The family drove to Tampa this week-end to visit my husband’s parents. This summer trek across the state just wouldn’t be complete without an apocalyptic, zero visibility thunderstorm which we endured for about 2 hours. I have a love/hate relationship with these white knuckle road trips..On the one hand, I hate the tension, (WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!) but I swear the whole exercise helps keep my rear-end muscles nice and tight 😜..so there’s that.
ANYWAY..we had a great visit…caught up on news, went bowling and this time dined out at a Japanese restaurant.
I don’t know why, but I love those places. Even though I’ve seen the “flaming volcano” a thousand times, I always clap, take pictures and make a fuss- as if I’m a Hibachi virgin. Hey, I feel I owe it to the poor guy- and seriously, I get more food.
The whole hibachi experience reminds me of our move from California to Miami back in 1989. One of the houses our realtor took us to see was in a community called Country Walk. The home we toured belonged to a tough looking old Navy guy and his Japanese wife. It looked like a normal American home from the front, but the back yard was something straight out of a magazine…full of fruit trees and expertly manicured rock gardens that surrounded this incredible, free-form swimming pool. The whole thing looked like it belonged at a five star hotel! The most amazing feature was a sunken bar/hibachi area that people could swim up to and sit at..on underwater bar stools!
As beautiful as the “backyard” was, it wasn’t a good fit for a family with small kids, and my husband was uncomfortable buying a home made of wood because of the potential for termites. Of course just a few short years later, Hurricane Andrew turned Country Walk into piles of sticks. (We fared better in the concrete place we eventually bought in a different neighborhood.)
So yeah, I love those Japanese Hibachi restaurants. It’s my kind of theater; the performances are short, you get to eat, there’s no singing and just enough audience participation to keep me interested. I’ll be 80 years old one day still acting surprised, delighted and amazed when the guy tosses the egg into his chef’s hat. He’ll wink and give me extra shrimp, and I’ll tell everyone at the table the story about that old sailor’s picturesque backyard with the swim-up Hibachi grill. And they will ooh and ahh as I describe the whole thing and pretend they haven’t heard it all before. 😉
Hilarious! I love that story and would listen to it again as well. I think it is so cool when anyone cooks in front of me and a big ole fire just adds more spark to the experience 🙂 That house would have been super fun to have lived in… maybe not so practical given the fact that I guess it doesn’t exist anymore. Your concerns in Florida or so different from our’s here in Canada… termites and hurricanes although we do get the odd hurricane scare/excitement as well.
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You know it’s funny..I (of course) felt terribly sad about our house and our neighborhood..but I always wondered about theirs. No doubt that oasis they painstakingly built was completely destroyed.
PS..I love it when someone cooks in front of me as well…frankly it could be a peanut butter sandwich..if I’m not the one making it..it’s a treat..and I’m a happy woman!
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Yes I have wondered about that myself with natural disasters… how you pick up and move on with so little… I guess you realize that just being alive is enough and thankful for that.
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It was definitely a life-changing event…one- in hindsight-I am grateful to have experienced because it forever changed my “relationship” with the stuff we accumulate in life.
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Yes, it would absolutely do that!
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