Merry Christmas from Okinawa!

We spent our Christmas this year at the Reimer house. The lab members had been planning to dress Nate up as Santa because of his giant beard. Unfortunately, Nate had to shave the beard for work, but they dressed him up anyway and he was a big hit!


The Reimers' neighbors joined the party for awhile, and Koharu, also dressed up, seemed to have the most fun.



We introduced Dirty Santa, which everyone seemed to enjoy. It got really interesting when Takuma took Jamie's present (a gift set of jelly desserts) from Maika (his 4 year old daughter). Don't worry, he shared them with her later. Afterwards, several people were entertained with making origami octopuses and a chocolate house, both of which were Dirty Santa presents.



Toward the end of the evening, the Santa beard got passed around.



All in all it was a very merry Christmas. Happy New Year!

Get a haircut and get a real job

The plan was for Nate to grow his beard for 10 months, longer than Alex's longest turkey beard, and to send it to Alex to mount on a hen. He made it 5 1/2 months before he had to get a haircut and a real job. Nate is now gainfully employed as a waiter at the Macaroni Grill on base.


Who knew one could get permission to work part time while here on a dependent visa? Not us. It was remarkably easy, considering Japanese paperwork, to get this permission.

In other news, we went to the Okinawa zoo this weekend. As always, we enjoyed the signs, particularly this one, that warns people that the tiger may pee on your head. The tiger is in a cage approximately 3 meters away, yet this apparently is still a problem.



There were lots of Raven-sized Okinawan fruit bats, which although we see them flying around at night, were really fun to watch while they were active. There are two videos at the end of the blog showing the bats climbing and one flipping itself over to pee! Very cool stuff.




We saw lots of other really neat animals, including a South American anteater with 30 cm long tongue! There were some very old tortoises, who were getting a bit frisky, and we even got to feed giraffes some leaves!



The weather is getting cool, but it's not as cold as last year. Hopefully it will stay this way. Merry Christmas!

4 years, Otsukaresama, and signs

It's hard to believe, but we've been married 4 years. To celebrate, we went to the White House for dinner. It is a French restaurant here on Okinawa.



The food was delicious, below are photos of the "amuse bouche" (seared tuna) and the appetizer (octopus in pumpkin sauce). We normally don't like octopus, but this was delicious! We followed this with some french bread, sirloin steak, coffee, and dessert.



After the East China Sea Workshop on Thursday and midterm presentation (for all of the lab students) we had an Otsukaresama/Welcome party. We have two new undergraduate members in the lab (hence the welcome party) and Otsukaresama means 'honorable tiredness' as Jamie says.



We had nabe (hot pot meal), sukiyaki (beef and vegetables dipped in raw egg), sashimi, and some other tasty dishes.



Below are some cool signs that we've seen recently. The animal signs are marking a construction zone.




And finally, to show you that we are still doing some work, a photo of an amphipod (female leucomorph with eggs) and a boxer crab (Lybia tesselata) that we collected today. The boxer
crab holds anemones on its claws (those white flower-looking things) and waves them around to defend itself from predators.
(See video below)

Nabe, Bata, and Namako

We had a nabe party this week with Obuchi-san, Megumi, and Sung-yin. Nabe is the word for "coooking pot" and refers to a meal cooked in the pot. We had simple Mizutaki, which is water, chicken, tofu, noodles, and lots of vegetables, including some really cool looking mushrooms.




For appetizers, we had sea cucumber sashimi (Namako) and teriyaki grasshoppers (Bata)!
The sea cucumbers just tasted like chewy sea water and the grasshoppers were very crunchy. They both tasted much better than they look.

Earthquakes!

Nate and I felt our first two earthquakes since moving to Okinawa today!

At noon today there were two 6.8 magnitude earthquakes a few minutes apart. It felt very surreal at first, we were both in different concrete buildings that were actually shaking. They were short and did not cause any damage that we know of.

Come to Japan!

In order to boost tourism, Japan is giving 10,000 free plane tickets to come visit Japan! Check out the link below:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2047477/Japan-offers-tourists-10-000-free-flights-bid-boost-ailing-tourism-industry.html

Happy Halloween!

We had a Halloween party again this year. Takuma and Yukari brought these fabulous pumpkins!





The costumes were very exciting, starting with the bearded lady and Jamie below. We had lots of tasty treats, including Frankenstein's fingers. We also had chicken and dumplings, tamales, smoked salmon dip, cheesecake, chocolate peanut butter tofu pie, pound cake, and homemade Okinawan donuts!



Maika and Seira had a lot of fun with the Halloween stickers they got. Most of them ended up on Seira's bottom or somewhere in the apartment.



Instead of pin the tail on the donkey, we played pin the glasses on Takuma. Dr. Jamie was having fun moving Takuma around after the blindfold was placed on the contestant.



We also played the wrap the mummy game, which was very exciting. There were some very well-wrapped mummies.


Costumes started evolving, operations were being done, and we started to bob for apples. Yukari was the smart one, who realized that we forgot to remove the stems of the apples and didn't even get wet bobbing for her apple.



Things got interesting after this, ending with a pyramid in the kitchen.