This morning I took Mom and Dad on a tour of the base and then we met Keenan for lunch at the club. Not my first choice of lunch spots but Dad wanted to try it out, it was chicken and waffle Wednesday which is probably the best day to go...
After lunch we headed to Shimoda Mall to do a little browsing and also checked out a couple farmer's markets to look at the different types of produce. Some is the same as in the USA, but there are also some different things that my parents hadn't seen before. From the mall we drove around in the country outside of Misawa, looking at the fields and crops. It's pretty amazing how much farming is still done by hand or with tiny farm equipment. We stopped at a little bakery and got some fresh baked breads too.
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One of the tower housing complexes on base. When buildings
are under construction in Japan the entire thing gets covered
with scaffolding and draped with cloth/tarps. |
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Japanese people almost always back in to parking spaces.
Mom and Dad thought that was interesting. |
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| More cars backed in. |
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Field of nagaimo, or Chinese yams. The vegetable actually
is the root of the plant...I have no idea why they are staked up
above ground. |
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| Farmer's market. |
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Kids going home from school and a mail
man with his motorbike. |
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| Carrot field. |
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| Not sure what was growing here...daikon radish maybe? |
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| Pretty amazing how fine they work up the soil. |
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| Permanent snow fences. |
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| Cabbage field. |
Dinner tonight was at Kaminarido, or Thunder Ramen, as it's referred to by most Americans. It's fun to show people what actual ramen noodles are like...nothing like those 20-cent packages! Meat, veggies and fantastic broths. So good!
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| I had finished most of mine already... |
The next day we took it easy in the morning and headed off in the afternoon for some gelato at a dairy farm where it's made fresh every morning. Yummy! The flavor lineup changes pretty frequently so we never know what we'll have for choices. Today's choices were the standards: jersey milk, chocolate, green tea, blueberry, cheese and coffee; plus the limited editions: coconut, mango, tomato, sesame and pumpkin.
After the gelato we tried our hand at the Japanese equivalent of slot machines, kind of? It's called pachinko and I guess there's a bit of skill involved versus pure luck. We really didn't know what we were doing and left losers. The place was unbelievably loud and smoky, not more than a few minutes in there left some of us with hurting ears and headaches. Crazy. I don't understand how it is so popular, so much worse than any casino I've ever been to. Maybe it can be lucrative and that's the draw?
For dinner we went out to a place called Ramen House Ogasawara with one of Keenan's coworkers. We had many small plates of Japanese foods such as cheese rolls, yakitori (chicken on a stick), chicken gyoza (wing deboned and stuffed with pork/cabbage mixture), fried rice, edamame, cucumbers with miso dip, yakisoba (fried noodles), etc. Everything was delicious. We followed up dinner with a stop at our favorite tiny bar.
Up next: My Parents' Visit - Part 8 - Nebuta, Aquarium & Yakiniku
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