It was around this time that I realized that Madam wasn’t kidding when she said you could find virtually any style of food in Japan if you knew where to look. I wouldn’t, however, have thought of setting out in search of Louisiana cooking in Kanazawa.
‘Er Indoors selected a set menu with a variety of New Orleans-style treats, which she reported was good while I ordered a couple of oysters natural and a bowl of seafood gumbo.
It obviously pays to be a foreigner eating early since when the oysters arrived there were four of them, plump, juicy and absolutely wonderful. The bowl of gumbo also went down well, washed down with a glass of good Chablis.
Suitably fortified we set off to locate the tour bus which does a clockwise circuit around twenty sites of interest, skipping the first couple of sites before alighting at the stop closest to the old geisha quarter. As it turned out we’d misheard the bus driver’s directions, and headed left along the river bank rather than turning left straight off the bus and turning right at the sushi bar.
As it was, we headed along the river bank and then turned left just after we’d spotted a couple using a camera, a tripod and a timed delay to get a photo of the two of them against a background of cherry blossom.
I took a couple of photos from the same general spot, before the guy with the tripod asked us whether we’d like a photo of the two of us against the same backdrop they’d used. We accepted, passed over the camera and the result appears at the top of the page.
By this time we realized that we’d taken a wrong turn, but knew where the geisha quarter had to be, and headed in that general direction before an extremely helpful older gentleman put us on the right track.
The geisha quarter was, as the accompanying photos show, quite remarkable, and we stopped at one building which had been set up as an information centre. Based on information received we retraced our steps to a place offering the chance to tour a recreated geisha house.