Blake and Deborah in Hawaii: Cold Squid in the Morning

Japanese cuisine is varied and delicious, but also often unfamiliar. Soon we'll start our house sit and have access to a full kitchen, but until then we've been eating out more and making do with convenience store purchases cooked with the hotel microwave and hot pot. We haven't come across any cereal – cold or hot – for breakfast, but we did find yogurt and of course fruit. The hotel does provide a few pieces of bread, but that's not so good for gluten-sensitive Deborah, and even I can only ingest so many refined carbohydrates before feeling gross. So we've also taken to eating previously cooked cold calamari in the mornings, which sounds strange but is actually delicious. I have no reason to believe the Japanese eat this for breakfast either – although I understand a traditional Japanese breakfast would include fish, along with steamed rice and miso soup.

Lunch we've been eating out, with surprisingly good success. It's difficult to pick a spot when you can't read the menu, or even the sign on the door to know if you're entering a restaurant or a hardware store. Fortunately, some places do have English menus or at least pictures of the various dishes. This is where pointing comes in very handy. But sometimes the photos are blurry and you end up picking a bowl of soup with a raw egg dumped in it. Deborah's afraid she's going to accidentally order eel. Avoiding meat is a challenge because it is not uncommon to find bits of pork mixed in with a fish and shrimp dish. We often end up in noodle shops because they are the least expensive. If you aren't careful you can spend a small fortune eating out in Japan, but we've yet to exceed the $20 mark for the two of us at a meal. It helps that we aren't ordering drinks and that there's no tipping.

One of our favorite finds is Okonomiyaki, or Japanese Pancake. It's a flour/egg/yam batter mixed with cabbage and various seafood and vegetables, grilled on both sides, and topped with a barbecue-like sauce and bonito (fish) flakes, then drizzled with a cross-hatched pattern of Japanese mayonnaise. Yum. Another treat we enjoyed yesterday on the way to the Kiyomizu-dera temple were the doughy little confections filled with plum, cherry blossom, or even green tea. These were offered as free samples to the tourists and pilgrims on the way to the temple. We didn't turn down any – it was just like being back at Costco.