Hi Everyone!
Life on Okinawa is getting better and better by the week! Josh is getting pretty good at driving off base and we are beginning to explore more and more. This week we have eaten at several interesting restaurants and visited new places:
1) A Japanese chain hamburger restaurant called "Mos Burger." We just pointed to a picture on the menu that we thought looked interesting and that's what we got. I picked a pita type bread with a tempura fried chicken breast topped with a crab/carrot/'some vegetable I don't know' salad. Josh picked a seafood salad served hot on a rice bun (rice formed into the shape of a bun and put on both sides of the salad). Both were really good! But small...as most Japanese portions are. So after that meal, we headed across the parking lot to check out a local grocery store. We were mainly looking to see what they carried, but found a selection of tempura vegetables and some "to-go" sushi boxes. Nothing was written in English, so we picked a few things we weren't sure about and along with some sushi. One of the items we later identified as Japanese eggplant which was fried with some kind of meat (unidentified). We also wanted to purchase soy sauce from the store, since the "to-go" sushi boxes don't come with nearly enough soy. Well, Okinawans cook with many things that look like soy sauce. We spent over 30 minutes examining every bottled filled with brown liquid trying to decide which one was soy. There were no letters on any of the bottles and none of the kanji (Japanese characters) looked similar to other bottles on the same shelves (so we could not even decide which bottles had the same liquid inside). We finally decided on a bottle with sashimi (raw fish) on the front thinking this might be the closest we will get to a clue. And hurray!! We successfully bought soy sauce! It would have been terrible to dip sushi in fish sauce!!
Another night we ventured to:
2) An Okinawan curry house which is a local chain and popular with the Americans:
We actually heard about this restaurant from a friend in the States before getting here, so of course we had to check it out! It is fairly close to the base we are staying on, so I decided that I would drive us there. I got so disoriented inside the car that I became scared to change lanes. The driving problem (for me) is that you have to look up to the left to see your review mirror and not the right. And I just can't seem to find the other cars that are around me...so I get scared to change lanes. And that leads to yelling and not turning around! So we went several kilometers out of our way, but eventually found our way back to the curry house. We..ok, I...decided to turn around in what I thought was a driveway. However, there were walls on both sides and it was impossible to back out onto the road. So, I followed the road (which I thought was a driveway) into a neighborhood that seemed impossible to get out of. The road was only as wide as our car (which is fairly small) and I was not sure how we would get out of there. Eventually, Josh got out of the car and directed the 3-point turn (ok, the 21-point turn) and we successfully made it out of the neighborhood tube. So, onto the food of the curry house...it is similar to Indian curry, but tastes a little different. Josh got curry with cuttlefish and I got curry with shredded chicken and spinach...it was yummy.
3) Pizza in the Sky: Today we went on a day trip to the north with one of my coworkers & his wife. It was great. We got to see a lot of the coast & the lush vegetation. There are a lot of mountains/hills on this island. We went to a great Japanese pizza place (sat on the floor on mats, shoes off, all that stuff). There was only one choice for pizza and one choice for salad, so we got one of each. The pizza consisted of goat cheese, corn, sauce, a few green peppers and what looked like hot dog pieces. They consider corn (kernels mostly) to be a semi-delicacy here (not an everyday staple that they get tired of like we do) so they put it on things like pizza (you know, like it was artichoke hearts or something). So of course, there was corn on the salad too!
Anyway, the pizza and the salad both were amazing. The restaurant is on top of a hill overlooking the East China Sea and it was a gorgeous bay. Then we went to an antique/pottery place where I bought a pink kimono. They were all second-hand, but authentic (I paid around $3 for a silk kimono)! Josh just went to town snapping photos of everything. Then we went to an old fortress/castle, basically a series of stone walls that they're still excavating. It was up on another hill so plenty more photo ops. Oh, and the cherry blossoms are blooming (only happens this time of year) so we got several photos of them. Our camera's batteries died about halfway through the day, so the rest of our photos are on our friend's camera. We will hopefully get them in a few days on a CD or something. (Josh has already loaded the pictures we do have onto our Picasa site:
http://picasaweb.google.com/joshmurphy ). We drove back (part of the way)along the water & man, did it make me want to get in. We saw a few people gearing up to go scuba diving & a couple of surfers (one had a funky paddle to keep himself going; that made me laugh). But not a lot of people since our highs are around 60 degrees right now (kind of chilly to be in the ocean). But when it warms up, the beaches are going to be awesome!!
We have signed up for our scuba certification which is a week long class (a couple of hours each night). The class will start on Feb. 11, so we will be ready to scuba dive with you all when you come this summer! :) There are a lot of coral reefs close to the ocean surface, so snorkeling is great too!
We are planning to go to an orchid exposition tomorrow, so the pictures from that and the trip north should be loaded in the next couple of days.
So, I could write a lot more, but I am sure you have had enough!
Hope each of you are doing well!
Miss you all,
Betsy (& Josh)
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