Day 3 and 4: Of manliness and the cold

We woke up bright and early at 6:30am to get another bath in at the onsen before breakfast at 8:00am. It looked kinda like this:

Were you expecting dudes bathing? Too bad, it’s Sayaka!

Got back from the bath and found one of the staff members waiting for us, with bowls of yogurt on a tray. Setting the bowls down on our table, she told us that breakfast would be ready soon in a nearby room. After finishing our yogurt and watching some TV show about kindergartners, we headed over for breakfast.

Breakfast of Kings.

Woah. Full-course Japanese-style breakfast. It even had a tangerine like in the bath and an onsen egg. Wonder if they actually make the eggs in the onsen? They weren’t warm when we ate them, so maybe they were made beforehand?

The night before, I watched Hanasaku Iroha for the first time. Watched about 4 episodes, and on the 4^th episode you get to see the rival inn “Fukuya” which was based off of Shuhokaku, the onsen we stayed at.

Fukuya Inn

Shuhokaku Inn for comparison

In the screenshot above, you can actually see one of the windows for the room we stayed at. Specifically:

That one.

Here’s the view from that window slit:

View from the slit

Some more comparison shots:

Fukuya Inn again.

Shuhokaku Inn

Watch out for the heron!

Same covered bench area

Heading to school

I’m sure you guys will too make friends in no time.

We went back to explore the town of Yuwaku onsen. By “town” I really mean a street that has a few shops and the like.

We visited a small souvenir shop that had a bunch of Hanasaku Iroha merchandise. They even had dakimakuras for 90000 yen or so. One of my companions bought 2 of them. I bet the owner was really, really happy about that.

Outside that shop there was a handy sign that marked the locations that were used in the anime.

Iroha pilgrimage map

The closest one (right across the street) is the bench that Yuina sits on in the ending animation.

Should you really feed a heron that?

Nailed it.

That drink that Yuina’s holding seems to be a yuzu soda that’s a specialty of the region. It’s pretty delicious. The souvenir shop actually sells these sodas with Hanasaku Iroha labels on them.

We walked around a bit more, checking out what was open in the area. We ended up walking to the small shrine that Nako visits often.

Henceforth known as Nako Shrine

I’m not sure, but I think it may have been made for the Bonbori festival that they held in honor of the show last year. Anyway, I headed to the shrine and donated 5 yen and did the whole bowing and clapping and ringing the bell thing. (Still didn’t really have a wish though)

Praying to the.. .Nako gods I guess?

There were a bunch of ema tablets that had wishes written on them at the shrine.

Ema

As you’d expect of ema from people who are most likely otaku pilgrims, many of them had fanart on them:

“I hope Bonbori festival continues forever!”

Anime ema for anime people

Even more anime ema

Not sure when the ema were put up. Bonbori festival happens in October or so. The ema looked fairly new or well-kept too.

Afterwards, we climbed back onto the bus to Kanazawa (without incident this time) and got off near Kenroku Garden (兼六園).

Bus to Kenrokuen

…well, that was the plan anyway until it started raining really hard, making all of us damp, cold, and miserable. We decided to take shelter in a nearby restaurant and grab some food while waiting the rain to stop.

Shelter.

I had a Niku Udon, which had thin slices of beef in it. Something about it was really good, might have been beef fat or something that was added to the soup. Either way, I ended up eating a whole bunch of it before remembering to take a picture (lol).

Mostly eaten Niku Udon

When the rain finally stopped (kinda, it was off and on the entire day), we finally actually made it into Kenroku-en.

Kenroku-en

It was really… wide and open. There’s a pond with streams that run all over the garden.

Inside Kenroku-en

There’s also a bunch of little bridges everywhere that apparently have interesting construction techniques:

Koto bridge – apparently made similar to koto strings

A lot of the trees also seemed to be tied down or something. Not quite sure why. Maybe it’s to promote a certain shape? Or maybe it’s just decoration? Wikipedia tells me that this is yukitsuri which is used to also protect the trees from being damaged by heavy snows.

Bondage trees

There also were a bunch of temple/shrine-related items like the torii near a pond.

Torii pond

Unfortunately, the weather that day was terrible with it being cold, drizzly, and windy. After walking through maybe 30-50% of the garden while being freezing cold, we collectively made a few turns and walked out of the garden and headed back to Pongyi.

Along the way, we went into a market where a whole bunch of vendors were selling fresh food like vegetables, fruit, meat, and fish. This market is Omi-cho (近江町) market, which is a central attraction of Kanazawa.

Omi-cho market.

We wandered around for a while, glad to be out of the freezing wind. There were a bunch of different foodstuffs being sold, including fresh crabs (which are really expensive!), grilled lamprey eels on sticks, and even fried chicken (it is Christmas Day in Japan after all).

On the way out, we passed by a stand that sold kingyoyaki.

Kingyoyaki stand

Kingyoyaki apparently were mini taiyaki. We got the caramel filling ones and they were amazing.

Kingyoyaki (Caramel)

We also stopped by the local department store to see if any of the food court stands had any discounted food (they didn’t). We did however get a box of fried chicken. Due to either vendor error or some sale, we got a cold, large box of fried chicken for half price. Weird.

When we got back to Pongyi, we immediately got recruited to help out with the preparations for the Christmas party that would happen that night. In short, nabe (hotpot) and cake for all the guests and staff of the guest house. The guests also helped with the preparations by assisting the two teams: the nabe team and the cake team.

Three of us went with one of the staff members to the supermarket to buy ingredients for the nabe. We also bought ChanMeri or Merry Christmas Champagne: non-alcoholic champagne that is marketed for Christmas parties (like ours).

I was part of the nabe-making team, so I helped cut a whole bunch of different things like napa cabbage, green onions (which apparently are HUGE in Japan), enoki mushrooms, tofu, and the like.

Nabe preparation!

With all the preparations complete, all of the guests gathered in the living room and the party commenced with the traditional uncorking of the ChanMeri and steamy unveiling of the nabe.

Steamy nabe reveal

One of the guests also brought a plate of sashimi and another interesting dish for everyone to eat:

Manly food

Apparently they were the male parts of fish. After eating one, they’re not bad, reminding me of a fishy cow brain or liver or something similar. The rest of my party and the guests seemed to disagree with me though, so I ended up eating most of it. The guy who brought it seemed to be really impressed though and drunkenly praised my manliness many times through the night.

After nabe, the cakes were brought out. They were decorated really well, kinda surprisingly well considering they were decorated by the guests (that seems kinda rude when I re-read it, lol).

Pro Christmas Cake: Banana edition

Pro Christmas Cake: Strawberry edition

Unfortunately, that was our last night at Pongyi and Kanazawa, as were to go back to Tokyo the next day. We signed the guestbook, and one of our party members left them a very patriotic memento of their American guests:

AMERICA.

And one for the one Australian in our party:

…Australia.

The next day, we decided to go to the station at 3:30pm to return to Tokyo. Before then, we had some things to discuss, so we headed back to the famires Cafe Gust at around 11am. I had Hamburg steak with fried oysters.

Breakfast (?) at Gust

Two of my party members in particular seemed to be craving the parfait (perhaps why he kept mentioning going back to Gust, lol):

Chocolate parfait of stackedness

We ended up walking to the station early so I could exchange my traveler’s checks into cold, hard cash. When I touched down in Tokyo a few days ago, I had only exchanged a bit of cash to get around with because I expected that the banks would give me a better exchange rate than the airport. Unfortunately, I kept missing my chances to actually go to the bank (holiday closings, etc.), so I was unable to pay things like lodging expenses up until that point.

Finally able to clear my tab at around 2pm, we decided to wander around the shops at the station for a bit. At some point, we decided to eat “lunch” at this small noodle joint in the station. It’s small enough that there’s a stand where you stand and eat. It was pretty cheap too: I got ramen and a egg for 500 yen.

Ramen for “lunch”

Afterwards, we grabbed our stuff from Pongyi, said our final goodbyes (though I’m sure we’ll see them again down the road at some point, I’d definitely like to anyway), and headed back to the station for Tokyo.

Snowy landscape

The landscape outside the window of the trains had changed a whole lot since 2 days ago when we were heading to Kanazawa. Everything was blanketed in white, almost making it seem like a different country.

We finally got back to our hostel in Tokyo around 9pm or so. A few of our party members needed to do laundry, so we found a coin laundry nearby and got to it. Luckily the place was open until 11pm, so we still had time. After washing our clothes, we threw them in the dryer and headed to a nearby Matsuya for dinner.

BEEF @ Matsuya

The Matsuya we went to had a huge box of sliced beef just sitting at the front of the store. Looks tasty. Makes me feel a bit better looking at it knowing that the meat they’re cooking actually looks like meat, unlike in a lot of fast food places in the states.

I ended up having a Kalbi beef bowl, and it was pretty damn good for the price.

Kalbi beef bowl

On our way back to the hostel, we realized that it was 11pm. 11pm… oh shi-

RUN!

We ran full-tilt back to the coin laundry. Luckily, we got there even though it was supposed to be closed. While we started to take our clothes out and fold them, an old guy comes in, trying to close up the place. Looks like if we were 5min or so later, we would’ve collectively lost a bunch of clothes. Fun times.

Now the plan is to stay in Tokyo at least until after New Year’s and prepare for Denkigai and Comiket 83. The next few days definitely seem like they’re going to be high in otaku concentration.