Family Night. . . Cooking Challenge

Tonight for our family date we went to a Japanese market. Each team was give 700 yen. The goal was for each team to come up with a meal. There isn't much in the market that is American. You have some basics like your proteins and some of your veggies but practically everything else is foreign. As we have been here a year now (To the day-yikes, time flies!) we are recognizing a lot more of the basic foods and are able to follow picture directions a lot easier although honestly, 99% of the 'translation' is just guessing ;)

We all had 15 minutes. The boys spent 695 and bought:
The girls spent 691 and bought:
We all quickly got to work. I laughed when almost immediately you hear from Pete, " Oh good, (happy sigh) it's what I thought it was!" As he opened a package. Meanwhile us girls were trying to decipher these instructions:
Our beef curry and rice tasted really good although we all wish there had been a little more 'kick' to it. Pete and Alex made a smoothie with pineapple, calpis, and blueberries. Very yummy.
And of course... our desert. Blueberry Kit Kats.
Lots of fun and even more surprising that we didn't end up ordering Pizza when it was all done
(I had secretly planned on it;)

Just some more examples of great Japa-English

Reading Japanese English (or Japa-English as my fam calls it) almost always brings a smile. Below are pictures of three gift bags that we found in a convenience store last weekend. Kind of funny. "I watched the pretty cat which there was on the rook of the neighboring house today. I want to make friends with her. I keep is a secret from other friends. The reason is because I want to make friends with her first."

My puppy played too much and was tired and has slept. What kind of dream do you watch? Let's go for a drive together tomorrow.

The day when I was troubled all day. My pretty puppy, the place are not your rooms. Please, please come out! Are you no use with the soft cushions of this place?

Did I mention these were the ONLY choices of gift bags available? What occasion would you use these bags for?

In a tree... wasn't the plan but we had a great view!

Our weekend adventure took a couple of detours. Originally we had planned on going to Kokusai Dori street Sat night as there was an Eisa festival with 100s of Eisa daners, drummers and the typical Oki festivities. However its been rainy here lately. Really rainy and Sat morning was *gasp* actually sunny! We had to take advantage of it, especially because the sun was only supposed to be out in the morning. We got our swimming suits on and headed out. The plan was to find this park I'd driven past earlier that week and then hit the beach. An hour later and we hadn't found the park. For those of you who wonder why we couldn't find the park I had drive past just a couple days prior, the roads in Oki are rarely labeled. They have no pattern and rarely connect to other roads the way you think they will and they are typically narrow and easy to miss / confuse with other roads or even find again as many of them look like they could possibly be drive ways. Needless to say, we didn't find the park! Plan B... swimming. As we were in Naha, an area we aren't as familiar with the logical thing was to drive towards the ocean and find a beach. Which we did with a minor detour to look at motorcycles ;) Found a great beach, we were just about ready to swim when Pete noticed an island and a bridge leading to the island not far away and decided swimming there would be much better (The water was warmer or bluer, maybe?) So we set out again. Please refer to the above description of the Oki roads if you don't already know where this is going. That's right, an hourish later we were finally on this island which had a park (Yippee-sadly there was a baseball game going on so we weren't able to really play) but no decent swimming beaches, too corally. Back to plan A. Overall, it was nice to spend the morning together. Our adventures ended at the Naha Harbor Treehouse Restaurant. Not a real tree- just made to look like one.

Can you see us at the bottom of the picture? It was a cool building. I was sad they didn't do much with the inside of the building, they could have really made it look fabulous inside with lots of greenery. But it was fun. You took an elevator located at the back of the truck up to the restaurant.

Yep, mom. Posting pictures of food again ;) Pete's was Guydon or a bowl with veggies, meat and rice and was delicious. Lalee has Oyakodon which is a mount of seasoned rice topped with veggies and a curried chicken and covered with a sunny-side-up egg. Much better tasting then it looks ;)

Alex had a spam, tomato and goya pizza. Goya is an Okinawa veggie that looks a lot like a cucumber with lots and lots of bumps. It is considered on of their 'fountain of youth' foods. It has a very bitter taste to it. Alex like the pizza, after picking off a lot of the toppings ;) Next to it is a salad plate with the usual salad springs and a noodle salad that you commonly get with foods.
I made Beccas pic bigger as she got probably the most variety and ate the least! Her main dish was rice covered with egg. She also had fried shrimp, sausage and a mini hot dog, an assortment of fruit (Kiwi, passion fruit, mango and cherry) and potato chunks covered in a sauce that tasted like fry-sauce. This is their kids meal option, supposedly kid friendly. Not Becca's first choice!
During our 4 hour adventure we didn't do any of the things we set out to do (Eisa festival, swimming or find the park) but we did have a fun time and made memories. I guess that's what counts!

White Beach

Summer time is perfect for weekend get-a-ways. We did just that this past weekend when we spent several days in a cabin at White beach.

It rained most of the time we were there but that was fine, we stayed in the cabin watching movies, reading and playing games. We also spent a lot of time at the swimming pool and took walks on the beach.
One of the nights we saw a huge group of migrating crabs.

Becca hated this but the rest of us thought it was pretty cool.

We rented an aqua cycle one of the days, I was shocked when Alex was not impressed with this and refused to get back on after the first ride. Lalee and I walked around just the two of us a couple times as it was super hot and humid and the family didn't want to leave the cabin, wimps!

Alex's Baptism

Alex was baptised on July 17 in the East China sea at Toguchi Beach, Okinawa. It was really neat experience for him and everyone who was able to be there. We started at 11:00 because of the tide schedule and we were so thankful the sun was shinning as it had been raining all week. And shinning the sun was! Combined with the intense humidity, we were all completely soaked before Alex even got in the water! We had two talks. One was on baptism and although Becca and I read it, Alex's grandparents provided the talk. Alex loved that they were able to be there in a small way and he held a picture of them as we were reading the talk. We also had a talk on the Holy Ghost by the Primary President.
Alex was baptised and confirmed on the beach and we had a lunch afterwards. We had about 20 members of our branch come. All in all, it was a great day. We recorded the talk portions of the service and will post it when I can get Pete to get on it :)
I posted a lot of pictures because these will likely be our family pictures for 2010. We usually try to take our family picture in the fall / early winter of each year but since Pete is going to be gone soon until mid 2011 this will be the family pics for 2011 ;)

Culture Class

The kids have been going to Japanese Immersion class from 8:30-12:30 M-F for July. They were able to learn more Japanese, learn new Japanese arts and crafts (their favorite part of the experience), learn songs and dances, cook Japanese foods, and play games, Etc. They really enjoyed this and came home each day sharing something new with us about the experience. The picture below was taken when they went on a field trip with their class to a market.

Fourth of July

Lalee and her 2 peeps from our neighborhood: Kendel and Emma.

The Fourth of July for my family means picnics, lots of family and friends, games (usually involving water) and whatever other activities to enjoy the day. In April two of my neighbors and I decided we wanted to have a BBQ / picnic for 4th of July. Although we invited most of the neighbors in our little housing area, we each also invited some of our own friends. We had Alex's best friend (Jacob) and his family, and our friends Mary, Kevin, and Zach come. We also invited Pete's shop.


We rented a giant water slide type thing that the kids played on ALL weekend long. Lots of fun. We also played water-balloon volleyball, volleyball, horseshoes, etc. There was a TON of food. It's neat as there is a good variety of cultures in our housing area so we had 'favorite' foods from a lot of different cultures. Very yummy. It was nice to be able to continue some of our family traditions although I definitely felt the void of our family and friends not with us.