So Kanazawa was… alright. Hey, this wouldn’t be a realistic blog if EVERYTHING we did was “the best thing ever”, right? It’s a nice city and all, home to a few interesting sites and attractions, but it was snowing (which normally we are stoked about, but not so much this time) and we had bought a bus day-pass which we could only use ONCE because the lines for the buses were INSANE and each time a bus would pass (every half hour…), it was, you guessed it, PACKED. This was the first and only time during our entire trip (so, 9 months at this point) that we argued for our money back. It wasn’t like it was a lot of money, but hey… that was both of our dinners at least!

Anyway, overall, there wasn’t anything BAD about Kanazawa per se, I just wouldn’t recommend it to anyone visiting Japan because it’s a bitch to get to (2.5 hours west of Kyoto by train) and you really don’t get much bang for your buck.

Nonetheless, we made the best of it, particularly by mocking the absurd amount of selfies the Japanese people take. I hate to make generalizations (that’s obviously a lie… I LOVE making generalizations), but c’mon people… you HAVE to know this about yourselves. I mean, how many pictures a day can a person take of their own face?!? I would just love to see the statistics on # of selfies per day per capita by country. So, with the few activities we managed due to the snow and the lack of buses, we dedicate this post to selfies everywhere.

Miles walked:               12
Miles transported:     ~165

Started off with a visit to Kenroku-en garden (after the one bus ride we took), one of the oldest gardens in Japan:

We are still unclear as to whether that tour guide was a man or a woman:

We chose to include this photo because A – I have clearly never looked this attractive in my life and B – this perfectly expresses how we were both feeling that day – exasperated, freezing and covered in snow:

And so, the selfie-mocking frenzy began:

We actually managed to capture a selfie in action!! This picture is literally a selfie of a selfie. We should win an award for this:

Kanazawa Castle:

More selfie-ing:

And some more selfies of selfies:

The castle gardens:

We then made our way over to the Higashi Chaya district, Kanazawa’s geisha district (after waiting for the bus for 45 minutes in the snow and then giving up and walking… a 20 minute walk…):

No geishas were found (and we had already seen a geisha in Kyoto!) and we were cold, bored and fed-up, so made our way to the bus station, where, of course, this was the line (only a fraction of it, really):

After 3 buses passed, each full to the brim, we gave up and started charging back to the main bus station (again, only a 20 minute walk…), fueling up for a battle to get our money back. After quite the battle, surprisingly, the lady gave up and gave us our money back. Like I said, we normally don’t do things like this, but we felt so damn cheated that on principal alone, we had to win this one. So Kanazawa – we’ll very likely come back to Japan one day, but please don’t expect to ever see us again.

As a side note, the highlight of this visit, for me personally, was that the owner of our guest house went to UCSD (my alma mater)!!