It’s been sad saying goodbye to all of our friends here, especially since we don’t want to leave and don’t know when we’ll be coming back. But the sadness is also wonderful, because it’s only so sad thanks to how many close friendships we’ve made!
One of those friendships is with the owner of our favorite restaurant, Ohana. She just goes by Ohana Mama – we’re sure she has a real name, but we’ve literally never heard anyone call her anything other than Mama!
Ohana is a Hawaiian place, with some of the best food we’ve had in Japan – and that’s saying a lot! Cassie loves the chicken curry; I think my favorite dish is probably the garlic shrimp. (I don’t even like shrimp that much!)
But the food is honestly only a small part of the draw. Each time we’ve gone, we’ve ended up sitting and chatting with Ohana Mama for at least an hour; we tend to go earlier in the evening, during her slow period, so once we’re finishing eating she’ll come sit and talk with us. Ohana Mama was one of our first extended conversations in Japanese with nobody to translate, and it’s been a lot of fun practicing Japanese with her, and getting to see ourselves grow. Our first conversation a few months ago, we were using Google Translate for every third sentence, but now it’s more like every thirtieth!
(Which is not to say the conversation is exactly fluid, just that we can all make ourselves understood with a bit of lateral thinking and the occasional pantomime.)
When Ohana Mama heard we were leaving soon, she invited us out to dinner at a different restaurant that she likes. Can you imagine such a thing happening in the USA? We’d eaten there, like, four times, and by then we were already close enough that she treated us to dinner at a wonderful Okinawan restaurant nearby! She brought a friend of hers, too, and we were there for hours, enjoying the food and chatting and having a great time. It was wonderful.
Then on Monday, she invited us to a calligraphy class; we had a fantastic time, and the teacher gave us some calligraphy of kanji she’d picked for our names!
(Quick lesson on Japanese names: their pronunciation isn’t always tied to the kanji that make them up. So they are, to a certain extent, arbitrary. To pick these names, she chose Kanji with similar pronunciations to our names and vaguely pleasant/complimentary meanings.)
She also gifted us the calligraphy brushes we used! They probably cost more than the amount we paid for the class! Everyone here is so nice!