katsuura

Sunday was spent exploring the port area of Katsuura. There is a large maguro (tuna) market, which boasts the largest catches of maguro in Japan. You can see rows upon rows of maguro in the early morning. Since we missed this, I got the photo off of their site.

There were many vendors selling freshly caught maguro.







As well as dried ika (squid).

And as you walked around the shopping arcade, it was decorated festively with maguro cut-outs.

Many fishermen were busy fixing their nets or chatting with their friends.







And many boats had returned to the harbor.





We were able to buy a tekkadon for Satoshi's lunch freshly made with part of the morning maguro catch. Tekkadon is sushi rice (vinegared rice) with slices of raw tuna on top.

My lunch was meharizushi, a local favorite. Large leaves of takana (Chinese mustard cabbage) are salted, rinsed, then used to wrap up rice balls.

It was a nice lunch on the train as we made our way back to Osaka.

p.s. I wanted to also show you some of the omiyage (souvenirs) that we picked up for ourselves.

Maguro which is seasoned and cooked with ginger is a nice pupu (appetizer) or great side dish. I put the smaller bits into Satoshi's musubi the other day.

We also got two kinds of ume. One from Godaikan and one from a street vendor near Sandanbeki.

Hope you enjoyed our adventure as much as we did.

nakanoshima

After our wonderful tour, we rode a ferry to an island in the middle of the Katsuura port to our hotel, Nakanoshima (which means the island in the middle).

This hotel is built around a mountain, so to get to different parts of the hotel, you sometimes need to go a-r-o-u-n-d.

The first thing when we did after we checked in was go to take a look at their observation deck. It was a 450m walk up, down and around on a trail to the top of the island. Here you can see the Bay of Katsuura. The islands in the bay are called Kii-Matsushima because it resembles the islands in Matsushima Bay in Sendai.

Also at the top is a little area with an ashiyu (foot bath), here you can take your shoes off and soak in the hot, sulfur smelling water. They also had little stones sticking up so that you could stand up and press on different pressure points on your feet.

From the top of the hotel you could see the men's rotenburo (outdoor bath). Luckily (or unluckily) no one was in there at the time. The women's rotenburo is covered by the corner of the building. When I was in the outdoor bath I had to duck down quickly as a boat passed right in front! Yipes!

In one of the lobby areas, they had a model of the whaling boats that were used to catch whales. Several of these boats would corral around the whale as someone harpooned it. The painting in the background shows the fishermen harpooning a whale.

This was our view from our room. It was also the parking area for the hotel's boats.

Dinner was again a kaiseki meal, but after the delicious meal we had at Godaikan, this wasn't anything special, in fact, everything had been put out way before, so most items were cold.