Written by Dave

Rest day in Akune

Before I say much about today, I need to report that I managed to get all four of our brakes working again yesterday afternoon. I was afraid I didn’t bring enough brake pads with us on the trip, which would have been silly after reading Mart’s nearly daily saga of searching for brake pads while he and Elsp (our friends from Wales) were touring South America. We are on such a short trip I didn’t think we could wear through working pads… Anyway, we have one more spare set and no more massive passes to descend. We’ll get back to Osaka without chasing bike shops – phew.

We opted for the Iwashi Building brekkie this morning and no prizes for guessing, we had sardines. In fact we had two each. One that had been dried for 72 hours and one that had only been dried for 2 hours. The 72 hour fish was tiny but super flavourful and gained flavour the longer you had it in your mouth (it was a bit chewy). We are having the same thing for brekkie tomorrow. And maybe now, we won’t take a package of fish onwards. While very tasty, that may cover our annual quota for dried fish.

We spent the morning planning the route forward – phew that’s a relief. Now Nancy can send an itinerary to her Fukuoka based Japanese teacher – we hope to meet up with her somehow.

More about Iwashi is worth discussing as well. As I mentioned yesterday, Iwashi translates to sardine. The pronunciation is E (as in the e sound in bee) –WA –SHE, E–WA–SHE. The Japanese sound for “i” is “ee”, not “eye” or “eh”. As an English speaker, you will be forgiven for saying (as I did for weeks) “ I-WASH-I” not “E-WA-SHE”.  The Wa and the SH are not pronounced together. And while I-WASH-I makes some sense, we are talking about fish, not bathing. Ok, got it, all together now “E-WA-SHE”.  Great, now you can order sardines next time you eat Japanese. Good luck. (Senior editor’s note – I tried to fix this paragraph so it made some semblance of sense but after some effort I gave up.  Just treat it as more of Dave’s rambling and let your eyes quickly pass by it.)

Based on a recommendation of the good folks at Iwashi, we hit a local sushi restaurant for lunch. The menu was cursive Japanese and no one spoke English. Nancy did great, getting us two delicious meals. The oddest part of lunch was the tables – they had plexiglass shields on stands set-up in the middle of the table so that Nancy and I wouldn’t give each other germs, I guess. Here in Japan there is heaps more mask wearing than in the USA. They are generally more compliant as a culture and pre-covid people who were sick already wore masks in public. So, now, most stores, shops and restaurants all staff are wearing masks. We hardly ever wear ours – probably a faux pas, but we are mostly interacting with people when we are going to eat so it’s a bit hard.

We wandered a bit this afternoon, found a temple, the port and few other things to look at. Japan is still really quirky to us. At the port, we found a pile of old, disused fishing nets, complete with floats. Even the old piles didn’t seem to have glass floats. Not sure when they quit using them over here but if you find one on the west coast of the USA, hang on to it.

Today while out I finally snapped a street sign photo that’s been bugging me. If you look at the photo below, you’d probably thinking “yield” as it does have the universal shape of yield. Nope, that’s a stop sign. Ok, now you’re thinking that you’re safe for driving in Japan. Well, no, the yield sign here is exactly the same shape as the stop sign, so you have to learn the Japanese words and read them quick. Or you can just drive like most Japanese and not bother with either, go, look, stop seems to work for them. We ride under the other universal rule that bikes yield to pretty much everything all the time – it’s just safer.

After our big lunch we are having dinner in the hostel – conbini purchased 1-2-3 onigiri and some salad. Tomorrow we head toward a few days on the Amukusa Islands. We’ll be taking our 7^th ferry tomorrow. Nancy and her anti-seasick bands have been doing great, even the other day when ran to the ferry last minute. She wasn’t keen to put an offer in on those fine boats in the harbor today so maybe we’ll give the bands a few more tests…