Fishing Trip

This past Saturday Nate and I ... along with 11 other people... went on a deep sea fishing adventure! We meet up with everyone around 3am and hit the high seas. The boat ride out to where the fish were biting was about 3 hours! We got to see the beautiful sunrise over the East China Sea while we were heading out.
We caught all Yellowfin Tuna.
Osamu was a huge help on the boat with our fish. Some of the fish were really big! Captain Billy didn't think we caught any big ones.... but since I am used to Blue Gill these seemed like monsters.

Captain Billy and First Mate Osamu getting all of the fish out of the cooler at the end of the day. Nate and I ended up taking home about 5 one-gallon bags of cut tuna fillets! We did cut some sashimi when we got home... which was really fun and good!

This past weekend our friends Jeremy & Julie had a Yukata Party at their place. Yukatas are the summer version of a kimono. It was so fun to get dressed up in them! Both of our shoes were too small, so our feet hung over the ends! We are a little sunburned from our 12 hour fishing trip that we had taken that day.

This is the sushi platter that we had for lunch on Friday at work! It was so amazing and pretty... just thought that I would share it!

This is Megumi and Erina, two of the ladies that I work with. They are in front of our Kokeshi Doll display. Kokeshi's are a traditional Japanese wooden doll that a lot of people collect now. Megumi is from mainland Japan and Erina is a local Okinawan.

This is one of Monsy's "Senior Pictures"!!! Just thought I would show everyone how handsome he still is here in Japan! Monsy will turn three next month :)

A Delicious Weekend!

This weekend we were able to try out three new restaurants! The amount of restaurants here truly amazes us!

Friday night we went out to eat with Matt and Jody to a Do-It-Yourself type of restaurant called An An. You order your meats and veggies, then you cook it yourself over a grill type of contraption in the middle of the table. The food was great, but the grill is definitely very hot and can cause some dinner-time sweating!

On Saturday afternoon Nate and I tried out Japanese style Mexican food at Obbligato. The food was great... but definitely different from American Mexican food. Our meals came with sticky rice, hash browns, potato salad and dippy eggs! All and all it was a great dining experience and we plan to go back! Nate has told me that we aren't supposed to be eating at the same place more than once because there are too many that we want to try.

Saturday night we had some friends over for a BBQ at our apartment. Nate was manning the grill, making burgers, brats, and chicken.

Sunday afternoon we tried out an Indian restaurant called Kebab's. We decided to go with a "Set". The meal came with soup, a puff pastry thing with potato in it, our curry main dish, nan (one was garlic and the other herb) that was AMAZING, and ice cream dessert!

We are looking forward to this coming weekend... weather permitting, we are headed out with 10 other folks for a deep sea fishing adventure!

http://www.saltwater-fishing-okinawa.com/

Since there are 12 of us in our group, I am pretty sure that we get the boat and the captain to ourselves! I am so excited, and I will be sure to take a ton of pictures! We get to keep all of the fish that we catch, so that should be great! An Okinawan fish-fry will hopefully be in order.

A Visit to Dr. Seng

Well... I had my dentist appointment this morning. It was just your regular routine cleaning and exam. It turns out that I am going to need a root canal! It is NOT because of poor oral hygiene, it is because my canine (tooth #11) has a crack in it (from either grinding my teeth or something) that is deep and is causing the tooth to die! Needless to say, I was a little unhappy to hear that news. I knew that something was wrong with the tooth, because it had been giving me problems for almost a year now!
I tried to take a picture of Nate while he was being my dentist, but he refused... quite adamantly. I then thought maybe I could take one with my cell phone camera. But under no condition was I allowed to take pictures :) Nate is such the professional dentist!!

Jody's Birthday

Last night we celebrated Jody's 27th Birthday... with KARAOKE!! We all had such a blast singing the night away.

This was our second time to this karaoke bar (Kuganea sp?), and needless to say... we love it!

Labor Day Weekend

FRIDAY

Friday we had our household goods delivered, which kept us very busy. We did venture out to eat to a place called Izakaya Genki with Matt & Jody. They have very large and delicious sushi rolls. We also dined on a staple dish here… Yakitori, which are kebabs.

SATURDAY

We ventured to our first secluded beach on Okinawa! We went with Josh, Suzanne & their two boys, Max & Brand; Ray, Cat and their daughter Lauren; Soon (who is a dentist for the Navy) and his girlfriend Kiko; and Tran (who is also a dentist for the Navy). We had such an amazing time! Not only was the beach beautiful, Nathan was very excited to try spear fishing for the first time! He came up empty handed, but Josh and Ray both speared a couple of fish and also an octopus. I snorkeled, but didn’t stay too long for the spear fishing adventure… but I did see Ray come back to the surface with his octopus still alive. You have to free-dive down to where the fish are, so Nate is going to have to work on how long he can hold his breath.

SUNDAY

We went to church on Camp Foster, and the priest is one of Nate’s patients. He is a really nice, funny guy. After church we decided we were going to have an adventurous day!

We first had lunch at a restaurant Nate has been wanting to try. It is called FAB. It is a curry restaurant in Sunabe. Sunabe is a very short drive or bike ride north of where we live. The food was delicious and our view was even more amazing! We were outside looking directly at the East China Sea.

After lunch we started driving north with the intention of going to the Ocean Expo Park… which is the 2nd largest aquarium in the world behind Atlanta. We actually didn’t ever make it there because we stopped at so many places along the way! Our first stop was Todoroki Waterfall. It is located in the village of Sukuta. The waterfall was a short walk back in the woods, which was so great to be out in nature… away from the cities. It wasn’t a huge waterfall, but it was so peaceful and pretty.

Moving more north, we thought that it would be fun to stop next at the Nago Pineapple Park! The pineapple park is a very popular tourist spot for Japanese. The park is situated near a pineapple field. You get to tour the park in a very cool Pineapple Golf Cart! After the tour is over we got to sample 3 different types of pineapple wine (very good) and also sample all types of pineapple foods and normal pineapple. We were definitely stuffed with sweets by the time we left!
By this time we had driven over an hour and thought we would head back south, but we did stop at a glass blowing factory along the way! The glass factory is called Mori Gurasu Kobo (Forest Glass Factory). We watched the guys working for a while. It is a really neat process, and they work very quickly!
On Sunday night we went out with Matt and Jody. We ate at a place by Araha Beach (where we both live) called Jet City Burgers. They have the most innovative burgers I have seen! I had a Hawaiian Burger that had the burger, cheese, avocado, pineapple and some other things I can’t recall.

MONDAY

We decided we should do some final organizing in our apartment. Then we explored the local 100Yen store (Dollar Store). The 100Yen stores are so great here! They have everything!! We also checked out a store called UniGlo. People have told us that UniGlo is the Japanese Gap. It turned out to be a great store… we didn’t get anything yet since Nate is bigger than most of the clothes.

We had Matt and Jody over for dinner and grilled chicken. Nate loves to grill now (which I love too)!