Met Chie at 7pm for a dinner at KotoKoto. As usual it was delicious and we had a chance to try Hiromi-san’s “home made” miso, with a promise to join her the next time she will prepare miso – takes almost a year for it to ferment to the right state though. Before we left KotoKoto Hiromi-san gave us green tea leaves that a friend of her’s had made – looking forward to try it.
Both Chie and I were late today so we decided to have dinner at Il Lupone, and Italian restaurant not far from our apartment. The food here is great and the staff is very friendly – there was no difference this time either. After the dinner we ordered three desserts: i) pannacotta, ii) walnut ice cream, and iii) pear tarte.
The idea was to share the desserts but Chie only managed to eat half her pannacotta so I HAD TO eat the rest. They were all great but the walnut ice cream was in a class of its own. The only problem with the whole dinner was that I got to full 😛
This weekend was extended with an extra day due to a National holiday on Friday. We spent it with Sachi-san and friends in Kobuchihama and Fukukiura. Yes, we traveled the 600 km or so to Ishinomaki and then some to the peninsula outside of Ishinomaki where Kobuchihama and Fukukiura are located.
This time it was not to really do any volunteer work but mainly to meet with friends, talk, and spend some money in the area.
The one thing that always hit me when I visit there is how friendly everyone is. We drop by unannounced and they always invite you in, offering something to drink or eat. The food you are offered is almost always self-catched and home cooked – or home prepared because often it is not cooked 🙂
We left Tokyo at 7 am and immediately got of course stuck in traffic, this was after all a long weekend so we were not the only ones traveling the roads. But it sucked nevertheless. We crawled our way out of Tokyo and once central Tokyo was behind us it speed up a bit. Still it was slow progress until after Nikko, 1.5-2 hours ride into our journey.
After a couple of stops and normal speed at the end of the trip we reached our destination around 2:30 pm. Our first stop was the newly built oyster factory in Fukukiura, but they had closed for the day. Instead we visited Haruto-san and his younger brother Kouichi-san in Kobuchihama for a talk.
Kouichi-san was packing sea cucumber in plastic bags for export to China – Chinese seem to like sea cucumber; me I can eat them but they don’t taste much and are kind of crunchy to eat. He also showed us where they dried sea cucumbers and awabi, and we tried a delicious dried awabi. We also got oysters cooked in their shells.
Around dinner time we went to Fukukiura to have dinner with some friends, a family that has helped coordinating the volunteer work in Fukukiura. After the dinner we said good bye and drove to Ishinomaki where we stayed at the Grand Hotel. On our way to Ishinomaki we saw a tanuki (raccoon dog) and about 20 or so rain deers.
On Saturday morning we returned to Fukukiura to visit the oyster factory. It was fun and interesting to see how to prepare the oysters for selling them. Most of the work is done by hand, including cleaning the oysters from blue mussels, open them, washing them to get rid of sand and other things. It seems to be hard and cold work.
We also met Haruto-san at the oyster factory. He was taking some people out in his recovered boat. His boat was pushed up into the forest by the tsunami but was recovered and was now back in a state as new – you can read about Haruto-san’s boat here.
After the oyster factory we visited a nori (dry seaweed) factory. They had quite recently invested a lot of money to automate it. It was interesting to see how the seaweed turned into nori, something that we eat on a regular basis.
It was now time for a coffee break and we, almost as usual, visited one of our friends for it 🙂 While the others were drinking coffee and talking I took a stroll around the house and walked into the woods behind the house. I was interested in what they had done there since the last time, basically they had cut down some of the trees. And I found that some had taken the opportunity to do some wood art.
In the night we went to Meguro ryokan in Kobuchihama. They were full the first night but today they had a room for us, which included dinner and breakfast. We also got a visit during dinner time from some of our friends.
Sunday was return-to-Tokyo day, but before we returned home we drove around visiting friends. Talking and saying “bye” for this time.
Our final stop was at a family where we got oysters, awabi, eel, and pickled Chinese cabbage to bring with us back to Tokyo. This happened almost everywhere we stop and the car was packed with boxes full of nori, eel, awabi, oyster, and even rice.
Before we returned back to Tokyo we also made a brief stop in Ishinomaki to visit some friends there. They invited us for coffee and snacks. We stayed there drinking coffee and talking for a couple of hours before it was time to leave. It was getting dark by the time we were on our way.
This weekend we went to San Francisco for our yearly football trip to Raiders’ land. We arrived at SFO on Friday morning. After checking out our rental car we drove to the hotel where we could check in at once.
The rest of the Friday we spent with Kikue-san shopping. In the evening we had dinner at home with Kikue-san and Shimura-san. Later Power-san also arrived.
Saturday we mainly spent shopping and preparing for tailgate party. Though we decided to cancel the tailgate as the weather forecast predicted rain, and tailgating in the rain is not so fun.
Sunday was game day as usual. We went to the stadium and, to our surprise, the weather was much better than expected. So we had a very improvised tailgate party.
And then the fun stopped… Another loss 🙁 This was the tenth year we went to an Oakland Raiders game, and the 8th loss.
Maybe next year???