March 22nd '06- The Beach

Okinawa is known for it's beautiful beaches. We lost part of our day to playing musical hotel rooms. The Airforce Inn is planning to renovate our room so we had to move upstairs to an identical room. So after lunch we hired a taxi and had him drive us to Torri Station beach. Torri Station is a small Army post tucked in to part of the island between Marine bases. It seems silly but when we drove through the gates and we found out it was Army property I felt like we were home - in safe territory. That is until we pulled up outside the beach facilities and the place was a ghost town. Everything is closed on Wednesdays - just our luck - but the taxi driver found an open gate for us and dropped us off. Because everything appeared to be closed, and we had no cell phone (Cingular disappeared after Guam) Rob asked the taxi driver to come back in 4 hours. The weather was a bit overcast and it looked like rain was on its way so it didn't seem like such a good idea to stay after the taxi left but we crossed our fingers that the taxi would come back and made the best of it. The beach was beautiful and the water warm (in comparison to Monterey) and there was a resort area within walking distance. There was a guy out in the ocean kite surfing - I think they call it kite boarding - so we didn't feel completely lost.

Other than that, we were basically alone on a beautiful beach. Robert and I started building sand castles and Katherine was tired so she just lay on the beach for a while.Katherine's sandcastle...

Just when the skies were looking their most ominous and I was formulating a plan for where we could get shelter if we had to the clouds broke and suddenly we had the most beautiful day we'd had on the whole trip.
We all relaxed and explored the beach and played in the edge of the water. We found big chunks of coral and tiny little black and white seashells that looked as though someone had expertly painted on black spots or stripes in neat even rows. Katherine and I went for a walk and found something that mystified us. It looked like a cross between a pineapple and a coconut. She insisted we take a picture so we can ask her science teacher.



To be continued...

March 21st '06- Hangasa and Fish

Today is a holiday in Japan. It's the Spring Equinox! I kept seeing signs for holiday specials, but they weren't specific so I was beginning to think that maybe Sundays were considered holidays. But it's Tuesday, school is out and 'summer' vacation has begun. The Japanese school year starts in April after only a 40 day break. I would never have guessed but our tour guide Sietsuko told us all of this today. Several times a month Kadena's MWR ITT (Morale, Welfare and Recreation - Information, Tickets, and Travel - wow, it sounds so boring when you translate it) offers tours to many of the island's cultural areas and events. Today's tour was mostly a shopping tour to Naha City. But our first stop was to the Udui theater. Udui is an Okinawan word meaning Performance Theater. Sietsuko proudly told us that a husband and wife manage this theater with no financial help from the Okinawan government. Traditional or classic Okinawa dancing was performed in royal courts. The first dance we saw appears to be the most famous and very symbolic of Okinawa. It was called Yotsutake which means "4 bamboo castinets" so named because the dancers click castinets in both hands during the performance. The opening words to the song say "ring out, ring out, oh castinets" but the dance is so much more than the small wooden hand instruments that it is named after. It is performed very slowly with such grace and beauty, the drama heightened by the colorful costumes that it left me breathless and unable to take my eyes off the dancers. The kimono that is worn is called bingata. Sietsuko had explained on the way to the theater that although Okinawans had long been discriminated against one of the reasons the Japanese desired the island was for it's colorful and masterful textile techniques such as bingata. Bingata is dyed using paper stencils and dates back to the Ryukyu dynasty. Only members of the royalty and upper classes of Naha wore bingata and it is said that women would keep the paper stencil used to make their bingata so that no other would have the same pattern. The yellow pattern worn for this dance has really come to be the "national pattern" for Okinawa. Hingasa is the traditional hat worn here and is shaped like a red flower reminscent of the southern areas of the island.



Here we are given a demonstration of the different elements that make up this elaborate costume. The explanation was completely in Japanese but captivating just the same.






After the show we went to a modern shopping mall for lunch. We wandered through the food courts looking at Japanese restaurants - too expensive to risk unidentifiable ingredients, Japanese style Italian (eggs on pizza??), or burger joints. We chose the most popular Okinawan fast food joint - A&W (they still have car hop service here!). The area it was set up in looked like a Smithsonian exhibit - like a street at night, maybe even a 1950's American city street. But the kids weren't interested in that just as that they could eat familiar food, well, mostly familiar. It's hard to describe but the chicken chunks just weren't the nuggets we are used to at home. Ahhh, comfort food!


We wandered around the mall a bit after lunch. We bought some items at the 100 Yen store aka the dollar store, and then we went into the Japanese equivalent of a Walmart. Their appliances are so colorful...and so SMALL!

It's a child-cleaning machine, gentle cycle only!










Our afternoon was spent shopping in Naha City on Kokusai Street.



This is a mile-long local market that's actually in alleys between the main buildings that are somehow covered, like tunnels.




There was so much to look at that I never took the time out to look up, but it was raining outside and we were dry, so there must have been a roof somehow.


Our tour guide wanted to show us where the locals shopped so she took us into the fish market.







Rob was excited to go because he wanted to take pictures, but I wasn't sure if we should go in there because I figured the kids wouldn't like it - they might be bored or hate the smell.


Surprisingly, they had a great time. The place was a flurry of activity with colorful stands full of all kinds of fresh food.





Mmmmmm! Puffer fish!!