After the nice sunset of the first evening on our trip to Ishigaki Island in the most southern reaches of Japan, in the East China Sea, we returned to the hotel for dinner, giving the Japanese-style restaurant a try. Ishigaki Island is known for its beef, so we wanted to try that.

The steak was okay, but after the steak we had on our day trip to Awaji Island a month ago, everything else will forever fall short. I wanted to write about it at the time, but what can I say? Words are impossible. In your wildest dreamland fantasies [...]

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Here's the answer to the linguistic quiz from the other day...

As Erik Anderson guessed, "Rough Tea" is from 「ラフティー」  (rafuti), a cubed pork disk....

Fumie's mom had made this before, but I never knew what it was called. Even Fumie was only vaguely familiar with the name. Here's a recipe: ラフティー(豚の角煮).

The "is easily boiled" translates better to "lightly boiled".

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On the first day of our trip to Ishigaki Island (southern Japan), between our arrival and stopping for the sunset, we drove around on the island a bit. Driving on a pretty rough road that I thought took us to the top of a mountain, it turns out that it eventually just petered out into nothing (where "nothing" is defined as "dense, unpenetrable mountain forest").

But before retreating all the way, I stopped to take a picture of a huge fern. I should have taken something to show the scale, but the width of the whole thing, seen in the [...]

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After arriving to Ishigaki Island on the first day of our short Golden-Week vacation, we puttered around the island a bit, and ended up at Oganzaki (御神崎) in the north-west corner of the island. In checking photos on Google Earth prior to the visit, it seemed like it should provide a nice sunset, and when I mentioned it to Fumie, she said she'd had it on her list as well, from reading the guidebooks.

It's not much more than a small lighthouse and a small park...

Beyond the park area the adventurous can take paths out onto the rocks and [...]

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I mentioned in my previous post that our hotel on Ishigaki Island in the far south of Japan had only "okay" food. However, their food sometimes offered me, as an English speaker, a bit of extra entertainment.

The label above was on one of the items in the breakfast buffet. I redacted out the name of the dish in Japanese. Can you guess what the original Japanese was?

Here are two hints:

It was clear from my overall experience at the hotel that they used machine translation (that is, computer non-human translation) for their menus. One menu had "Popsicle" as [...]
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