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Hellooooo~
These last few days have been absolutely amazing. Not only did my date with the super cute Japanese girl go extremely well, but my study abroad group took a trip to the island of Okinawa for 4 days!!
Lots of Okinawa pics on my site! http://jetsetseattle.zoto.com/galleries
So first of all, the date. Awesome. Simply awesome.
Secondly, Okinawa. I can’t even begin to describe how wonderfully gorgeous that place is, so I’ve posted up quite a bit of pictures here to try and give a feel of what the place looked like. The first picture up is the view from our HOTEL ROOM. Unbelievable. And this wasn’t even really the nice, resort hotel or anything. It was more or less just a regular hotel, but with a super neat view of the ocean. Now I know it’s been awhile since I’ve been to Hawaii, but I think this place might have it beat scenery-wise. All of the mountains, beaches, and ancient temples—it was just cool.
Ok, enough about the scenery. Our group did quite a bit of sightseeing as well. We saw Shurijo Castle, which has actually been rebuilt several times as it was destroyed time
and again during World War II……by the US………*awkward*….but it was neat that they preserved a lot of the old ruins by building the castle above the wreckage. You could even see some of the old pathways and tunnels through a glass portion of the floor. Afterwards, we went to a really touristy park/beach. It was a little contrived, but they had the biggest aquarium I’ve ever seen in my life. On top of that, it was full of crazy stuff from the Ryukyuu Islands (the string of islands where Okinawa is) that I had never heard of before.
Speaking of stuff I’ve never heard of before, Japan never ceases to amaze me with Her oddities. Okinawa is famous for this particular beverage called, “Awamori.” It’s like normal sake, only brewed a little differently, and aged for a long, long time. The result: a surprisingly tasty beverage that contains 40% alcohol. And here’s the kicker there are special bottles of it you can buy that have snakes in them. Apparently if you drain the venom out of this extremely poisonous snake indigenous to Okinawa and let the dead snake ferment along with the Awamori, it gives it that extra moxie
Heaven
best picture of the trip!!that makes it oh so special. Too rich for my blood, though. I wasn’t gonna pay $100 to drink snake juice.
I also attended an activity where a group of us learned how to play the Shamisen. Ok, I guess it’s not really called a shamisen, since it’s an Okinawan instrument, but I can’t remember the word for it. It was actually a lot of fun! It’s like plucking a 3-string violin vertically. I got the hang of it fairly quickly since I’ve played guitar, but man, some of those other kids—it was a bit torturing.
Our group also visited a cave that has an incredible amount of stalactites and stalagmites. I think in the section we walked through they said there were something like 950,000. That, along with some underground rivers and mini-waterfalls made for some really cool scenes that were impossible to photograph since it was so dark. Oh well.
Overall the trip was amazing. Even though it was sponsored by the IES program, I did my fair share of drinking beer and lying on the beach—usually at the same time.
I can’t believe I’m at school!!!
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Larzipan
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No snake juice?!
How very disapointing! J/K Okinawa looks bee-yoo-tee-ful, mang!