Seen Around Town

Today I was driving toward base to get a couple of things, and saw a sign by orange cones & a closed lane: "MEN WROKING A HEAD"
I laugh at that sort of thing, but I shudder to think what Americans would do if we had Japanese people occupying Hawaii, for instance, and had to make Japanese signage for them. I would definitely make the wrong kind of character - for all I know there's only a one-line difference between the character for "good morning" and "f-you".

Anyway, more pictures. Below you see the view of the ocean as you look to the left outside of Transit Cafe, a fantastic little restaurant for lunch & dinner that's about 2 blocks from our place.

Here is the view if you look to the right - and past that table of 8 people, there's an outside bar, very sweet.
Here is a little drinkie I tried - Strawberry Dream or something like that. Red wine with strawberries and something else - kind of a frozen sangria with whipped cream on it. Excellent on a hot afternoon.


My food - some kind of beef (tender, like pot roast) with mushrooms and one of the best tasting sauces I've ever had. A scrambled egg rests on top of a ball of perfectly cooked & seasoned rice. I licked the plate. Definitely the best meal I've had so far here. (Not that we've eaten at a ton of places yet.)
Here's the inside bar, picture taken from where we were sitting. There are about 12 seats inside, 12 seats outside, so this place usually garners a wait. Worth it - I think. They were playing a Brazilian band CD of all Eagles covers when we were there. And there's some local jewelry for sale over where the person in this picture is standing. Yes - you DO see Maker's Mark on that shelf - this is a good place for Aviva. And we also had a dessert here; coconut milk & vanilla ice cream with rice balls and fresh mango, raspberries, strawberries and rum. We ate that before we got a chance to take a picture of it.

Saw this on the way out yesterday (Sunday) - Persian restaurant. Hm, could be interesting. Down the road from us there's a new Turkish place right next door to Coffee Casa, and 1/2 a block from that a new sushi joint is opening up!

The bar at Hokulea, the restaurant upstairs from our apartment. Apparently bands play there sometimes too.

Mia with Hachi - one of the waitresses upstairs, who speaks excellent English. She's great with all the kids here apparently, and teaches us mnemonic devices for Japanese expressions. Today we learned "Don't touch my moustache" for "you're welcome" - in reality it's like danitachamastashta or something.....classic.

So firearms are illegal here. Only the military has them, and they're issued. What they do sell (and you should never ever buy because as you can see it's impossible to discern them from the real thing) are air guns. Below is a picture I took at Jusco of the air gun counter.

I had thought they were REAL guns - and if you stand, as I did, feet planted looking at the guns on your right - this is what's on your left. THE TOY SECTION. Is anyone else thinking this is crazy??


Ok, gotta shower. We went swimming today at the Camp Foster pool. Has a cool water slide, but apparently Torii has the best one. More on that soon - we need goggles first for that chlorinated hell. Mia looks like she's wasted after an hour in the pool.

A Couple Of Links...

Here's our hotel: http://hotel-thebeach.com/ - "Restaurant & Bar Hokulea" is the restaurant on our roof. And on the right, if you click on "Access Map" there's a bunch of other restaurants & shopping places noted in there with links when they're available. It's great that we're in a hotel so they have the info about our apartment online!

Here's the cool restaurant/bar 2 blocks over from us on the sea wall: http://www.transitcafe-okinawa.com/ (Click on the top picture for cafe menu & pictures of the food - hungry yet?)

And, last but certainly not least - 2 blocks away is this coffee place! http://casa.ezlog.jp/ AMAZING little place, definitely going to get to know those folks.

There are 2 floors with 4 apartments each in our building, the rest are hotel rooms. (3rd & 4th floor); 2 apartments on each side of the elevator. 5th floor houses the roof & the restaurant. All the apartments are homes to Americans - and across the alley (those townhouses you can see in the pictures of our view) are all Americans too. We met a bunch of people on July 4th when we went to the rooftop to watch the fireworks being shot off from Kadena Air Base. The whole neighborhood was up there! All the kids knew each other, and all the parents knew the kids; we met one boy, Logan, who will definitely be in Mia's kindergarten class. (he's one of 3 soon to be 4 kids in a very nice family) They were nice enough to tell us about the school & the bus stop - so we know that'll be easy enough. (Yes, I will cry like a baby when my little girl gets on a school bus!!) It truly is like a small town 50's scene here the way everyone is - it's so nice. And with the cool bars & restaurants here, it's nice to know people trade off babysitting so that you can get out with your spouse now & again.

So much more going on - our neighbors in the building are great. We met Leighanne in our parking garage- she lives 1 floor below us and across the building. She has a 2 1/2-year-old daughter, Aubrey, who's a cutie and Mia's already acting like a "big sis". Her husband is a Navy pilot and is stuck in the Philippines at the moment because his plane was struck by lightning and he's waiting for his new engine to come through customs. Get this - that's the SECOND time it happened too! They're here for one more year, I see a definite friendship there - super sweet family. And apparently we have another great neighbor who's visiting family in Hawaii right now (Maggie) and due in October with a baby I think - I know her hubby is in Iraq until October. She lives on our floor across the way from the elevator, and everyone in the neighborhood seems to know her - very friendly and outgoing. I'm excited to meet her! Leighanne was telling me that they knew our apartment was vacant and they were hoping a cool family would move in. I guess she's satisfied....

Ok, off to pour some cereal for the kid & me - it's 9:30am Sunday morning. Not sure what we're doing today, but finally our living/dining room A/C should be fixed tomorrow morning at 9am! Now we just need television and faster Internet, and our household goods shipment with the rest of our stuff - and this just MIGHT be home!

Sea Life

We stopped at a beach right outside the gate of the base where Craig works - Camp Hansen. In the little tide pools there were these amazing bright blue fish and some kind of sea snake or eel - we were fascinated. Mia wasn't thrilled about the snake, but after we explained it was small and wouldn't come out of the water she was cautious but better. This was just in a dinky tide pool - imagine when I dive! Wow... exciting.

We Are Online!!

However, it's slow - ADSL (300-someodd kb/min) so bear with us. LOTS has been happening, lots to tell - but not much time to type right now. Soon - I promise. Categories to include:
July 4th
Our neighbors
Restaurants/food
Shopping
More culture shock

To tide you over, here are some photos:
Starbucks inside of Jusco (huge department store/flea market/supermarket/mall...more pictures soon, maybe some video when we get a quicker connection).

Fresh fish/noodles/sushi/fried things we have no idea what they are market in the middle of Jusco.
This is one side of the "American Village" - that mall designed to look like a San Diego mall. You can see McDonald's, and I think "Deep Blue" is a clothing store meant to be like Old Navy.

This is the view if you look to the right from the last picture - Sega/Sonic is everywhere - as are game rooms, pachinko & slot machine places.

Sunset view from our ROOF. That platform on the left - yeah, there's a hot tub up there. Not our first order of business when it doesn't ever get below 80 degrees and humid outside, but come winter we are SO there... And a giant plastic mug of beer - no idea why that's there. Maybe if someone was drowning you could throw that in there for 'em.


Daytime views from our roof - there's a dog park down there, and there's a small playground next to it too - apparently the moms call it "poopy park". Guess they aren't cleaning up after their pets too well.

That Hawaiian/Japanese restaurant? It's not on the 1st floor, it's on the ROOF! This is it - right above our apartment. The menu looks amazing - I'll be trying it tonight with our neighbors. Very cool bar in there too! Do you love it that I can grab a drink on my rooftop bar or in a beer vending machine? Sweet.

Inside the aforementioned restaurant.

Here you go Ryan - this guy was chirping away on a ledge above a doorway. These are everywhere... any clue what it is?

Going dark

Moving day - we have power & a telephone today & tomorrow, but no Internet connection until Friday. So posts will be unreliable at best (have to bring the laptop on base to a hot-spot).

I'll miss you all for a while! Have a great week!

Flying Foxes

AKA fruit bats. There are lots of them on Okinawa - they're really big. We saw 3 flying around last night, 2 were large. I'd say 2.5-3' wing span. They're very cool, and I guess they're called flying foxes here because their faces look like foxes'. I was also told NOT to take pictures of them sleeping because if it disturbs them they attack you like something out of a Hitchcock film. I can live without a picture....

Jazz Festival And Such

Yeah - still no fun seeing gorgeous sunsets every night. This was outside the restaurant after dinner & before we went to the jazz festival. The moon rise was even cooler (full and huge) but the camera never would've captured it with no tripod.
Some gas stations here (like this Esso station) have the pumps coming out of the overhang. You pull them down to put gas in the car. (which we NEVER do in town because it costs about 4x as much as on base) The gas on base here has fluctuated between $2.89-$3.00 since we've been here. It's mid-grade (the only choice) and off base it's almost 300 yen per liter (a liter is a little more than 1/4 of a gallon, and right now it's 199 yen to the $1. When we got here it was 124 yen to the $1.) Welcome to my math world.
Mia at the top of a big jumpie thing - this was a wave, and at the bottom there were "sharks". At the jazz festival off to the side near the beach there was a park full of jumpies, 4 of them. And the kids were going nuts in there. Mine was sweating like crazy, but happy as ever to be among dozens of other kids. She came to me, crying that she'd fallen & bitten her lip - wanted water, and then wanted to go right back in there! The energy & stamina is astounding.
The jazz festival was fantastic. It was warm and humid, but breezy and not totally uncomfortable. This time I had bug spray on to protect my already mosquito-eaten legs and arms. It's really warm & humid here, but without the haze of the states- it's why all the pictures are so clear, you can always see for miles, even on the most hot & humid day. The beauty makes the discomfort level more bearable. I was only disappointed that we attended at night because we didn't get to see the beautiful beach it was being held on.

Mia also danced on the dance floor in front of the stage where several Japanese jazz ensembles and even the III MEF jazz band performed (though we missed the USMC band unfortunately). We heard everything from "Take 5" to big band stuff, it was fantastic. Mia danced very happily ("interpretively") and I took a bit of video but the upload will have to wait until we have a better Internet connection.

Today we're packing up and moving some things over to the new place- and we'll hit Jusco to get some things for the apartment too. (Picture giant Target meets sushi restaurant....pictures to come)