Okinawa Glass Factory - Lookie but NO touchy!!

Ok, so this adventure was actually form a couple weeks ago. Since Sarah and I are both unemployed... we were like, "What in the world should we do today?" In lieu of our excessive boredom, we took a sorta little, kind of long road trip down to the southern tip of the island to a town I can't remember the name of. There we went to the country's most popular glass making factory, which in reality was a bunch of huge outdoor kilns with a huge group of guys running around like chickens with glowing hot balls of molten glass. It was pretty interesting to watch.

From our deductions, we could make out that there were various stages in the glass making process with a different person performing each step of said process. There would be one guy who would heat the glass, another the would pour it, one would blow into the glass to start a shape, one would mold it into a glass, another would create the base of the glass... it was really quite interesting to watch. It all had to be timed just right so that glass would come out correctly.

Now apparently from the history I could gather this is how the glass came to be. After WWII, the americans came over here with our green, clear, brown, and other various colored glass and discarded it in a wasteful manner, as we Americans are known to do on occasion. Well, the smart Japanese took these glass bottles and started melting them down to make glass objects that soon became popular souveniers. Eventually the craft expanded and colors and textures of glass changed, but it is still extremely popular here with locals as well as tourists, but VERY expensive. A single standard sized plate can range anywhere from like 25 dollars and up. This type of glass is only made in one other place in the world, and that's in Vietnam. You can google okinawa glass and see it, very pretty!

We went one afternoon during the week and it was very quiet there so we were able to watch the guys work for a while, and it was just amazing to watch them work! They have huge kilns of various temperatures depending on what they were making and were all running around all over the place in a rush to get what they needed done before the glass cooled.

As we were walking along the building, I noticed the tiles looked very shiney and as I approached one, which was about 1/3 the size of a normal brick, it was actually like a painted tile or rock with a thick glass covering on the top of it. From the pics you can see just how many tiles are on the wall, and the entire place is covered in them! Thats what the pic of the yellow square is.

At this visit I didn't buy anything, although I was very tempted! Each piece is hand crafted and they are very proud of the items they make, which are all labled with a special "hand made in okinawa" sticker. They really are one-of-a-kinda and anyone who comes to visit really should stop in to appreciate just how much work goes into making a single glass!

I am a sushi makin' master!!

So here's proof that I actually made sushi all by MYSELF!! I got the book, braved the grocery store off base to find the ingredients, and I rocked it like it was my job! Well... I suppose making dinner is my job now that i'm an unemployed bum... Anywho, here are some actual pics that prove I am not a culinary disaster.

On tonight's menu were: cucumber rolls with wasabe and toasted sesame; Veggies rolls with cucumber, carrot, avacado, and green onions; Shrimp rolls with cream cheese, sesame seeds, and cucumber; California rolls with crab meat, avacado, cucumber, and lastly were rice rolls topped with avacado and wasabe mayo with toasted sesame seeds. Yes, I rock.

To really blow your mind, last night I made tuna avacado dandori. It was delicious! It was raw tuna marinated in some mirin and soy sauce, over top of rice and topped with avacado and a wasabe soy sauce. For desert was a matcha (green tea powder) jelly roll and hot tea. I confess, I didn't make the jelly roll but I want to learn how! It was delicious!!

So yeah... no more going out to eat for sushi when there's now a world class chef in the hizzouse! Now all I need to do is master the art of tempura and I will be all set!

Yuppers, finally got some video! Day 1 in Oki!

So this is a video from our first morning in Okinawa. We had arrived the night before at like 10pm-ish and were very nicely picked up by some of Mike's future co-workers. They brought us to our TLF and we passed the heck out. At that point we had been on a plane for like pretty much 2 days straight, our poor bodies had no concept of what time it actually was, and the stress of our last 48 hours was finally over. It's kind of long but it shows our room that we lived in for like almost 2 weeks. This TLF was actually a little smaller than the one we had in Mississippi, but it'll give ya an idea of what it was like living in one of those things for almost a month! The video is kinda boring, but hey... you can see Mike in his pan-panties! :-)

What girl wouldn't want 50 inches?

It's hard to take in the full glory of all 50 inches of our new Panasonic flat screen, but it is quite glorious. We decided it was an absolute necessity for our new house. You can't really tell the size based on Chloe's head or Mike's, but it's pretty flippin' sweet. Nothing like watching my man, Ben Stiller, on the screen almost life-sized. It could bring tears to my eyes...

Lunch Bunch at Yoshido Japanese Fusion

So I went out to lunch today with the ladies of the Kadena Officer's Spouse Club, and we went to this extremely nice place called Yoshido Japanese Fusion, and let me tell ya it was amazing! The place wasn't about huge portions or rushing you out the door. They took their time and made sure each plate was pleasing to the eye and to the tastebuds.

First course was a double-layered plate with the top being a tuna and scallop with avacado and tarter sauce over a subtle mint tea jelly and season veggies. It was very very yummy for being raw, because I'm not a huge raw fish person.

Next course was a trio of a sort of tomato-veggie soup, an open-faced smoked duck with mozzarella and sun-dried tomato, and the last item was called Noguni-imo and it tasted like carmelized sweet potato. It was pretty dang tastey!

Next came the pasta Bucatini in a salmon cream sauce with spinach and capres with a little shredded vegggie in it. It was served with a type of focaccia roll that was hollow and had smoked-type of bayonne ham on top. It was probably my favorite course next to dessert.

The main dish was a breaded yanbau chicken with rosemary and veggies. Super duper yummy. I'm not a huge dark-meat person, but it was cooked very well and had a great taste to it.

Next came the first round of dessert. We had a double layer ice cream with espresso-flavored on the bottom and a very rich chocolate on top with a type of crispy almost chocolate-chip cookie-ish wafer on top. It was amazing!

Last round was a PLATTER of desserts! It had a vanilla custard-filled cream puff, a type of a brownie with pine nuts, a fruit tart, and a moshi ball, which is a very popular Japanes dessert here. It's not very sweet, it almost had what tasted like mashed sweet potato on the inside and kind of a dough-tasting flourey outside on it mixed with these sweet beans. Very interesting texture but not a bad taste to it. The Chef had spun the sugar in front of us for each plate, it was so cool!

Every plate we got was not overloaded so even though we had like 6 courses, it was just enough to fill the tummy without being stuffed. To end it off, I got a cup of "coffee" which was basically like 4 shots of espresso in a cup. Needless to say, I had a lot of energy to get through my daily afternoon moment of jetlag-ness!

So, if you happen to be in Okinawa one afternoon and have just 1,500 Y, you should stop by this little place and let them put on quite a little meal for ya. It was beautiful and delicious!

Aquarium, again... just can't get me enough of that sweet fishy smell!

So I love the aquarium, and we decided to hit it up again since we are now year pass holders, and one of the guys in the car had never been there before. Here are some more pice for your viewing pleasure...

Firt pic, it's onne of those whale-eating super giant squids... it was very... giant-like. The next pic is at the dolphin show. We hit the last show of the evening so the sun was setting, and I thought this looked pretty cool. The next pic down is actually the hide of a huge great white shark that was caught of Japanese shores in the 60's or so... makes me really want to sign up for those Scuba lessons!! The next pic is Mike demonstrating just how thick that plexi glass in front of the whale sharks is... I think it's like 60cm!!

The next pic down is a dolphin brain versus a shark brain. The dolphin is the bigger of the two... go figure. A shark can't even swim backwards, and now I know why! The next pic down is me by the head/eyes of the shark skin. I was gonna pucker up for a kiss but then I realized it was real, and I kinda air-gaged a little. Sarah made some sweet lovin' to it, but to avoid any beastiality comments, I kept that pic in the "naughty" file!

Next pic is obviously Mike and I in a huge shark mouth... I don't know if it was real because... well, I couldn't read the damn sign! Nothing like moving to a country who uses symbols for words to make you feel like an illiterate village idiot! Moving on...

The next pic if you look closely is actually of two frowning fishies. Sarah said they were frowning because they were so ugly. I told Mike it's what we were going to look like when we were old... but as long as we both look the same, maybe we could smile a little...

The yellow fishy is a horny something-or-other. I stopped reading once I saw horny... and of course I giggled. I put this pick up purely due to the fact it took like 20 pics to finally get one of him not blurry. He was all over the place! I wasn't supposed to use a flash, but the little bastard was asking for it! I flashed his little face off, and let me tell ya, he held still for a couple seconds after that!

The pic was actually of a poster. It was too hilarious not to photograph. I have no idea what it was saying or the point of it, but look at it... HILARIOUS! Ok, so that was the aquarium... I will get some video of it up as soon as I can!!

Watch out Disney, here's comes Nago Pineapple Farm!

So the Nago Pineapple Farm was just too amazing to be true! We drove from Okinawa City to Nago and it takes about 1 hour 15 on the back roads with me driving... and when we pull up to this place we are greeted by a HUGE 20-foot high pineapple flanked by dancing Okinawan Oranges. It was like I had won the weekend lottery for fun places to go. You walk into the "park" and pay your 5 dollars, and you are given a ticket for the amusement park ride of your life!

You can see in the last pic posted that we were all put onto these self-propelled golf cart transformed into the coolest Jurassic Park-type pineapple rides. If these things had spinning rims, one woul dhave come home with me for sure. So anyway, we load into these pineapple carts with iPods attached to the roofs with radios zip-tied and duct-taped to the roofs, where some very Japanese person is trying to speak some English dialogue to us about the park... too funny!

I would like to skip to the third picture of the random palm trees for just a moment. The look a lot like bamboo shoots, but do not be fooled! According to our pineapple cart voice, they are called "ass-lick" palms. I could be wrong, it's been known to happen, but I swear that's what the lady said! Moving on...

The second picture down with the little mini-pineapple looking pink flowers are actually baby pineapples. They grow from a plant in the ground that kind of looks like an aloe plant, but smaller, and the flower on top it actually the fruit once it growns up big and... piney.

The pic on the top with the HUGE pineapple in the field sorta shows how low the plants grow... and according to the lady on the radio, "the word pineapple actually comes from two seperate words, pine and apple." I kid you not, that's what the radio said... it's too perfectly hilarious for me to even try to make up!!

So anyway, there's the random self-taken pic in the cart of Mike and I. Aside from laughing out asses off at the terrible narration from the radio, it was interesting to learn there were like 200 edible types of pineapple, and that it actually comes from those two seperate words, pine and apple... who woulda thought!!

So after you take the little 10 minute cart ride, they force you to walk through a little shell museum and then into a little gift shop, go figure. Once you make your way through all that comes the ultimate part of the trip, which makes the 5 bucks seem like chump change... it's FREE SAMPLES!!! I mean this place makes Sam's club look like amatures!

They gave us pineapple-flavored everything, from wine, champagne, cake, juice, cut fruit, chocolate, pie, cookies, cooking vinegars (which I actually purchased), pineapple charcoal as air deodorizers, facial scrubs, lotions, perfumes... just everything you could ever imagine, and they literally were throwing the crap at you to try. One semi-buzz, a full tummy, and one hot flash later, we finally made it outta the place with two bottles of wine, a bottle of pineapple brown sugar vinagrette, and some pineapple white chocolate. It was... AWESOME!!

If any of you come here to visit, get your 5 bucks ready because you will definately be going here. And if you think it sucks... you didn't try enough of the wine. If you're not a wine-o, and you don't like pineapple... well, you suck and you can't hang out with me!