Trying it all

The last couple days have been a blur of eating strange food, tripping over our tongues as we try to speak Japanese and visiting the highlights of Morioka, where we arrived on Sunday morning.

I'm here on a professional exchange through the Rotary, while at the same time, I'm sending back stories to the newspaper I work for. There are five of us here: Aimee, Beth, Erin, and our team Rotary leader Andy.

Our host, Takashi, has been more than gracious. He seems to anticipate very need, or want, we might have.

Meal times have provided some of our best lessons in Japanese culture. They start with a hot towel to wash your hands with. From there, you must be careful where you set your chop sticks. Of course, it was me who stuck mine in my rice. Takashi looked at my bowl and said, "Where did you learn to use chop sticks?" Then I learned that setting the utensils in your rice has connotations of death and is only done at funerals. Oops.

One of our dinners was at this restaurant tucked on the second story of a down town building. Takashi ordered up a veritable smorgasbord of seafood. The waiter brought plate after plate of the kind not typically found on an American dinner table: mollusks, grey masses of crunchy, yet slimy tentacles; bright orange squid, large oysters still in their shell; whole baby shrimp, legs and eyes in tact; octopus, tuna and crab. Oh and we had a little Sake, too.


Beth, who seems to be born with a Japanese palate, eagerly sampled each course. To my credit, I tried everything that was set in front of me, smiling instead of gagging at the slimy things I was swallowing. I am a notoriously picky eater, so my parents would have been proud.

Sunday was also the day we visited a Shinto shrine. We sat around a short table and drank green tea, while Takashi wrote our names in the three types of Japanese characters.

Monday, we headed to a craft fair where you can participate in making some of the crafts. My favorite was dying handkerchiefs with indigo.


A slim woman, her hands blue to her wrists, softly explained the process in Japanese, with Takashi close by to translate. Clipping plastic pieces to the cloth, twisting it with rubber bands or pinning on chop sticks yielded white designs after the cloth was dipped in vats of the indigo. After rinsing them in water and pulling off the tools we used to make them, the woman ironed the cloths dry.

The final products looked nothing like the intricate versions the business sold at the front. Whether Takashi snuck off to pay or she gave them to us for free, I'm not sure, but the woman said goodbye without charging us.

Now we're off to the coast to stay with host families for the first time.

Lesson learned: Sea cucumbers are not cucumbers (they're mollusks.)