Cultural Relations

We finished the classroom portion of our Inter-Cultural relations course here. It is part of the mandatory Indoctrination class that everyone, sailors, dependants, and civilian workers, must attend when arriving in Japan.

Tomorrow we go on our field trip and see the surrounding area. We are excited to see things in the area, such as tourist attractions, shopping malls, train stations, and similar things. Its only a small snippet of the things that are available to us, most of which we have found already in our off-base travels, but its something to do and we arent trapped in a classroom all day.

We went to dinner tonight with an officer and her family who met me and another sailor who is checking into the Essex. We got a good tour of the area from her husband, who is a veteran also, and went to dinner at a japanese barbeque restaurant. It was awesome. They bring you a big tray of raw meat, beef, pork, and I'm not talking just sirloin bits either. I had heart, stomach, innards (unknown inside parts?), squid, cabbage, eggplant, and other various things. The really cool part is, you cook each item yourself, a task no American restaurant would allow due to liability. There is a big gas grill built into the table and you lay your meats and veggies on it and cook and eat and cook and eat. The pieces are small so they cook fast, you place them on your rice bowl and then chow down.

We will take lots of pictures tomorrow, and maybe I'll figure out how to post some on here, hehe.

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Well, I felt my first real loyalty to this place and its people today.

I was having breakfast, and I observed some civilians, I imagine they were contractors or GS's, in the restaurant, and in my opinion, they were incredibly rude to the Japanese waiter. They didn't do anything purposeful, they were just uninformed and ignorant.

They came into the Harbor View Club with a large group and informed a waiter they had a group of nine coming. He of course immediately proceeded to go set up an area for them so they could sit together, as they are awesome, as I've mentioned before. The group however, disregarded his efforts completely and just sat at two tables near my wife and I.

I had a hard time not standing up and approaching the civilian I observed to be in charge and informing him of their error. As I have not been here long, I am not about to make waves of this size quite yet, but if I saw something like this six months to a year from now, stand by.

I can definitely am feeling attached here, and I like it, but don't worry mom, I still plan to come home after this tour.