Memorial Day Onigiri Party

Following Haruka's lead (amd with lots of her help), we hosted an onigiri party on Memorial Day.  Onigiri is a Japanese rice ball that rivals the American sandwich.  Making onigiri takes some practice, but the concept is pretty simple.  First, you put a piece of saran wrap on your hand, put some white rice on it, add some filling and then form a ball or triangle out of the rice around the filling.  Finally, you can sprinkle salty sesame seeds or wrap some nori (seaweed) around the rice ball.  Traditionally, onigiri are filled with sour plums or some kind of salty seaweed or fish.

Haruka preparing rice

At our party, we provided all of the ingredients and everyone had to make their own onigiri.  We had some plums, seaweed, salmon, spicy tuna, and then some not so traditional fillings such as Spam, peppered pork, cucumbers, corned beef hash, avocado, and pickled radish.

Spicy fish ovaries

Some ingredients

 

 

Random thoughts

There isn't too much to report these days so we thought we would post some random images from the past few weeks. Kris' amphipods had babies, you can see two of the little guys below. 

1 day old leucomorphs

 

We came across these classy panties for men and thought they were worth sharing. 

"Mens Beauty Briefs"

Kris is teaching an amphipod taxonomy workshop this week.  It is going very well and all of the participants are really excited to learn about amphipods!

Workshop participants identifying amphipods

 Below is a sign we saw while driving...it is a bit small, but the drawing is of a bald man holding up two fists like he is angry at the world...no one is sure what this sign means.  It only says the name of a man on it. Rainy season is here and the snails are invading



Seeyalaterbye.

Under the sea

Nothing too exciting has been going on here.  We have both been working a lot, but we've managed to fit in some diving.

We dove near Tengan River with Masaru and Daisuke and found some neat critters, including this hermit crab and the shrimp in the sponge below.

Nate found an empty giant clam shell that he took back for a friend who has been wanting one. 

 The local fisherman laughed at him for bringing an empty shell back. We told them we were hungry, so we ate the clam underwater.

A group of us from the lab did some Nitrox diving with Taku, seen below using his rebreather.

  

Ctrl + click on this photo...it is really cool.

On the nitrox dives we were at 25-35 m depth (~80-115 feet) and saw an incredibly diverse coral reef with a lot of different live corals, cool tube worms, ascidians, and sponges.

The ascent from these deep dives was very blue.

We found a handmade Ryukyus glass set of glasses at the recycle shop and bought them to bring back to the states with us.  That shit made us happy.

The last supper

Yesterday we had the last supper with Obuchi-san. The General is leaving Okinawa for his new job in Kochi, on mainland Japan.


We made Saag chicken (Spinach chicken curry) and Nate's split pea soup and had a lot of fun!

Miyakojima

Kris and Megumi took a quick trip to Miyakojima, an island between Okinawa and Ishigaki. It is a very beautiful island with natural beaches and lots of live coral.




Megumi's friend Hikaru lives on the island so we had lots of great company on our trip!



The weather was great the first day, but then a mini-typhoon came along, so we did a lot of sightseeing and not so much diving. What we did see in the ocean was really beautiful.




We went to a family-run sugar cane factory, which has changed my view of sugar forever. We watched this family (four generations) make brown sugar from the liquid in harvested sugar cane. After the cane is dried in the road (literally spread out on the road), it is used to fuel the fire to heat the liquid sugar. The liquid is then cooked and moved between vats until it becomes very thick. Then it is stirred and dried to become what we know as brown sugar.



These piles of sugar are then hand scooped into plastic bags,weighed, and sealed. The neighbors can smell when the sugar is ready and come to buy some. The rest is sent to the market to sell. The video below shows one part in the sugar making process.

On the road again

Kris went to a biodiversity workshop in Singapore where she helped with collecting and identifying amphipods for the survey. The workshop was on Pulau Ubin, a small island on the north side of Singapore. Below is a photo of a aquaculture house that are all around the island. The next photo is of our "sorting center" at the resort we were staying at for the workshop.



Something I found very interesting in Singapore is the coffee in a bag instead of in cups. I guess it is more convenient to carry multiple bags than cups. There was a pond at the resort that had many sting rays and these trevali swimming around.



Below is a photo of the take from a trawl that we pulled in and a photo of a mud lobster mound that we were digging up for crabs and lobsters.



On an off day, I went to the Singapore zoo, which was really a great zoo. They have free ranging orangutangs that are literally moving along these ropes just above your head. It was really crazy to be so close to a huge orangutang! They have many different primates including the proboscis monkey below.



While walking through the zoo, these elephants were walking along the path only 5 feet away from me. They were surrounded by trainers, but it was still very surreal!




After being home from Singapore for a day, Nate, Kris, Masaru, and Javier packed up Masaru's van (see photo below) to take the ferry over to Zamami Island for three days.



It is mating season for humpback whales at Zamami and the surrounding islands, but this is the only whale we saw on the trip when coming into port. In the summer, many sea turtles nest on Zamami beaches, so there are signs up to protect them.



We bought this tent at a recycle shop to camp on Zamami...and it only took the four of us an hour to put it up! It was quite roomy and all four of us slept very well in it.



We drove around looking for suitable diving entry points and this was not one of them. At night we built a fire in the "kitchen area" as fires are not allowed anywhere else on the island.



Below is a photo of Nate near one of the giant coral heads we saw while diving and a photo of the reef on one of our dives. We heard several whales while in the water although we never saw one.



We got a lot of amphipods from sponges and ascidians on our second dive including the two circled in the photo below. (If you control-click on the photo you may be able to see them.)



The video below shows a squid we collected in the trawl in Singapore changing colors.