いいね 金沢

Sign hanging in front of the station: "If you're going to come to Kanazawa, spring, summer, autumn or winter is good, I think."

A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to spend a day in Kanazawa, temple hotspot and home to the famous Kenrokuen Gardens, one of the three great traditional gardens of Japan. (This sounds impressive, but Japan seems to have an entire industry of top-three lists of things. Go to any nothingness town and they are guaranteed to be the proud home of the third-most-famous rice cake or the second-best traditional leather breeches.)

Someone put some little toy cars and a toy supermarket on top of the postbox. Vroom.

Another person was apparently selling vintage radios out of their garage, or perhaps just showing them off. I'm not sure.

I'll show you a few sniblets:

There were a lot of swallows flitting about, who it turned out were building nests out of flim and flam and spit and whatnot. Apparently they're enough of an issue that some places now use shop-bought artificial swallow nests to try and guide the birds into settling into the most convenient places. They are gross but nice.

Kanazawa is a centre for the production of gold leaf. We somehow wandered into a gold- leaf souvenir shop and the shop assistant invited us to watch the leaf being made. We agreed, a little warily, but no-one pressured us into buying anything and the ojiisan who explained the process to us was lovely and informative. He had gold flecks on his chin and I wondered what it would be like to be around gold so much that you can be so blasé about getting some on your face. I watched one of the craftswomen pick up a 1-micron-thick sheet of gold with tweezers. When she breathed on it, it rippled just like water.

In spite of my cynicism in the face of Japan's incessant listmaking, the Kenrokuen Gardens are beautiful. One small section was closed off to the public. In the middle lay an eerily placed rock, like an unexploded mine.

In the Japanese style of saying much whilst saying nothing, I got a very clear and effective sign to keep away, just from the unnverving placement of this rock.

***


My favourite part might actually be Kanazawa station though, for its fantastic fountain clock. Instead of reading one of your boring old analogue clocks, or one of your yawnsome digital clocks, you can read the time at Kanazawa station through the medium of water:

"Welcome to Kanazawa"

"Kanazawa: isn't it nice?"

It's hot.

Like, really really hot.

Summer came slowly - up until now we'd been having a good few months of warm breezes and pleasant t-shirt weather. A couple of days ago the blasting heat and humidity suddenly hit like a big hot hammer. A wall of solid discomfort. I can look forward to another couple of months of this.

It's sort of like having a toddler, in that you're always tired and everything in your house is sticky.

The air conditioner in my flat is a) expensive b) environmentally questionable c) only covers my living room. As with last year, my sleeping routine now consists of going to bed, waking up an hour later, splashing myself with water, going back to bed, being unable to sleep, going to the living room, turning on the aircon until the room gets decent before turning it off and falling asleep, then waking up again. Repeat every day for a season. The daytime is currently bearable, but I'm probably going to spend a lot of time in shopping malls and cafes just to stay somewhere cool. I've got healthier at cooking but I'm going to struggle to motivate myself to exercise. It's all just a bit crap and I wish I was at home just for this bit of the year.

Off now to rub ice on my arms.

Hello again!

There was a short hiatus, as you probably didn't notice. I went back to the UK for a week to attend a friend's wedding, and when I got back I found it difficult to slip back into the good habits I had built up for myself before I left - blogging, studying Japanese, keeping the flat clean. Fortunately, after a few weeks curled up in my own filth, repeatedly pressing F5 and ignoring my responsibilities, I am finally getting myself sorted again. Today, after work and Japanese class, I ate an actual nutritious soup that I cooked with my own bare hands, worked out, and, well, did this. Before bed I also hope to squeeze in kanji practice, have a quick go on a Japanese vocabulary app on my phone, and read a few pages of something or other. Okay, so it's 1am and I'm probably leading myself towards a 12pm wake-up time tomorrow. But if I spend a couple of minutes on each I can at least say I've done them and feel all smug.

So, how was the UK? Pretty good, actually. I was worried I'd either:

a) go back, realise how much I'd missed everything, never want to leave and cry my eyes out when I returned, or
b) go back, realise how shit it was, and never return.

Fortunately I landed neatly in the middle. I like lots of things about Japan and lots of things about the UK. I like the kindness of Japan and the humour of the UK. I like the ingenuity of Japan and the landscape of the UK. I love konbini chicken and sausage rolls. I love my friends in both countries.

I was happy to be there, and happy to come back, and you can't really ask for better than that. Maybe I'll write something more detailed about the trip in the future, but I doubt it since the highlight of the whole week - apart from the wedding - was eating a roast dinner. If you're in the UK now, seriously, go and have a roast dinner tomorrow. You wouldn't believe how good they are after you haven't had one for a year and a half.

What am I up to now?

General life update -

• I've got a new part-time job teaching business English in Japanese offices, which is fun because I get to pretend I actually know things about business. Being in the Japanese office environment is a little strange - everything looks a bit 1990s. (I saw actual fax machines. In the UK you can only see those in museums now, like mangles or travel agencies.) But the students are great and it's a nice bit of extra work to supplement my income now I'm a lazy good-for-nothing part-timer.
• I'm trying to get fitter and more into cooking. This week I made chicken soup, aubergine parmigiana, and some kind of stew with an egg on it. I feel extra-excited about cooking since I recently discovered a new halal mini-market about 20 minutes from my house, where I can buy hummus, halloumi and other culinary wonders heretofore unbeknownst to the shores of this mysterious isle. As far as fitness goes, I'm not doing any intense workouts yet, just a daily dose of 20-30 minutes of exercise videos in my living room (gyms scare me; I don't know what all the levers do). But the ultimate goal is to get really jacked and challenge people to fights.
• I'm taking the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) in December. I'm only taking N4, the second-lowest level, which should hopefully be easily doable by that time. I could theoretically have super-super-challenged myself and chosen N3 but it would be a lot of work for an exam I've never tried before, so I'd rather build up my confidence by taking something more manageable. With this in mind, my current plan is to do at least 5-10 minutes of kanji practice every day, use my Memrise app to quiz myself on vocabulary, review the work I've done in my Japanese classes each week, and work my way through the exam practice textbook I just bought. I love buying textbooks. They're pretty much the only books I can buy here that I can actually use, and they're all so colourful and nice-looking. 
• Last year I read about 30 books, so I'd like to at least keep up with that pace, though I'm not sure I'll be able to. I've only read 11 so far in 2015, although one of them was Don Quixote which was unfathomably long (but very good - I think a lot more people would read it if they knew how much it involves people being silly and hitting each other on the head with sticks). I just finished High Rise by J.G. Ballard, which was great - a dystopian satire set in a block of luxury flats, which was written forty years ago but reads like it could have been written yesterday. I'm kind of flagging and can't really think of what to read next. Any advice welcome.
• This month is the beginning of summer festivals in Japan, which gives me a lot to look forward to, such as doing traditional dances where you unconvincingly pretend to be a coal miner, and trying to take pictures of fireworks even though you know they'll come out shit.
• nekoatsume!

If you like cats and wasting time, get this free app. It's only in Japanese, but if you copy and paste the name (ねこあつめ) you'll be able to find it, and you don't really need to understand Japanese to play (there are Youtube tutorials, wikis etc. to help if you feel you need it). It's very simple and adorable - buy food and toys for your garden, cats come to visit you, they bring fish, use the fish to pay for more food and toys, get more cats, the cycle continues. It's not Dark Souls, but there is a time for Dark Souls and a time for watching a cat sit in a virtual hammock. Plus, I can convince myself I'm actually practicing Japanese when I play it. Good thing to check on if you're waiting for a bus, or need to look at your phone during some kind of awkward moment.

Bring on July!