Okayama With Our New Favorite Jersey Girl

Shelly is a peach. She's a mother of three, an English teacher, a daughter of the Garden State and an all around hoot. We were treated to an apartment with a kitchen in the same block as her place. She normally uses the space to teach her classes, but she had few during our time there so we pretty much had it all to ourselves. It was lovely. I made breakfast every morning, drank strong black coffee and chilled.

On our first night there, Shelly invited us up to her home for dinner with her family. Her husband Akira, a Japanese native, was still at work but her kids, Masuru, Meg and Nozomi were in attendance as well as her neighbor, Yoko. The warmth of family mixed with the sounds and smells from her kitchen felt like home and the caprese salad and pasta with which she plied us brought us closer to Philly than we'd been since landing in Japan.

Next day, onsen! Unlike our Gero experience which was rather a bucolic affair, the baths we found in Okayama were more akin to a health club with large sprawling tiled spaces, mineral baths of every kind, many jacuzzis whose jets focused on different body parts, one hot and one really hot sauna, an outdoor area and a restaurant to fill your post soak nutritional needs. As Shelly had invited us to dine with her family once again and join in her son Mas's birthday eve celebration, we opted to forgo the bathhouse food that day.

Mexican food, a rare treat for a Japanese family, was the fare that night. We set up shop in our apartment being that our kitchen and dining areas were more conducive to accommodating 10 or so guests than her own. While Davida and I prepared pineapple salsa and guacamole, following an hours long search on bikes for the somewhat specialty ingredients, Shelly made tacos, bean salad and prepped all the toppings needed to complete our exotic repast. We ate with gusto late into the night and made loose plans to sing karaoke the next evening. It should not be omitted that Davida's guacamole was among the best Shelly had ever tasted.

We woke up the next morning groggy from the previous evening's south of the border fiesta. In spite of this, I managed to produce an adequate breakfast comprised of the leftovers. After several pots of coffee and an afternoon spent deciding our next destination, it was time to accompany Shelly and Mas to the music store downtown, but not before another delicious bowl of spicy ramen. The order of business was to restring one of his two beater guitars, creating my first available southpaw sixstring since leaving Philadelphia. And boy, was I in for a treat. Not two feet into the store, I spotted four left handed guitars on display. The proprietor, a Japanese Ron Wood, happily set me up on a stool in the back and let me play to my heart's content, interrupting a talented middle-aged ukulele player who graciously gave up his spot to listen to me play. As I strummed away thoughtlessly, he enthusiastically espoused my prowess as Guitar Sensei, imploring me to play Billy Joel, Harry Connick Jr. or the Beatles. And damn, that man could carry a tune. I banged out 'Only the Good Die Young', but the chords were nearly inaudible as the man's Freddy Mercuryesque vocal assault rattled the nearby snare drums. Long story short, I got my strings, and as a bonus, was treated by the shop owner to a demonstration of a sanshin, best described as a three-stringed Okinawan dulcimer.

Evening came, onsen! Seriously, it quickly becomes an addiction. This time some of the family came along. It was helpful to have Masuru as a buddy to translate signs for me, and the fact that we were in our birthday suits on his birthday seemed somehow appropriate. I soaked, steamed and enjoyed the ritual bathing with a greater appreciation for the manifold styles of water, their differing chemical components and the relative benefits of each.

Then the karaoke. Shelly chaperoned me and Davida to one of her favorite haunts, The Pinball. This establishment featured a drink named after our host which was suspiciously pink and composed of I don't know what besides sugar. After a few of those, we made our way to her karaoke spot where we heard a litany of American and Japanese pop numbers sung by heavily intoxicated Japanese men wearing expensive shoes and donning interesting and poofy hairstyles. I sang 'All Night Long' again but was met with a somewhat cooler reception than in Osaka. Everyone's a critic.

We zipped up the night, crashed and made our way to the train station the next day where, after exchanging hugs with our new friend and social director amid the deafening tones of a Japanese political nationalist bellowing his views from a loudspeaker, we boarded a train eastbound to Nagoya. Sayonara, Jersey Girl.
-Ken