Adventures in Japan

Yay Canadian bar!

I don't quite remember how yesterday ended, but it began with another great breakfast. It wasn't exactly traditional Japanese fare of the fish & rice with raw egg variety, but it certainly wasn't American-style, either. It did include rice, but also fried eggs & spam, salad with garlic dressing, tofu, squash, pickles, fruit, miso noodle soup, and coffee. Good stuff.

In the afternoon we took a bus tour of some of the sights to the south. I only understood about 1 out of every 30 words our guide said, and she talked a lot. It made my head hurt. She also sang every once in a while. That was nice.

The tour took us to a lot of places, but we never got to stay anywhere long enough to see everything we wanted. What we did in an afternoon, we could have easily spun out into a couple of days. More if we got lost, which is likely. A brief rundown:

• Imperial Navy Headquarters Underground HQ of the Japanese navy during WWII. Site of a mass suicide when they realized they'd lost. War makes my tummy hurt.


• Ryukyu Glass Village We watched people make stuff out of glass. It was amazing! There were a lot of people back there, and they work so FAST. There was so much going on at once, and everyone seemed to be in the right place at the right time with the right tool or bit of hot glass, but I never saw or heard them talk to each other or ask for anything. They all just knew. It was nuts. The glass blowing & shaping itself was super cool, too.


• Himeyuri no To Memorial to 190 high school girls and their teachers who comitted mass suicide rather than surrender to the Americans. I think it's a stop on a lot of tours, because the little park was surrounded with ugly shops selling tacky Okinawan souvenirs. There's a museum there, too, but we didn't have time to go in.


• Okinawan Peace Hall There were A LOT of peace memorials around here, but all we saw were the giant lacquer Buddha and a bit of the peace art museum out back. I tried to fold a paper crane (because that seems to be the thing to do when praying for peace) but I don't think I did it right. It's the thought that counts, I guess.


• Okinawa World A tourist theme park, without the rides. The big attraction is a large cave, which we dutifuly walked through. There were a lot of pretty linestone formations to see, and some creepy-crawly cave creatures (bats & fish) but it all felt kind of ruined by the immense number of tourists that pass through every year. There was hardly anyone down there when we were, but we could see all the places where stalactites had been broken off as souvenirs, and the dark spots on the formations where people touched with their oily hands, wish-tossed coins just about anywhere there was standing water, foot and handprints in the clay where people stepped off the walkway, presumably to take pictures. There were even Christmas lights wrapped around a bunch of stalagmites and stalactites near the exit. Tacky. I kinda liked it anyway. I think caves are neat. The cave exit was at the far end of the park, so we had to haul ass to get back to our bus in time. We rushed past a sugar refinery, a brewery, a distillery (all with samples), more glass-craftery, a snake park, and a few souvenir shops that actually had neat stuff we haven't seen elsewhere. We would have loved to stop and see all of that. Sigh.


• One Final Tacky Gift Shop The stuff in here seemed especially crap, but it was the sole purpose of our stop. No one bought anything.

We were pretty bushed after all that, but we stopped in at a Canadian bar on the way home. We ate nachos and drank Crown Royal (among other things) and talked to a lot of people, and apparently used the free internet to post about what a great time we were having. I don't remember how we got home. Yay Canadian bar!