Adventures in Japan

You Look Nice, Okay?

Today we got off to an early start. We were so proud! We were out looking for breakfast before most places even opened. That kind of sucked. But we eventually found a café that sold us cubes of French toast baked with syrup in a coffee cup and it was all good. By which I mean delicious. Really delicious.

We spent the day in Shuri, the old capital. Pretty much everything of cultural note had been destroyed during WWII, but a lot of stuff has been reconstructed for tourists like ourselves. But not in a crappy concrete Osaka Castle kind of way. More like in a UNESCO World Heritage kind of way. It was all very interesting, at any rate.

Shuri Castle was a mixture of Chinese and Japanese styles (with some purely native touches, of course). Makes sense. For a very long time these islands had close ties with China and were an important stop along trade routes through East Asia. Some of the things I noticed were the curved walls, the bright colours (lots of red), the dragons, the lush tropical vegetation, and the slanty, slanty steps. Can't say I was a fan of those. The not-at-all-level steps, I mean. And I was also kind of disappointed that the big touristy photo ops (the main hall of the castle and an ornate gate) were all covered up for restoration or something. Pity they were both out of commission at the same time. But...

We didn't know ahead of time, but on certain days the Shuri Castle people put on free cultural dance performances. It just so happened that we showed up about 10 minutes before one was about to start. (Kinda made up for getting caught in the rain.) The 40-minute show was made up of six dances. Like all other Japanese dances I've seen so far, four of them were mesmerizingly slow. Two were faster. I quite enjoyed those. All six made use of handheld props like shiny fans & castanets. I couldn't take my eyes off them. Except when the awning overhead would dump massive amounts of water onto the spectator seats. That was a little distracting. And because there are no pictures (at least not yet) you'll just have to take my word for it: the costumes were beautiful.

We spent the afternoon wandering around the park and saw more ruins and reconstructions. We paid to see Tamaudun (a royal tomb), but we couldn't go inside or anything, so there's really nothing to say about that, other than it's World Heritage Listed. I wonder why our guidebook gave it 3 out of 3 stars.