Oarai Part 1

While the boys were in Korea Mike and I took the girls on a short vacation.  We had originally intended on going to the opposite side of Japan.  We wanted to go there this past spring but had a hard time finding accomodations for seven people so we ended going to Izu instead.  We thought it would be easier to find a place for four of us but at the last minute we decided to stay closer to Tokyo.  The drive would have been five or six hours and we only really had four days so we didn't want two of our days to be spent driving.  We will eventually make it to The Sea of Japan and Kanazawa.  We found a place to stay just two hours North of Tokyo in Oarai.  Let me say, a vacation with only two kids is so much easier!  We chose activities that the girls would like and I genuinely loved seeing how happy they were.  The first day in Oarai we went to the beach.  The beach was not crowded but there was a constant stream of people coming and going.  We noticed that besides some surfers, no one was swimming.  We wondered if it wasn't allowed but found a man walking up and down the beach with a police shirt on and we asked him if it was okay to swim and he assured us it was fine.  The water was chilly but not unpleasant.  We spent probably four hours at the beach.  We decided to investigate what all the people who were not swimming were doing and discovered that they were all clamming.  People would come and go with their buckets and mesh bag and shovels.  We tried to talking to a few people in Japanese and they told us that the clams had to be at least 3 cm and that the clams were "oishi" or delicious.  We decided to dig for some clams like our fellow beach-goers and brought home about 20.  We didn't really have the correct ingredients so we had to kind of improvise but we boiled the clams and made a broth.  I am not a huge seafood lover, though, I don't hate it. My experience with clams is limited and the previous times I've eaten them (in clam chowder) I didn't not like them.  I was nervous to try them but was brave and I can confidently say that they weren't bad!  We even convinced Felicity and Piper to try them.  Felicity ended up loving them and Piper said they were fine but didn't want to eat more.