18/7 Claire - Dinner with Miyake

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Originally uploaded by blenkers

Dinner was a fish that had been caught by the young woman earlier that morning. It was sea bream served with salad with a second course of burger covered in mustard sauce (?) with rice. The fish was the best fish I have ever tasted. The odd thing about dinner was that Miyake-san, and the young couple (who it turns out weren’t a couple but guests) served our meal. Miyake-san insisted the younger man sit with us while we ate our fish. He looked more uncomfortable than us but we tried to ask him why he had been asked to stay - his English was as good as our Japanese. It turned out he’d been told to stay to practice his English but Ian and I are crap teachers as we don’t know the Japanese translations for anything. So we all just continued to say things and look confused at each other.

Miyake-san and the two younger guests all returned back to our room dining area to chat. The young girl had excellent English and Miyake-san broken English. He had lived in France for a lot of years so French was his second language. He had also learnt the French way of loving French wine. In fact, I would go as far as to say he’d been loving his French wine quite a lot that day. Imagine a conversation in broken English with a Japenese man who had a Japanese/French accent who was clearly slaughtered and rambled incoherently and kept forgetting his train of thought. Even the other “guests” kept glancing at each other occasionally as if to roll their eyes. It turns out these other “guests” were kind of working at the guest house too. The woman originally had been a guest at the café but ended up staying here, she was 2 weeks into a 4 week stay – something about recuperation from a work issue (maybe stress?). The guy was here on his first day so no wonder he was looking as overwhelmed as we were. There was another young girl who’d been sailing with us. All of these people were about 30 years his junior, all introduced as his friends. I think perhaps he either offers inexpensive working holidays for young Japanese (preferably pretty ladies) OR he is the leader of a cult and once they visit they never get away.

Joking aside their generosity and kindness to make our stay comfortable was lovely. From the sailing trip, to catching the fish for dinner themselves, to bringing out English tea in china cups after dinner, to him sharing his French wine with us after dinner… these were all touches that made the experience great. Even if he was completely bonkers.