back in Manila

Back to Manila, sprawling city with lots of people. Friendly people! With really great English (one of the PI's national languages). I learned a few phrases of Tagalog but even Tagalog is only one of the many languages and is not spoken everywhere.  

 Sewer wanted.

 Vegetarian food was kind of hard to come by in PI (most of the food is very meaty). However, one place we found was the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital cafeteria. A weird place to eat on vacation, I know, and kinda hard to find, but I was really happy once we did. The entire cafeteria is vegetarian, and included many veg versions of local dishes. Score!

Manila, you are pretty. 

Boracay

We decided to try Boracay, from reading the tourism bureau's recommendations as the place that locals favor. We arrived to find that this is decidedly a resort island, with a few grand hotels and lots of touristy restaurants. While some (not all) parts of the island were sanitized and resort-y, I did appreciate the availability of food options.

An aside: I don't like pretending that I'm not a tourist when I am. When I'm traveling I try to give my money to people who will notice it and use it in their local economy, just like I do at home. I try not to use big international chains especially when I travel. But I am still a tourist and a stranger and someone who is not fluent in the language and culture. I try hard to be thoughtful and have a low impact and considerate of others and mindful of my surroundings, but the fact remains that I am a relatively privileged person with the means to travel. I know there is a pretentious notion against being a tourist, of being a "traveler" instead and hating on other people who have the gall to visit some secret place that the traveler feels they are the first outsider to have ever visited. Suck it up. If you don't actually live there, if you are not from a place, if you are visiting not because of work but because you have the relative freedom and money to travel to somewhere you don't live, you are a damn tourist. Fine, don't be a loud obnoxious person in Tevas and Bermuda shorts, but you are not a special snowflake. Be kind and learn things and get over yourselves.

Boracay is just beautiful. Beaches, sand, a few restaurants, a few moto-taxis, but it's not over the top. There are plenty of places to get away with just a short taxi ride. 

All I wanted to do was drink calamansi juice.

Lots of boats on the clear water.

 Grilled vegetable sandwich at one of the cafes in town.

Beach treasures

Toilets are euphemistically known as "comfort rooms" in the PI.

This is what it felt like. 

soy milk story

Little flavored soy milk boxes are common in Japan, easy to find in supermarkets and drug stores for about 90yen a pop. I'm determined to try them all. This is an incomplete list.

Banana

Coffee

Annin (apricot pit)

Fruit mix

Grapefruit

Cocoa

Kinako (roasted soy powder)

Vanilla

Almond

Strawberry

Black sesame

Yuzu

Black tea

Sesame honey

Sweet red bean soup

Roasted sweet potato

Chestnut

Vanilla ice cream

mo' mayo

It's a mayonnaise graduation. I had earlier spouted the virtues of this nice, vegan albeit expensive soy mayo. But now! A new vegan mayonnaise has come over the horizon!

Enter:

卵使わず作りましたマヨドレ
(Mayo dressing made without eggs.)
http://www.nisshin-oillio.com/goods/mayodore/index.shtml

At my local grocery, this dude scans for a mere 288 yen. An almost 500 yen savings compared to its competitor. And it is very nice. It's made by a mainstream company which should make it pretty easy to find.

No longer do I have to shell out mad bux nor import Nayonnaise in my suitcase.  Hurrah!

a visit to the pumpkin patch

My sis wanted to take all of our child-friends to the pumpkin patch (she's a very cool fake aunt) so I found a groupon to Lee Farms and off we went.

It was a fine fall day.

There were lots of things to entertain the kiddos in addition to squash, so as they powered from hay maze to barn slide I snacked on a caramel apple and listened to a bard doing Jake Johnson and Bob Marley covers out of the corner of my ear.

The pumpkins were a bit expensive, and while I truly want to support small farms, 10x the price of the grocery store is a little hard to swallow. Still, a good time was had. (Faux) country living!

ethiopian delish

Vegansaurus used my photo for one of their posts!

Mmmm Ethiopian food. I ate this with Cory.

Angel Auction at What the Dickens

The lovely folks at What the Dickens in Ebisu hosted our Angel Auction last weekend, where volunteers put their professional services up for bid. On the block were marital arts lessons, Indian cooking and piano lessons, a tour of the German embassy & meeting with the ambassador, and much more.

Photo by Jennifer Julien

WTD is a great spot even when they're not raising money for a cause, with free live music most nights. They also have nice food - in additon to the standard British pub fare like meat pies and fish & chips, they also have veggie offerings like a cheese & tomato sandwich, hummus, some kind of quiche, and other stuff that the chef dreams up. Plus the whole place is dark and woody with cozy corners and feels like something in Diagon Alley.

Noah Style

On our last day on the island, we had the rental til the mid afternoon and the flight took off in the early evening. Time for a shop and a stroll and a lingering lunch.

Noah Style is in a residental area near Shuri Castle, up a hill in a modest neighborhood. In fact, the cafe is a pretty converted house.

Inside, there is a tiny clothing store with things made from soft natural and organic cotton, and another area selling organic vegetables and other goodies like house-made sweets and enviromentally friendly laundry soap.

The menu offers a few carefully crafted options - soups, sandwiches, plate lunches chock full of color, and the daily special, which we got. It had 11 kinds of food, with brown rice and organic coffee. Such vegetables as beets, urizun-mame (winged beans), and hijiki seaweed. It was all followed with a tiny lovely sliver of cake made from brown sugar and nut butter.

N was inspired by this lunch and bought some kuruma-fu as soon as we got home and made a stunning dinner for us.

Out the back patio, we found several bedraggled bunnies hopping around the garden, and a large tortoise in repose under the deck.

A definite recommendation for people who love delicious wholesome food, lovingly prepared and artfully presented.

Onna-son and rocking at the Casbah

The viewpoint at Cape Manza in Onna-son is fetching, with green expanses leading to cliffs plunging into the blue. After gazing at the spray for awhile, I found that there was a geocache less than a kilometer away, and genius that I am, insisted that we strike out across the rocks to find it. Alas, though I am a Capricorn I am not a billy goat and we were soon thwarted by the sharp steep rocks and our ill-chosen footwear. We decided to try again from a less precipitous approach, stopping at the souvenir stand to buy some かりゆし.

This time we were able to hone in on the cache zone. Just a bit down the road, the beach was secluded and completely absent of the day trippers who were goggling at the sea just a few hundred meters away. Huge jutting rocks formed caves and we searched for the cache. Along the way we made the acquaintance of a cat who seemed to live in or near the caves, as she kept popping out of holes and perching on different boulders.

We never did find the cache, but in the way of the best cache spots, it didn't matter that much. We got to hang out on a beautiful lonely beach and had it all to ourselves. Unfortunately, N waded into the water with his phone in his pocket and lost all the pictures of that place.

On the way back to Naha, we stopped in Okinawa City for some grub.

Tucked in a decaying city center in a deserted shopping arcade, the unlikeliest cafe and shop waits like a soft pearly pebble gleaming in the gravel.

Vegan junk deli (Rock the) Casbah!

Buffet style weigh and pay, complete with skull and crossbones.

I'll have a little of everything, thanks.

sata-an-dagi and other delights

Thursday morning we gorged on the free breakfast and then picked up the rental car, a boxy little "eco" car (I think it was a Daihatsu Tanto) that had a feature called eco-drive that would cut the engine off and turn it back over seemingly at random. Northward! Onna-son (恩納村 - the "mura" character is pronounced "son" in Okinawa) looks far away on the map but in reality is only a few dozen kilometers and an hour's drive up the coast. There, we went to a "secret" beach recommended to us by a friend who grew up on Oki - beautiful, clean, and deserted.

Who's that asshole on the phone?

On the way back it was still early, so we stopped at Ryukyu Mura, a recreation of a traditional village. The ratty shisa dolls were cool and the pottery factory was rather interesting, but the best part was the live music offered, both in the main atrium adjacent to the food court, and by a guy casually plucking a san-shin and lounging in the doorway to one of the huts. He later came onstage and did a wonderful set, including an Okinawan language version of 上を向いて歩こう, aka The Sukiyaki Song.

He has a youtube channel!
Just north of Naha we stopped in Chatan, at the "American Village", which has a lot of restaurants. We poked our head into a Thai place and I was pleased to find a big fat vegetarian advertisement on the front window. Jai Thai's menu has two pages catering to vegetarians, and they can also make vegan dishes.

Returning to Naha, we hit up Makishi Market, the warren of shops and alleys in central city, starting just off Kokusai-dori. There are stray cats there, as everywhere else on the island. In addition to the trinkets and vegetable sellers and butchers, there are a few vendors hawking freshly-made sata-an-dangi, the local doughnut-style fried goodness in an array of native flavors. My Oki-raised friend has requested the purple-hued beni-imo (taro) ones, and we tried those out - yum. My favorite was the coconut, but the brown sugar, mango, and sesame ones were delicious too. Sata-an-dangi is Okinawan language, but the word sata means sugar, or sato in Japanese. Even though I couldn't understand the native language, I did notice that some words are similar like this.

In Makishi market

Back to the strays for a minute. There are SO MANY STRAYS all over Okinawa. They are a much more common here than on the mainland. Breeding seems to go almost unchecked. There are a lot more stray dogs, too, though they aren't around quite as much as the cats. There is a great organization called Doggies Inc. that works there trying to alleviate animal suffering. Mainly, they pull animals out of Ozato animal control, which is a high-kill shelter where many many strays end up. They then vet and re-home the animals. They do mostly deal with dogs, but they help cats too.  They are a registered non-profit in the US, and they do really good work. I will be transporting a dog to a new forever home in the States for them next month. Check them out!

めんそーれOkinawa

Shisa, the Okinawan lion-dog creature, decorates many houses.

Mensore means welcome in uchinaaguchi, a native Okinawan tongue. It's one of the most common native words a tourist will see around the island, which mostly, at least in the large commerce areas, runs on mainland Japanese.
This was my third time in the Ryukyu Kingdom, the first when I was a kid and the second two years ago. Again, Skymark was the cheapest deal I could find on a flight. Thankfully, no needy seatmates were in residence this time around.

Body-shaming freebie at the hotel

I looked into staying at the place I stayed last time, but the hostel has changed hands and a double now costs about the same as a cheap business hotel - except the hotel has the benefit of a private bathroom. We ended up getting a Toyoko Inn club card (¥1000-¥1500) because at a few hundred yen discount per night for five nights, it paid for itself. In addition to the discount, you get a free night's stay for every ten. Since the card is for life, it also saves me the hassle, at this hotel at least, of being asked for my passport. I always refuse to provide it (I don't travel with my passport domestically, and guests who are assumed to be Japanese are not usually asked for ID), but it saves me the whole refusal song and dance agitation. Getting worked up less often is good.

So after arriving late at night, cabbing to the hotel, and crashing out, we spent the first day in Naha city riding the monorail and checking out the city. At Shuri station, we found the cleverly named 35 coffee, and when I saw they were offering iced coffee for only 100 yen, we got one. 35 in Japanese is san-go, which in a homonym for sango/coral (珊瑚). This coffee company spends a portion of its proceeds preserving coral reefs in Okinawa.

We hit up Vegi Cafe Shanti for lunch, a beautiful little vegetarian cafe offering Nepalese-style food. Some of their sales go to building a school in Nepal. Yum!

These ladies are doing a tea-gathering dance.

We had both been to Shuri Castle before, but walked around the grounds anyway and got there just in time for a Ryukyuan dance performance! We got to see four traditional dances from various aspects of Ryukyu culture, from the courts to the farms. I love the whistling and chanting that goes along with Okinawan traditional music!

View from Shuri castle

On the way back to the monorail station, I spotted this storefront and we stopped, intrigued. NPO Agora is a non-profit dedicated to helping those with developmental disabilities, especially those with mental disabilities. Here they have a cafe and social space, and also sell arts and crafts made by their members. We bought some jewelry. This day left me with the impression that Oki has a higher than average level of do-gooders/socially conscious people.

We also hit the prefectural museum, which has both art and history wings. We chose the history museum, and learned about both the natural and folk history of the island and the archipelago(s). Worth it!