Kanazawa, Japan

A busy afternoon

02.12.2014

We squeezed in a brief visit to Kanazawa. It was a short train ride from Takayama and we'd managed to find a cheap hotel for the evening, so that helped make our decision. The train got in at midday and so we quickly rushed around a couple of the main tourist sites in a busy afternoon.

The Kenroku-en Garden is the best I've been to, especially the time of year we went because of the autumn leaves and rope suspensions on the trees. The gardeners tie the branches of the trees with rope in the autumn to prevent damage to the branches during heavy snow fall and it creates beautiful landscape views. A japanese garden is supposed to have six attributes; seclusion, spaciousness, water, artificiality, antiquity and views - I think this one does pretty well - it really was stunning to walk around.

==Your heading here...==

We made a fleeting visit to the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art. We didn't have time to visit any of the special exhibitions, but we did have a brief look around the building and outer galleries. The building itself is extremely modern, smooth glass walls and circular in shape (with no main entrance, so that you don't approach the works in any particular way, apparently) and there's a weird swimming pool that looks like there are people walking around in the water (but it's an optical illusion and actually the people are in a room underneath the water).

We then dashed over to Higashi Geisha District. Apart from Kyoto, it is one of the best preserved geisha areas in Japan. Untouched by WW2 and so showcases original streets with slatted wooden facades and lined with boutique shops and tea houses. There's a gold leaf company there and you can watch the process of gold leaf production (although we didn't have time). In their shop they sell gold leaf jewellery, gold facial products, bags embellished with gold leaf and much more...I could have spent a lot of pennies here. There's a whole building facade covered in good leaf too.