The Rynearsons in Japan 3: The Rest of It

The next morning (Tuesday) it was time for my parents to spread their wings and go visit large portions of Japan unattended by us.  We stuck 'em on the correct bus to the station, and then they had to take a train to another train to get to where they were going.  We understand they made the first train, but had some confusion about the old Osaka Stations, called, cleverly, Osaka Station, and Shin-Osaka Station, or New Osaka Station.  They're about three minutes apart but you can't catch a train at Osaka Station that departs from Shin-Osaka.  They made good use of the fact that their tourist pass allowed essentially unlimited train travel at a fixed cost and rode the first-class car the three minute journey to catch a later train to their destination, Okayama.  Ana and I had visited Okayama earlier, and decided to base my parents out of it for this leg of their trip.  We got them a nice hotel right next to the station, and after they dropped their stuff off there, visited Koraku-en, completing the trifecta of the three most famous Japanese gardens in four days.  I heard that afterward they went to the same restaurant that we'd enjoyed when we visited.

Koraku'en Garden in Okayama, with Okayama Castle in the background

Probably the best vegetarian burgers on the planet from Natural Mystic in Okayama

The day after that they took the bullet train to Hiroshima to visit Miyajima, as we'd done earlier in the year.

Enviable weather for Japan in November, from the ferry to Miyajima

My mother is well known for a dislike of deer, but apparently ones on small islands on the other side of the world from her gardens are OK

View from the top of Mount Misen on Miyajima

The day after that they went to Kyoto and saw things.

The day after that (Friday) they went to Kyoto again, and saw different things.  When they were finished seeing those different things, they came back to our apartment in Kanazawa and Ana fed them lemon meringue pie and chocolate pudding pie, and I believe I may have convinced my mother that high-quality Scotch is a worthwhile commodity.

Saturday Ana fed them crepes for breakfast and they took a break from the breakneck traveling - did some hanging out, reading books, napping, etc, and also walked up into the bamboo forest behind our apartment for an hour or so.  It's pretty nifty and it sounded like they enjoyed it.  I made pulled pork for dinner and Ana produced Kaiser rolls to eat it on, and there was pie left over, so it couldn't be called not a good day.

Sunday it was back to breakneck traveling.  We took them out to Natadera, which was mostly as impressive as we'd remembered - it truly is a world-class garden and pretty much nobody even knows it exists.  We had the good fortune of pretty good weather for being outdoors (on other occasions, my parents made good use of the waterproof jackets we'd recommended they bring, and the umbrellas we loaned them) and got some pretty decent pictures, some of which are not in fact pictures of individual plants like the hundreds that my parents took for later identification.  On the way out, we got black sesame ice cream and my dad ordered some udon to go with it, which ended up being sort of prescient, because our intended lunch destination had gone out of business without us knowing it.  Freshness Burger of Kanazawa, we mourn you.  Thwarted in our burger ambitions, we walked across the street to the fish market and went to another rotating sushi bar, where we mostly ignored the rotating sushi and ordered off the menu what we actually wanted.

 Natadera - generally worth the trip

 A few weeks later it might have been in full autumn color, but even a touch of it was nice

 Black sesame ice cream

 This is a picture of all the currently open Freshness Burgers in Kanzawa

We sensibly (didn't) stock up on dried squid - has so many uses of which we're thankfully unaware

After lunch we split up - the women to go shopping (my mother was pining for a Japanese vase) and the men to go get naps.  They got the vase, we got the naps, and then it was time for an adventure which brought true fear to their hearts - having dinner with my boss and his wife at their house.  They'd been kind enough to offer to host and offer some authentic Japanese cuisine to taste and Japanese people to talk to, though mostly in English, in which my parents can say more than "biru".  The food was excellent as usual, mostly
roll-your-own-sushi and tempura, with a soup and a few more small dishes I'm probably forgetting about.  To my knowledge, a good time was had by all and no major faux pas were committed.  Liberal applications of sake and biru lubricated the conversation and no mentions of my infancy or any embarrassing childhood anecdotes came out, for which I give thanks.

The next day, Monday, my parents started wrapping up their trip.  We put them on a bus to the train station, which they rode about 90% of the way to Tokyo, and then took a detour.  We'd wanted to give them one night at a traditional Japanese ryokan (incidentally, we'll have a new ryokan post coming up fairly soon) which is a hot springs hotel in the classic Japanese style.  I'd been aiming for a nice hotel but misread the price in the brochure (the method it listed varied by hotel, I thought it was the price for one room holding 2 people, not, as is sometimes standard in Japan, the 2-person room with two people in it listed as the per-person price) and they ended up with a really, really nice hotel.  I understand that they had a private hot springs bath on their sixth-floor screened balcony and real Western-style beds, amongst other luxuries such as an English-speaking staff.  Apparently, one couldn't see Fuji from the hotel, but they did see it from the train.  They were fed a traditional Japanese meal and either ate it or still had enough granola bars left so as to not starve.

View from their hot-springs equipped balcony

After their stay at the ryokan ended, they took the train into the city, stayed over one night, and caught a flight out early the next afternoon, not, I think, too much the worse for wear.  It was quite a trip and I'm glad they enjoyed it.  We're looking forward to seeing Kyoto ourselves this spring sometime.  Please note that we sorted through many, many hundreds of pictures and kept only the good ones in the Flikr set, so take a look there if you haven't yet.

Fuji