Kanazawa Hyakumangoku Festival

I've got a bike, you can ride it if you like, it's got a basket, a bell that rings and things to make it look good

As Greg mentioned, I recently acquired some new wheels. There are a few rivers running through Kanazawa, and I've been wanting to take a bike ride along one of them for a while now. Like most Japanese bikes, my new ride is a single speed number completely lacking in suspension, but Kanazawa is pretty flat so it's not much trouble. Plus, it makes up for it by having an adorable basket, light, and a built on tire lock.

The river has a wonderful bike path along side it. Along the way I spotted one of Kanazawa's very own love hotels. I imagine its motto is "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and let them have sordid affairs in hotels you can rent by the hour!"

Eventually the path dumps you in a nature reserve that also has a water slide park in it. It's eerily closed and empty this time of year.

Other random sights along the way included a woman walking her cat (strangely common here) and an old man who was playing fetch with himself. He would pick up a tennis ball and bounce it out in front of him and then walk to wherever it landed and repeat the process. What?

Finally, after about 10km, I hit the Sea of Japan. Sorry folks, no views of the Koreans.

Bridge to somewhere (i.e., 3 or 4 meters across)

I've been meaning to comment on this for a while. About 2 blocks down from our building (between us and the train station), there's this huge, completely inexplicable pedestrian bridge:



This is literally the only pedestrian bridge I've seen anywhere in the entire city of Kanazawa. Andrea claims to have seen one other one, but I chalk it up to heat-induced hallucinations. In some of the busier areas of town, you can find underground walkways, but no real bridges like this.

This one is no mirage, though; it exists, and it exists for no purpose other than to save you a few negligible seconds in walking 100 feet in either direction to a crosswalk. Still, I guess it's not completely useless; it takes a good two minutes for the lights to change, which doesn't seem like much, but I'm used to the wait being much shorter, especially on what seems like a moderately busy 4-lane street.Maybe you could save yourself time, if you just missed a crosswalk light and ran the whole way.

Another curiosity:



On the bridge end near our side of the street are these characters, which read "Horikawa-machi" or "Canal Town", the name of our specific neighborhood. On the opposite end, it reads "Konohana-machi", which is the name of the adjacent neighborhood; our street, as you might've guessed, is the dividing line.

It might seem strange (especially if you're familiar with San Francisco and the ridiculous arguments over neighborhood boundaries) to have such clearly delineated neighborhoods, but they serve a purpose: neighborhood names basically replace street names in Japanese city addresses, and each block and building are assigned a specific number.

This system is the other side of the coin from my earlier post about the convenience of package delivery: addresses are near-useless strings of building names and numbers that only give you a vague idea of where something generally is. If you ever come here, take our advice, which we learned the hard way: draw a map or get very specific directions about where you want to go. You'll save yourself a lot of time and frustration!

Kenroku-en and Modern Art

After far too many days without a break, I finally had two days off to check out my new home, Kanazawa. Since we’ve landed it’s been unbearably hot and humid. My San Francisco fog accustomed body does not approve of the sudden change in climate I’ve forced it through. I’ve never before been in a place where it can be in the upper 80s and suddenly start pouring rain extremely hard.

On my first day off, however, I quickly learned that the rain is something to be thankful for. It was the first day without overcast skies since I got here and it was absolutely unbearable.

So we went to Kenrokuen, Kanazawa’s main tourist attraction and rated as one of the top three gardens of Japan. As pretty as it might be I didn’t enjoy a minute of it because I spent the entire time running from shaded area to shaded area, keeping an eye out for benches should I need to pass out. I got a few pictures, but I think I’m going to wait until fall before I head back.

Lucky for me, the Museum of 21st Century Art is across the street from the garden. A significant portion of it is free, including the air conditioning! The building is a giant circle and they have art bikes you can take a lap on.

This an awesome if a little OCD ongoing exhibit in which the artist is creating a giant maze entirely out of salt.

A dip in the pool sounds good right about now…