So I awoke my last morning in Kanazawa, cheerful and refreshed. I walked down to the 7-11 to get a couple of things, and noticed something neat that I had also observed in Tokyo after one of my traveling companions pointed it out: Construction companies here have an obligation to tell the public what the decibel counts inside and outside their sites are. In Kanazawa, they also provide information about air quality, which is pretty cool.
This is video instead of a still picture because the refresh rate on the display happened to sync closely to my shutter speed and frame rate and I didn't think to do a longer exposure, so I just grabbed a quick video instead. To the human eye, the display looks solid.
I made it back to Hotel Pacific and ordered my 😭last😭 ginger latte. I struck up a conversation with our barista about how much I was going to miss them, and she smiled and said the magic phrase I had been secretly hoping for: "Oh. You could make them at home!" and grabbed the recipe book from behind the counter...
I was delighted, and sung her praises to my traveling companions as they joined me, as I drank the (beautiful!) latte art flower she made me that morning.
My companions and I realized (tragically) that we wouldn't be able to fit a third sushi breakfast into our morning plans, and so we caught a bus to Kanazawa train station. When we arrived, I was absolutely charmed by their fountain display.
It's animated, and the individual points of aerated water are the pixels. It welcomes you to Kanazawa in both Katakana and the Romanized alphabet in between sessions of telling you the time.
There are also these glorious wooden pillars integrated in the metal structure of the entrance to the station. I'll be revisiting them in a later post about design elements I found striking during my time in Japan.
It gave a really remarkable sense of volume to the place.
We found a locker, dropped our bags, and went to grab lunch at a chain
restaurant that is known for making Kanazawa style curry-- Pork katsu curry smothered in a rich warm brown sauce, on a bed of rice, with a pile of shredded cabbage alongside.
It was excellent, and they served a sort of Yuzu-shandy-esque wine cooler thing with it that was tart and refreshing alongside the richness of the meal.
They also served these, which are just cubes of pure cheese, fried in the same dough they use for the katsu, and given to you in a gravy boat. They're quite tasty, and are apparently the Kanazawa peer of mozzarella sticks you get in mid-tier Italian places in the states.
One thing I snapped a picture of as we were leaving was these baskets, which are an important indicator of a difference between American and Japanese thinking.
The Japanese are not inclined to put items on counters, or seats. But since they're a "shoes off" culture, any place where you keep your shoes on (like many modern izakawas or say, a train station restaurant) you don't have anywhere to put your stuff, because the floor has had shoes on it, and is therefor not a clean surface either. In a lot of Izakawas, this means there's a set of coat-and-bag hooks all down one wall where you're expected to hang your things out of the way. In places where there isn't a wall next to your table, this becomes a puzzle though.
The solution is these baskets, generally one for every seat, either up against the counter in a setup like this, or under the seats if you're sitting at a normal table.
The basket, of course, doesn't count as "floor" despite being on the floor, and so is a place to put your stuff that is mentally "not floor" and therefore a good place to put things you carry, since shoes don't touch it.
It's a pretty handy thing, I found, since having a dedicated "place your stuff goes" actually made it easier to get in the habit of checking to make sure you hadn't forgotten anything when you left a restaurant. In the states, where I often toss my hat or coat in the booth next to me, I'm more likely to forget it, I find.
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