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Published: March 29th 2007
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my room
i just couldn't get the whole room in a photo because of the size and the different rooms, but oh well wow. today is hard to sum up. i woke up at around 3:30am or maybe earlier because the ceiling was creaking in my hotel room. i thought it was somebody moving around above me. finally i got up at 3:50am because i knew i wasn't going to fall back asleep, and we were getting up early to go to the fish market with the chef from Zeniya at 5:30 anyway. i realized that the ceiling was creaking because it was extremely windy outside and the whole building was moving slightly. i was on the 25th floor. so we went to the fish market, and checked out all of the fresh catches, getting lots of good footage i hope. after about an hour there, we went back to the hotel to burn a little time and then we went back out with the chef (Shin-ichiru) to the Omicho Market in Kanazawa to see other items for sale such as fruits and vegetables and other meats. We stopped back at the hotel for a quick breakfast and to check out, and then made our way to a
soy sauce factory, where we sampled excellent soy sauce ice cream, made miso soup (aged 6 months
my sleeping quarters
while we were gone for dinner, they fixed up my room for bedtime and aged 12 months) and sampled soy sauce. We left there and made a 2-3 hour drive up to the Noto peninsula, which is where the earthquake hit hardest. The drive was very beautiful, and reminded us of areas of the Pacific Northwest and of Door County. Our first stop once we got in the area was
Flatt's Inn, where we had an excellent late lunch made by an Australian man and his Japanese wife. There were 6 or so courses, including excellent calimari pasta, amazing bread, wonderful soup, a great dessert, and really good fish of course. We ate for about 2 hours again, which has sort of been our average meal length, and our next stop was a
hotel that specializes in Robato BBQ grilling, which is traditional Japanese style grilling. We got lots of footage of Rick grilling everything and it should be a nice little piece in the show. The building we did it in was over 450 years old. Then, just seconds down the road we came to our
hotel for the evening, which is spectacular. It is perched maybe 100-200 feet above the bay (on the Sea of Japan) on a narrow peninsula, so it is surrounded by water. The views are great. We each have our own rooms, which are huge. For my room, you walk into a small foyer, the toilet is to your immediate right, and then there is another small sort of hallway/foyer room that you step up into, with tatami matts. To your right is the rest of the bathroom, the sinks and the shower/tub. On the other side is the main room, with a large locally made lacquerware table in the middle of the room. Then you can step down into a long room with full windows looking out onto the cove and to the ocean. There are two chairs and a small table to sit and look at the view. I couldn't get over the size of the room, especially because the two previous nights at the Hotel Nikko the room was about a quarter the size or smaller. After we got situated in our rooms, we went down the elevator to a cave 4 or so floors below the hotel lobby, which led to one of the two Japanese hot baths at the hotel. We took a quick tour of the bath, which had an outdoor portion with 3 large barrel-like tubs (like cooking pots) overlooking the bay. From my hotel room, you can see the overhang above the barrels. From the bath, we went down a long cave tunnel to some over-water private dining rooms and patios right on the water and did a little Japanese BBQ demonstration very similar to what we'd just done at the 450 year old building. Once we got enough footage there, we were escorted by the owner/manager of the hotel, a very hospitable woman who had been taking care of our every need since we arrived, to a private dining room on the water and we had dinner that included tons of food, once again, including sashimi, BBQ beef, squid mouth, abalone, and oysters, and tons of other food--also my first experience with eating a fish served whole, I believe. Cooking the abalone was pretty wild. They were so fresh that they were moving while on the grill, as well as before they were cooked. And when cooking one of the oysters, it built up so much steam inside that it flew off the grill and landed on the table in front of Reed. Dinner also included hot sake and deep sea de-salinized water. The hostess and her daughter would never let your sake get empty. Dessert was great too, although I cannot explain what it was, because I don't know, other than the strawberry, but it was our 3rd really excellent dessert so far. After dinner it was about 10 or 10:30, and we went down to the cave to experience the Japanese hot bath. That was something else. It was exactly what I needed after several long days of shooting. We got some great shots of us in the large barrels/pots. My back has been giving me problems here and there. When I got back to my room, the table had been moved to the side, and my sleeping mattress had been put out and the heat was pumping into the sleeping room. Despite it being a very traditional Japanese style hotel, there was wireless internet in the room, so I wrote a quick message or two and then had the best night of sleep so far.
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Aunt Barb
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You're Spoiled
Joel, you're being spoiled rotten! Two hour wonderful meals, excellent desserts and a hot bath to die for. Those meals don't come cheap from what I hear so I hope you don't have to pay for them. Keep on having an awesome time and keep up the great journal, I'm really enjoying it.