Gaijin Girl: More Stories of a Curly-Haired Sensei by Beth Matuska

Author:Beth Matuska [Matuska, Beth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-09-30T21:00:00+00:00

As usual, I managed to get myself lost fairly quickly. Having decided to use the bus to get around, I was attempting to find my way to the local castle. While the tourist information desk was able to provide me with a bus route map, nothing was in English. From the maps to the buses themselves, everything was in Kanji, and with so many different lines leaving from the same stops, I once again found myself on the wrong bus. Either that, or I missed a connecting bus that I should have transferred to. I found myself at the very end of the line, at the bus terminal where a total of three people were waiting in a tiny shack of a bus stop, and no idea how to get to where I was going. Fortunately for me, an elderly woman spotted me. She asked me where I was going, and figured out the correct bus. After about a ten minute wait, I was off once more.

Beyond the typical sightseeing spots and touristy activities, one of the biggest things that struck me about Okinawa was the food. It was so distinctly different from the rest of Japan. I think that this trip turned me into a bit of a food tourist. For my first night there, I took the advice of one of the hotel staff and tried a local restaurant, rather than a touristy one. They really succeeded on that one! I might never have guessed it to be a restaurant if I hadn't been looking for the sign (in Japanese only). There was no plastic food outside, no picture menu. It was a simple building with a door curtain. Inside, there were no paper menus, only wooden boards on the walls, all in kanji, of course. Normally, that might have worried me, having found myself in overly expensive restaurants with no idea what to order, but what I could read of the prices looked fairly reasonable. Not able to read the names of the dishes and not really sure what to expect, I just asked the server what the best thing to order was. This turned out to be a dish called soki soba, a very common dish in Okinawa. It was a dish of noodles in pork broth, with a large chunk of meat filled with bones in the center. I didn't ask which part of the pig it was from, nor did I want to know. I have often found that there are some things I am better off not knowing.

Over the course of the next several days, I went shopping, swimming, exploring and eating. Tacos turned out to be a poplar food, much to my delight, the Mexican version of tacos, not the Japanese tako, which is octopus. I had several meals of these from street vendors, wanting to take full advantage of the opportunity, as Mexican food wasn't as common in the area where I was living.

I also indulged in a gourmet burger. While

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