You want rice with that?

The local discount store, like many of them on "the mainland" (that's what we call the rest of you folks) contains a fast food restaurant. It has the usual menu, sausage and egg on muffin, biscuit, or whatever. A seating area full of elders who congregate there for their morning coffee and kibitzing. Kids toddling around getting into everything they can reach. The usual stuff.

They also have on the menu, the local platter. Eggs, spam and rice. For breakfast. Or you can have eggs, Portugese sausage and rice. Or you can even have eggs, spam, sausage and rice. Yum. And over in the area where the elders are sitting, chatting and chuckling over their rice and eggs is a man strumming a ukelele. How many times have you seen that in your local hangout?

On the lunch menu, along with the typical hot apple pie dessert, one can order hot taro pie. For those of you who may not be aware, taro is a local starchy plant. It might be in the potato-type family. It cooks up purple. So the picture on the menu is a nice, crispy, crusty pie thing with purple pasty stuff spilling out- and it's not blueberry. Different, to say the least. I agreed to try some local tapioca pudding for dessert at a local chain. The waiter told me it had sweet potato in it. Naturally, I expected it to be orange. Nope. It came out looking like blueberry tapioca. Purple. I'm afraid I was not able to conceal my horror and just added to the local disdain for tourists, which they all assume that I am. My apologies to future visitors, but it was just too much of a shock. Apparently, okinawan sweet potatoes cook up purple, not orange like mainland sweet potatoes. Who knew?

And rice goes with everything.