Lisa birthday japanese food and lost in Chinatown

July 11, 2012

Aloha auinapo (Good late night after midnight). I was very tired and fell asleep before 8pm. Just woke up and so am entering this in the beautiful cool of the night before I go back to sleep for a bit.

I woke this morning and headed to work early. Ann had meetings most of the day so we made a list of more in-depth information for me to search for and chart for the DVFR. I spent the morning in data land. I have consistently found problems with the DVFR data so I need to go to the paper copies and do some searching. I am also working on teasing out a new list of variables and cross-tabs. Things like did the victim ever try to leave? Were risk factors present? What were early signs that DV was present? Some of this may be in the paper copies and some may not. We are writing the report now and we have a lot of facts but we need the "why?" portion if it can be gleaned at all. Was there extreme jealousy? psychological coercion? drug use? mental illness? etc. If there are any trends to find that is what I am looking for. There may or may not be. I worked on this all day, before and after lunch. I sent up the charts in excel to auto-formulate so even if I have to tweak some data the charts will auto-change the percentages and whatnot easily. Thank god for Excel. (And for Jeff, the mad Excel guru, who should be the Excel function held-desk for the universe.)

For lunch Lisa drove us to Hinone Mizunoni. It was her birthday! I bought her lunch and had to strongarm the check away from her paying half.

I picture of Lisa, after I finally got her to stop ducking away from the camera. Sorry birthday girl but you're the special person today and get pictures taken! May each day of the next year be as delightful as your favorite moment of the past year!

 This was above our table. The dangling things are little stick people! I am sure it has some meaning but I don't know what. I tried not to think of the little paper people hung in effigy over my head throughout the meal.

I also had to take a picture of this. It is a condiment on the table just labeled "Sauce" in black on white letters. I figured that out thanks. WHAT TYPE of sauce I have no idea.

What an amazing place! The food was so delicious. We each ordered the Teishoku sizzling hamburger steak with demi glaze sauce. Lisa recommended it and it was out of this world delicious! The presentation was quite nice. I love the fact that things are in separate little dishes and not all thrown on a plate and sauces and juices blending. A this restaurant you get a 2-choice Teishoku, rice, miso soup, and a variety of pickles and other items. We both got the sizzling hamburger steak with demi glaze sauce and a special of the day menchi katsu (breaded hamburger steak patty). Lisa joked we were having 2 hamburger main dishes but they were both so different and so good. Very reasonable price of $12 for 2-choice Teishoku, rice, soup, and side dishes. This could have been shared but we were hungry and wanted to splurge.

Miso soup. SO GOOD. I learned the correct way to hold the bowl, stir with the chopsticks then sip the soup while occasionally eating a bit of the tofu, bean sprouts and cabbage shreds that are in the soup. To the left you can see a few of the pale pink pickled something that were on another little plate (forgot to get a picture by itself). I thought that was pickled ginger at first but it was not. I loved the pickled whatever!

 Eggplant. What looks like wrinkled in the eggplant skin in this photo are actually delicate knife slices for decorative purposes. I tasted this and it tasted fine but had the consistency of a veggie skin full of slime so I gleefully passed it on to Lisa who likes it and she was thrilled to pass on her little plate of pickled pink whatever that I just described above. She doesn't care for pickled and I'm not fond of eggplant slime so we were both happy.

 Pickled black seaweed with small shreds of some sort of veggie.

Kamadaki gohan rice. This is a way to prepare rice in a big pot not in a rice steamer. It was sticky and just perfect, not to hard and not too mushy.

 The sizzling hamburger steak with demi glaze sauce. The sunny side up egg cooks in the metal dish and is still cooking when it arrives at your table. The sauce is bubbling hot on arrival. There were two crisp raw green beans in the dish as an edible garnish and 3 chunks of potato. This was DELICIOUS. Seriously. The meat was super soft and was mixed with egg and breadcrumbs so it had the taste and consistency of a meatloaf with this unbelievably great sauce. The idea is to mix the egg yolk with some sauce and eat the meat, egg white and sauce and yolk in each bite with some rice. This mellows out the sauce a bit. I loved the rich tangy strong flavor of the sauce and prefered to eat the meat with the onions in the sauce in the dish, then they egg with the sauce and onions - then rice with the rest of the sauce and yolk.

This is the menchi katsu.It is a twice dipped in egg and panko breaded hamburger steak. It is not like a country fried steak from home. This is a very crispy panko thick breading over what is basically meatloaf. It was really good and completely different from the sizzling steak. I tried it with the sauce from my other dish, but it didn't taste nearly as good. It came with a cup of a brown sauce which was good. However, Lisa asked for tonkatsu sauce which was more tangy and sweet, which just made this perfect!

 Tea, which was very tasty. Not too strong or bitter. I am starting to drink all the hot teas here unsweetened because they are just super tasty and don't need the sugar.

After lunch we quickly went to Ward Center to pick up banana tapioca from this one vendor Lisa loves. I wasn't able to get a photo because we were in a hurry. They were out of the normal size servings but we were able to get small sample size servings. SO GOOD. It was a super creamy tapioca with chunks of apple banana. DELICIOUS. I want more :) While Lisa was getting the desserts (I couldn't convince her to let me pay for the $0.50 cent sample cups) I saw these cans of drinks displayed to show what was available. They had the normal soda offerings plus these two. NO IDEA how they taste since we weren't getting any. I'll have to hunt them down another time and try them - maybe when I come back for more banana tapioca!

Soy milk - an authentic Asian drink - made with Canadian soy beans. Anyone else find that humorous?

 What the hell is grass jelly? And it looks like cubes of jello? Is this like sucking jello through a straw? I am clueless. In fact, I am a bit scared. I need to try it because when am I EVER going to see such a thing again? I cannot even guess what this might taste like or resemble.

After that Lisa drove us to where her meeting was located by the main Capitol building. I walked a couple of blocks to catch the #3 bus back to work. Well.. . actually, I walked a couple of blocks and caught the bus, then realized I was going the wrong way! So I got off the bus. Then I realized the #3 going the other way didn't go down that street. So I was hiking around Chinatown trying to figure out where to get back on the bus! I figured it out after walking about 6 more blocks through all Chinatown. I wasn't shopping so don't think this was a pleasure jaunt. I definitely need to go back to Chinatown some other time though. I didn't take pictures because I looked enough like a clueless haule (Hawaiian for white person/caucasian) tourist already. I did get some interesting pictures near the Palace while downtown. The first is some sort of eternal flame.

So I made it back to work after a nice lunch and a longer time of being lost. I worked late to make up the time so I didn't leave till almost 5:30. It was really fine though. I did my 8 hours, had a wonderful lunch and a good walk. Plus I had figured out how to overcome a block I had with a chart I was creating. So I was walking out of the building and I saw this framed document. I have seen it before but not posed it on the blog. Apparently it is the norm to have a building blessed here and to post somewhere in plain view the document proving it was blessed. The building is old and people here are very sensitive about honoring spirits. Spirits of people, places, or things. I would say superstitious but that word has a negative connotation. It is just a different culture completely here. For a state government building to post a document that they had the building blessed at home would probably cause an uproar. Here, it is not only normal but even expected. From talking to work folks it seems the uproar would come if it wasn't done - though what religion blesses it doesn't seem to matter. People are much more tolerant here now of accepting people's choice of religion and not hating others. They hold blessing ceremonies here for everything though. In the newspaper a week ago I saw an article announcing a special event where people could bring their pets to be blessed. I can think of a little orange terror at home who might need to be blessed - little devil that she is.

My plan was to go to the zoo for the music tonight but after walking about 12 blocks total my ankle needed a break. I proceeded to come home and get settled, had a few minute video chat with Scott, then lay down to read the rest of Typhoid Mary. I think I read a whole page before falling asleep around 7ish. I was up till almost 2:30am last night. Papa George had given me a diet coke with lime to try since Lisa likes those. It actually tasted good so I drank most of it and didn't stop to think that though it was diet it was still CAFFEINATED. I mainly drink water here. I have my coffee milk most mornings though occasionally tea instead. I sometimes have tea in the afternoon but it is usually green tea or another decaf type. So this caffeine that late in the evening kept me up till the wee hours. Suffice to say I was exhausted by 7pm.

So I woke at a little after midnight, have now posted about my interesting day, and am going back to sleep. I hope everyone is having a wonderful sleep, morning, day or whatever time it may be there.

Malama pono, (Take care)
~Melissa