Watching TV in the car

The Cube, a popular car style in Japan. Well, you've seen the streets . . .

A $21,000 vase at Yunokuni no mori

Our hotel, the Econo Asper. Great hotel, great price, great location.

Internet cubicles inside the Freaks Cyber Cafe; shoes neatly tucked away underneath

Traditional Japanese crafts. Kanazawa lies in Ishikawa prefecture, a stronghold of traditional Japanese crafts. Chiaki picked us up in her mother's car (kindly loaned to us for the day), and took us to Yunokuni no mori - a theme park where you can do hands-on traditional Japanese crafts. On the ride to the park, Chiaki turned on the TV set into the car's dashboard, unknowingly beginning my addiction to Japanese TV.

There's a video!. You can check out the video for November 4 to see us making dorayaki (a Japanese sweet) and washi (traditional Japanese paper).

Dinner and gifts. We asked Chiaki to call Nico and invite him to have dinner with us after he got off work, hoping we would have another chance to see him before we left Kanazawa. She dropped us off at our hotel at 5 pm, and we met her & Nico at 6 pm to walk to dinner (this is significant later). As we walked down the street, we passed the small restaurant with the gas burners on the tables, where we ate by ourselves on our first night in Kanazawa. Now well acquainted with our vegetarian eating habits, Nico and Chiaki laughed, "That's where we go to eat meat!"

Suddenly, the waitresses' confusion that night when we walked into that restaurant and announced, "O niku o tabemasen!" (We don't eat meat!) seemed less a confusion of translation . . . maybe she wondered if we were some sort of bizarre protesters determined to eat only vegetables in grill your own meat restaurant.

Cabbage & barbecque sauce. We ate at a small restaurant with an open kitchen in the middle. We wrote our order on a slip of paper and passed it to the cook. Chiaki invited me to write part of the order, copying kanji characters from the menu. She relieved me of the duty for some of the increasingly complicated characters, and I noticed she wrote the order from top to bottom of the page, and right to left, in a traditional Japanese style. I, of course, and naively written horizontally, left to right. Fortunately (or unfortunately if you are trying to learn Japanese), the Japanese aren't too concerned about the direction of writing, or punctuation, or spaces between words, or anything else that might help a neophyte decipher their language.

Amazed again. Chiaki and Nico then surprised us with a number of going away gifts; Japanese snacks, pictures from our time together that had been digitally enhanced with phrases like "We had a great time! Thank you!" and so forth. Remember, they had spent the entire previous day with us, and today Nico had worked and Chiaki spent the whole day with us. The only time we had not seen them was the hour before dinner. We had no idea where the found the time to get gifts for us. Our box of Saskatoon Berry chocolates we had given them yesterday seemed poor by comparison. I managed to convince them to let me buy dinner, but for a while it looked like a little WWE smackdown might be necessary to convince them to let me pay.

Thank you, Chiaki and Nico!. Again, it was so very kind of Chiaki and Nico to take care of two strangers for a weekend. We enjoyed every minute!