We were given a very warm welcome at the Kanazawa train station – the big dome behind the entrance is called  “Motenashi (Welcome) Dome,” which looks like a huge umbrella.  It’s meant to welcome new visitors and offer safe passage to people leaving.

How cool is this?  It’s a fountain!

So we found our hotel and checked in with the lovely lady at reception told us that we had a wonderful room with a view of the “Japan Ocean”.

We poured through the tourist information to see what was on offer in this lovely, petite city and found what looked like an awesome ‘tour’ of sorts – I say that because it wasn’t actually a tour, it was a hop on/hop off night bus that went on a special route around the city to include a whole lot of buildings lit up at night – they called it the Light Up Bus.

We asked at the service counter for suggestions whether it was good or not and the reply was a resounding “of course!” – ok, that was our night planned.  Woohoo!

So, before we went on what promised to be an amazing ‘tour’ we popped outside the hotel to get a grasp of our surroundings and just around the corner, we came across this:

CHERRY BLOSSOMS!

Or as the Japanese call them – Sakura!

These trees were in a playground that was attached to what looked like a shrine, and this sign was out the front – it apparently says “No Fireworks”.  Who knows what goes on here?

These lovely, kimono wearing ladies were just there taking selfies, cause why not?

Then they had somewhere they needed to be….. hate to be all dressed and nowhere to go!

Then back to our hotel to plan our evening when we came across this – in the little room where you can get ice and there’s sometimes a vending machine was a pay TV machine, where you pay for TV channels in your room.  Really, they could surely fork out to give you a couple of channels, couldn’t they?

So, the evening was planned and down to the station we popped to hop on the Light Up Bus with about 14 million other tourists.  They squeezed so many people on that we were all standing in the aisle, meaning that we couldn’t see out the windows and not only that, the lights on the bus were on, meaning you couldn’t see the lights outside…… not only that, a lot of the buildings were a fair walk away from the bus stop.  So we jumped off at the one place we really wanted to see – the Kanazawa Castle and as soon as we got off the bus, look what we saw….

You know it’s cherry blossoms, right?

Me Jenny was very excited!

They were all lit up and were just gorgeous!

This is one of the gates to the Kanazawa Castle, which again was full of cherry blossoms.

And….. we weren’t the only people there.

They have food stalls all up and down the streets, mainly cooking anything you can put on a stick and these little biscuit things with a bean paste inside.  Honestly, if you can possibly use bean paste in a food, they do it!

This guys were tossing a few squid around the barbie….. then probably smearing them with bean paste.

Not sure what these were, but there was an egg involved and you guessed it, bean paste (I can’t confirm the use of bean paste)

So, we would definitely be coming back to see these lovely blossoms in the morning.