Scenes from Kanazawa...

...chieko and i had our bi-monthly venture into downtown kanazawa today to grab some lunch and stroll around in the drizzle...after lunch we briefly explored the samuri district (i think that's what it was), which consists of narrow streets with some small public gardens and tea houses tucked into various corners (i should have taken some better pics)...it was our first time to check out this part of town, and i hope we can do it again more extensively, perhaps on a nicer day...there were quite a few tour groups wandering around en masse and it was difficult navigating all those umbrellas...





...like cities everywhere, but particularly in japan, kanazawa has lots of little side streets that are packed with izakayas (bars), yakitori (chicken on a stick) and ramen (you know what ramen is, right????) restaurants, and other mom and pop operations that manage to stay in business somehow...



...and here's yours truly, right as my head exploded in a big bang and birthed the universe, and chieko, trying to scoot out of dodge...



...i'm enjoying a quiet evening at home tonight...it is still raining off and on...the rain here in kanazawa is more like a constant mist, so it doesn't really matter if you use an umbrella or not because it's not actually falling down...it just kind of fills the air...there's no real way to block it that i've found yet...seems like the kind of rain that drives people to insanity...i'm hanging in so far...saturday's about gone but i still have two more days of relaxing (and house cleaning) before we head back to work on tuesday...you'll probably hear from me again before then :-)