The newest of years!

Well I hope everyone is doing well in the new year. Have you broken all of your resolutions yet? My main goal until we come home is to spend more time studying Japanese. And to keep posting our stories regularly, but I've got some catching up to do.

This installation will be about our New Year celebration in Japan and our trip to Okinawa.

Let me tell you this about celebrating the new year in Japan. The idea is not to get together with friends on New Years Eve and drink yourself into a coma. Most people don't go to a bar or have house parties for their friends. This is a time to get together with your family and eat a ton of food. Houses often have grass decorations on the front door, with an orange placed in the center of it. The food that is eaten generally consists of a huge assortment of cold pre-prepared foods so that wives don't have to spend the day cooking. There are cold vegetables, cold egg dishes, cold tai (snapper) and dried fish, also cold. The best part however is mochi. These are small round rice cake that are traditionally eaten at new years. One of my student's mothers gave me a large bag of mochi to celebrate with at home. This generally comes in a very decorative display case (a round plastic two tiered shell with a cardboard stand). Well the clock had struck and Colleen and I decided to crack them open and dig in and boy were we disappointed. They were hard and crunchy and completely without flavor. We immediately asked ourselves. "Why on earth would they eat this stuff and why does everyone always say how much they love it?" Thinking that perhaps we had received a bad batch, we contacted our friends Chiaki and Sanae to see if they were supposed to be like this. Their reply was "Well how did you cook them?" Our answer was "You have to cook them?!" We soon found out that after applying a little heat they become soft and chewy and when sauce or flavors are added they are downright tasty. Chiaki invited the two of us to her house a few days after new years to eat a holiday meal of pre-mentioned cold foods and try mochi the right way. We had it in soup and with seaweed and found out that every year in Japan a handful of children and seniors die from eating it as it is very sticky and can get lodged in your throat. Deadly and delicious. My favorite kind of food. We then walked to a nearby temple to pray. Thanks to a new year TV commercial I had the routine memorized. Wash your hands, throw the coin, ring the bell, clap twice, bow twice, make a wish, clap again and finished! After that we got new years fortunes and went back to Chiaki's house for round two of the food. This time instead of cold food they put a large electric grill right on the living room table and proceeded to make takoyaki, then okinomiyaki, and finally yakisoba. By the time we left that night we could barely walk we were so full and we had many gifts to take home with us, which is a tradition I like here. If you go to someone's house bring a gift. If someone comes to your house send them home with stuff. Yay!

Now about Okinawa. We actually flew there at the beginning of November but I'm just getting to writing about it now because if you read the last blog I have mentioned that I am indeed lazy. I checked our travel book and it states that Okinawa is a prefecture comprising of more than a hundred sub-tropical islands stretching over 700km. With lush vegetation, gorgeous beaches and coral reefs it is a popular destination for many tourists and home to several American military bases. I however state that Okinawa was the location of Karate Kid II and it's freakin' sweet! The weather was about 25C the whole time we were there, but it was overcast most of the time. Still a cloudy warm day beats a cold sunny day hands down. We were there for four days and saw lots of cool stuff while we were there. Before we even hit the hotel we took a taxi to Okinawa castle. It wasn't as big as the castle in Osaka but the design was way different. Okinawa was it's own kingdom before the 1600's when it was conquered by the Japanese, so the castle is a combination of Japanese and Chinese design that (from what I remember) was also created in the 15th century. After that we headed back to the airport to take a really long bus ride to our hotel, which was great. We had an ocean view (well all of the rooms had an ocean view but that's no reason to not mention it) and there were a lot of hills and small mountains nearby. During our visit we spent some time at the beach, took a lot of long walks to enjoy the scenery and ate a lot of great food. We had Okinawa soba (a local variation on noodles) goya (a bitter melon often served in salad) and the occasional dish with Spam in it (Okinawans eat more Spam than any other area in Japan)(this might have to do with American military living on the island?) We also visited a huge aquarium at the Ocean Expo Park, which had both outdoor aquatic shows and plenty to see inside. Also at the park they had a traditional Okinawan village and an absolutely amazing place called the Dream Gardens. It was a series of indoor greenhouses and outdoor gardens where the amount and variety of plant life was stunning. Our cab ride back to the hotel was amusing as there was a very insistent cab driver who was desperate to get back to the other end of the island and wasn't going without a fare in his car. With the help of an interpreter and a little bargaining Colleen and I shared a cab back with a couple of Chinese tourists who were headed to the airport (and incidentally spoke really good English). And so after four glorious days of relaxing and sightseeing we headed back to the airport to return to our daily lives as mild mannered English teachers. In all the trip was really good. The only odd thing was that a lot of people in the shops and many of the hotel staff wore Hawaiian shirts, as if they were competing in a "Who's the coolest vacation destination?" contest. Then again I don't know what an Okinawan shirt looks like so maybe it's the norm. To see the pictures of all of the flora and fauna (does that sound fruity?) from the Dream Garden and a few other places in Japan, click here. For the rest of our Okinawa pics, click here.

Sayonara, Carl.