This Is A Lake - A travel blog

I've been thwarted! Foiled! My grand idea for today was to go to Takayama, a well-preserved old town in the mountains. I'd researched beforehand that you can get there by train from Kanazawa via Toyama, but today when checking the timetables I saw that there are only like three trains a day between Toyama and Takayama. I saw to my horror that our only option to get there would see us in Takayama no earlier than 14:30, and we'd have to take the train back before 17:00, so it'd be a lot of train hours for very few sightseeing hours... With Hiroshima it was totally worth it, but we've seen several old quarters already. So we stayed in Kanazawa! I put together an alternative plan for the day and we took a bus to see the 21st Century Contemporary Art Museum in the centre of town. It's a very modern disc-shaped building, in a low-key kind of way. The floor plan is a perfect circle, inside of which lots of smaller rooms make up the different exhibitions. I think they m...

After a big, hearty breakfast at the hotel, the first order of business today was to visit Kenroku-en, Kanazawa's most famous attraction and one of the Three Great Gardens of Japan. Its name means "Garden of the Six Attributes" because it has all six classical attributes that a garden is supposed to have in the Chinese and Japanese tradition: " spaciousness, tranquility, artifice, antiquity, water courses, and magnificent view from the garden," according to the tourism information centre's documentation. We took a bus from the station, packed with people, that stops unnecessarily in six bus stops where nobody gets off before reaching Kenroku-en in the city centre, where the entire bus vacated. We walked a little bit uphill to find one of the garden's multiple gates and paid 320 yen for a ticket (€2.7). Right off the bat we were greeted by Kenroku-en's main sight, that of the pond with the famous two-legged stone lantern in the foreground. It was clou...

Although it rained heavily all throughout the night, by the time we left our apartment with our bags the morning was cloudy but dry. Today saw us on the road again, as we took a THUNDERBIRD train to Kanazawa. With such a bombastic name I had assumed it'd be a state-of-the-art shinkansen, but it's in fact a regional line. No thunder or birds spotted on board either. It takes a little over two hours to make the trip from Kyoto north to Kanazawa, and it can be booked with the JR Pass. The landscape during the journey seemed nondescript from my seat, but it's likely due at least in part to the gray, drab mist that clung to our train for the majority of the ride. We arrived at Kanazawa Station, which is yet another massive city-within-a-city with a mall, shops and restaurants. On top of that, there's another 7-storey mall literally next door to the station. We're staying at the Dormy Inn Kanazawa, a mid-range hotel just three minutes from the train station. It's very...