Nathan's first Halloween

On Saturday, we took the train out to the Ikego housing annex again for a Halloween party at our friends Andy and Arick's house. Andy is a midwife and is my sponsor and she and her family have been amazingly helpful to us. They even offered to send their 12 year old son out to the main base at Yokosuka to meet us and guide us on the train system. They've really made us feel at home and part of the "Navy family".

Here is a picture of Nathan in a "Baby's first Halloween" onesie.

Here is a picture of him in his real Halloween outfit. Unfortunately we didn't feel like we could leave it on him for very long because he was probably burning up in it.

Here's a picture of the party hosts Andy and Arick. Their whole family (including their 12, 13, 14 year old boys) dressed up as Power Rangers and they have their downstairs bathroom decked out in Power Ranger figurines. The party preparations were pretty amazing. They had great chili and "sewer water" punch, brain pasta salad, cockroaches made of dates, jello shots, etc. There were mainly corpsmen and nurses and Andy's dive buddies, so I was a bit disappointed that I didn't get to meet more of the doctors from the hospital, but we still had a great time. Andy loves babies and spent a solid half hour with Nathan asleep on his chest.

The next day we just went off base in Yokosuka again to explore some more. We walked through a little indoor mall with tons of tiny shops including a 100 yen store (equivalent to our 99 cent store). We ended up stopping for lunch for our first sushi in Japan. It was a cute little restaurant with conveyor belt of options. I'm not very adventurous when it comes to food, but I did try squid (very chewy and almost synthetic looking) and salmon egg sushis. Charlie tried octopus shashimi. I had hot sake for the first time. There were little spigots to deliver hot water for your tea at each place setting and wet towels to wipe off at the beginning of the meal. One of the other customers, an older lady was fascinated by Nathan. You can kind of make out the characters of the menu on the wall (tan blocks) with the color-coded plates with different priced sushi items, but thankfully they also had a menu that translated the items for us as well.

Since arriving on base, our travel around base has been limited by either the 40 minute roundtrip shuttle or walking, so we ended up buying a bike on the way home. This will make getting around a lot easier. Don't get me wrong, the shuttle is great, but it can only travel between 8 and 40 km/hour. I guess the maximum speed limit in Japan is 80km/hr.