Days 2-3-4
Posted By Kelly Orange on September 23, 2008
So I`m going to start with today because it`s the least blurry…Day four, Tuesday. Started the day off with some Tuesday morning football! Chargers kicked the jet`s ass, totally awesome so the day started well. We were whisked off at the end of the game to go down to Okinawa World & Gyokusendo Cave which Rich and Nancy say they have never been to without getting lost, so of course I thought it would be best for me to be the navigator, just to see if i could get us there. Of course, the maps are pretty much no good, the numbers of the roads change in the middle and are not written down right. So one minute you are driving along and there is a right turn for 82 and then 2 miles down there is another right turn onto 82. I have no idea what the hell was going on. One minute you are on 241 and then it turns into 86 and then all of a sudden you are on 241 again. As the navigator I just decided that it would be best to go south and then figure out how to get onto the right road when we got closer to where we were supposed to be. It worked, I swear I have an internal gps & can get anywhere, so really we were never lost, just took a different road.
We found it and right as you get in you walk down into this cave. It was cooler down there but much more humid than above so you end up sweating more. The cave is 5 kilometers long with 890 meters open to the public, the second longest in Japan, it was a really long cave. It`s filled with 1 million stalactites and they are all drippy and have so many cool formations. I was able to get some really cool pictures in there surprisingly and I`m sure they will show up in some art of mine. It`s pretty much the length of the park underground and when you come up you walk into a village with all kinds of shops with craft areas. This is where they make the famous Ryukyu glass & sanchins (a traditional banjo type instrument that is made of snake skin). They also have a brewery for beer and the traditional Okinawan sake Awamori made from Habu extract (snake venom), turmeric, ginseng root & herbs. We saw the brown sugar factory where they make “Happy Sugar” and stopped to watch the Eisa Dancers. Then I got to take a picture with a huge snake!!!
Somehow we made it home a lot quicker because we found the expressway right away and it pretty much dropped us off right at the gates of Camp Foster, where we are now enjoying our afternoon beverages before we eat out at Zen`s.
And now I will fill you in on the past few days. Yesterday Rick and his dad went golfing nearby so Nancy took me out shopping for the day. I made out like a bandit, first off we stopped by the 100 Yen store where I must`ve gotten about 50 things. There`s was so much pottery and little Japanese Orange lunchboxes I had to swoop up and a really funny blank notebook called “My Trees” and on every page it says “I love my trees. When I was in sad, trees cheers up my mind.” I love the funny translations! They crack me up. We`d only been in that store for a little while when Rich called and told us they were stuck under an overhang because it was pouring out! We didn`t even notice, anyways we let them fend for themselves and continued shopping. Next she took me to a little art store so I could check out the local stuff, didn`t see too much there that I couldn`t get at home so we moved on to ETWS. They had so much stuff there too, more plates and little things, postcards and I found a cool Clash tshirt, ooooh “The Crash” Punk rawk. After that we were going to eat at a Thai Restaurant but it was closed, so we just ate at a nearby Mexican Restaurant called “Obligatto”. Gotta eat mexican food in every country I can, and it was actually pretty good, but I`m not sure what the tortillas were made of, didn`t taste like corn or flour. Hmmmn? The last stop was a nice little eclectic store in the American Village which had some sweet furniture but I didn`t really find anything more that I wanted so we headed back up to base. Shopping sure does tire you out. We stayed in last night and ate some really good chicken for dinner and watched some football and golf.
And back to day 2, we decided not to go to the ruins because it was so hot so we went out to the concessionaire on base and bought a ton of really cool plates, a sake set, some robes and a hillarious toy owl that repeated what you said. We were laughing so hard in the store that Rich had to buy it, I think he`s going to send it to his mom (Rick`s g-ma) out in Connecticut. Funny. Ok, I`m done, I`m pretty sure that I`m going to have to make the rest of the gang wait for me to get ready to go out to eat so I better done with this blogging stuff.
