Revisiting Japan

Merv on the Costa as 'Mr Pizza!'

On an overcast chilly morning we sorted out my recipes which until now they have been lovingly collected with no home of their own, just stored in a large acrylic recipe holder.  Merv sorted them into;  dinners, desserts, pizzas (we have an electric pizza oven), soups and miscellaneous.  He did a good job of sorting and they were given new folders as homes.  Merv chose a few recipes for me to cook, but not today!  Merv had been asked by the OT at the HD social group to bring a photo next Wednesday of a place he has travelled to.  I dug out the large group photos of us taken in China, one at the Forbidden City and the other at Juyongguan Great Wall.  This started a sequence of events finishing with me foraging for the diary I had kept throughout our Japan/China trip.  We had flown from Perth to Shangai via, Hong Kong in late August 2009.  We boarded a small Costa cruise ship to Japan from Shangai for a six day cruise stopping only at Nagasaki and Fukuoka ports.  As I read the entry for each day of the cruise, memories came flooding back.  The Costa is an Italian ship and offered both Italian and Asian menus.  One of my first orders was Chinese pasta which was presented as a plate of worm-like pasta topped with a couple of mushrooms.  I ate the mushrooms! Merv played it safe always ordering Italian while I ventured outside my comfort zone and tried true Asian food.  No Aussie-Chinese foods here.  It was a real eye opener when I realised many Chinese meals in Australian are created for the Aussie palate!  No fried rice as we know it and the spring rolls were filled with bean curd and not vegetables as we had hoped.  By the time we left China a month later we were both enjoying a daily bean curd dumpling!  We laughed as we read about Merv pretending to be 'Mr Pizza' during one of the many evening entertainment sessions at one of the bars.  He had to pretend to make pizza, sing and dance with the applause of the audience deciding the winner.  He didn't win the contest but we both had a lot of fun!

Enjoying dessert at Japanese Maccas

 Kimono clad girls in Nagasaki shopping mall 
providing entertainment