Kanazawa With My Sisters

 Welcome to Kanazawa, in Japanese

I spent the last days of winter vacation sightseeing in Kanazawa with my sisters, while Lee got things straightened up at home. We saw all the typical sights, like Kenroku-en, Omicho market, and the gold leaf place, but we also did a couple of things that are not typically seen as major Kanazawa tourist attractions, such as going to Mister Donut for a New Year's Special Snoopy set, which was a very good value - 16 donuts plus a whole lot of Snoopy merchandise for the low low price of 2000 yen, or roughly US$26.

Certain Snoopy-centric sisters were very excited about this.

Of course, we visited a rotating sushi bar and had other Japanese foods, but since my sisters were almost more interested in visiting us than the rest of Japan, we also spent a lot of time at home making desserts and foods, including a kabocha squash stew I created, toffee, and pudding.  I also served them homemade matcha (traditional green tea) with some sweets picked up from downtown :

Yum, matcha!

We also got our pictures taken at a Purikura machine, a very Japanese thing to do. These machines are fun - you jump in, pay up, and take a few pictures that are automatically kind of glamour-shot photoshopped, smoothing your hair and skin and widening your eyes, then spend some time adding stamps, makeup, backgrounds, and other features to the finished photos, which print out as stickers which you can share with others. Ours turned out very cute:

After I had to go back to work, the girls took two day trips, the first to Hiroshima and Miyajima (mom's trip) to see Hiroshima's bomb museum (past trip):

And Miyajima's famous red torii (past trip):

As well as their demon deer*:

*substantially less demonic in daylight

They managed to navigate the train systems and made it home late but not too late that night. The next day they went to Osaka to visit the aquarium (past trip), a fairly large and famous place that has some animals that are not likely to be seen in aquariums in the US.

They didn't have to deal with a 90-minute line to get in.

As usual, you can check out Flickr for the full set of pictures. I was very happy to be able to spend some time with my sisters here in Japan, and hope they enjoyed it too!  This wraps up their visit, and we have a few minor posts that have been waiting their turn queued up next.