One of our more recent adventures was to go explore Kokusai St down in Naha. Naha is the metropolitan center on the south end of the island, and we had been told it's a street full of little shops and restaurants. We decided to take a taxi, because parking here can be limited or even non-existent. Lexi was at a sleepover, so it was just the four of us. This was the first time the girls rode in a taxi, which wasn't weird to them, but my first time was when I was 20 and that was in Chicago. I grew up in a small town where there were none, and if I wanted to get to the other side of town, I walked. Something that is unheard of with today's kids.
The girls had so much fun watching the meter go up, and were worried that the 2000 yen that Daddy had given them to pay wasn't going to be enough. Silly girls didn't realize he had already asked how much it was going to be, and gave them more than enough. I'm not sure how, but Avi is the one that ended up with the 500 yen leftover.
We decided to walk around for a bit before deciding where to eat. There were a lot of choices, and we weren't quite sure what we were in the mood for. We were hungry though, so we didn't actually go into any of the shops to look around.
Most restaurants around here have picture menus, which makes it really easy to decide if we want to eat there. We saw a few places that looked pretty good, but decided to go with a yakiniku place. Yakiniku is where you order raw meat/vegetables and then grill your own food, not to be confused with shabu-shabu, which is boiling your food (that experience is another blog waiting to be written). One of our favorite restaurants is a yakiniku place, so we figured this one wouldn't be too different. We were wrong.
We see a sign that says "English friendly staff" which is always a plus, and makes ordering easier. We sit down and look at a menu, which in big English writing says "Yakiniku in Naha". We open it up, and nothing is in English. Some pictures of meats you can order, along with prices but no descriptions. I'm sure you're thinking, so what? Just order some meat. Sure there were pictures of cows above the beef, and pictures of pigs above the pork, but I'm kind of picky and not super adventurous. I'm willing to try new things, but not for my whole meal. The one time I have done that here- just jumped right in ordering something I didn't know if I'd like- I ended up eating only thinly sliced carrots for my meal. *see shabu-shabu comment above.
I was also thinking about our favorite yakiniku restaurant, and there is a whole lot of meat they offer that I have no interest in trying. I didn't want to pay 2,500 yen for a plate of intestines. So we settled on a "set" as they are called here, with a plate of beef, plate of pork, 2 salads, 2 soups, 2 bowls of rice and a plate of vegetables.
Trying to substitute here is almost impossible because of the language barrier. We wanted to switch the soup in our set, to a soup that was in another set. After 2 waiters talking and trying to figure out what we wanted, and if it could be done, we gave up and said just bring us the soup.
We have had to learn real fast how to eat with chopsticks. Alex was already pretty good at it, but the girls and I were NOT. Most places we've gone don't offer any silverware. Some offer baby forks or spoons for the kids, but we are almost pros at using the chopsticks now. I remember one day at lunch, watching an old couple eating salad and pizza with chopsticks, and I thought to myself "wow, I'm not sure I would be able to eat salad with those" turns out, it's not as hard as you'd think! I'm sure the fact that I had no other way to get the food into my mouth helped.
That purple stuff is called beni imo, a purple sweet potato. It makes delicious ice cream, but I didn't love it grilled. The food turned out to be pretty good. We discovered that soaking the meat in our leftover salad dressing, before cooking it was really good.
Poor Alex, spent most of our dinner cooking the food and feeding the three of us. Which is what usually happens when we do yakiniku, but our usual restaurant is all you can eat with no time limit. So you just keep ordering meat until you're full. Here, it was just the two plates of meat. We could have ordered more, but I think Alex was ready to be done cooking anyway. So he ate all the extras (the vegetables) that we didn't want. There just weren't enough "extras" to fill him up. Our dinner ended with some sort of toffee ice cream that was delicious.
We walked along the street, stopping in a few shops to look around. One store was offering samples of some sort of cookie, we had no clue what they were, but they were delicious so we bought a box. We of course had to stop and take a picture in front of the big Shisa. (Shisa are a half-dog half lion "guardians" here in Okinawa, that are similar to the guardian dogs seen in Chinese culture, and are descended from the Chinese influence here. They are every where, and generally found in pairs of a male and female. In fact, one of the first things we did setting up our house, was to hunt down a small pair to put over our front door.)
As we came to the end of Kokusai Street, and all the shops, we find a Red Lobster. Had I known that was there, that would have been our dinner. Oh well. We grabbed a taxi and headed back to base, unfortunately this taxi wasn't able to drive us back to our house, and dropped us off at the gate. As we walked along the deserted road back to the exchange where we left our car (and keys to the house) I smiled thinking about the memories the girls will have about living in Japan. I have met plenty of people who refuse to leave base, and have no desire to explore this beautiful island we live on. These are the same people who hate every duty station, and always find something to complain about. We are not those people. Are there difficulties living in a foreign country? Of course, but if we lived our lives refusing to deal with anything difficult or new, we'd be miserable. We have 3 short years here, and plan to do and see as much as possible.
