In addition to my Okinawa post, I've added photos of Okinawa, Hiwakajima, Yagoto, and Sakae. Additional photos of my dorm and Kyouto are soon to follow.

Also, in light of the sporadic nature of my posts lately, I have officially re-implemented the little known Scott's Weblog RSS Feed. I'll keep it up to date with complete copies of all subsequent posts, so you can feel free to read using the RSS reader of your choice. I'm heading back to Tokyo over Spring Break with Steve and Jared, so more happenings are apt to appear hear soon. http://homepage.mac.com/mchughs/newsArchive.html#23 When you know a trip is good

After transferring from the Meitetsu rail line into the main terminal, I met up with Jared-tachi (Jared and company) on the sky deck. Resembling a high-class food court in some urban mall, the sky deck had two rows of eating establishments surrounding an inner ring of seats and a showcase area. Today's exhibit was the i-Unit, a 'personal conveyance device' resembling a wheel chair styled by a James Bond gadget aficionado (the edges pulsated different hues). Every few minutes a crowd of onlookers would accumulate in front of the thing, taking photos (usually with their cell phone), pointing, and otherwise expressing some sort of 'ooh, neat' feeling.

Half an hour later our fellowship was fully assembled. For the sake of identify-ability, I've assigned each person a character class in traditional RPG fashion. Our group consisted of Jared the bard, Steve the dwarf, Ryan the squire, Loren the knight, Aeko the sorceress, Maiko the rogue, and Yasuhiro the bard #2. As we presented ourselves at ANA flight check in counter #1, I imagine we seemed a right motley crew. We were immediately redirected to a distant little counter at the far right side of the terminal where'st a sign reading 'Group Ticketing' stood, not quite visible from over in futsuu no counter land. A short trek later we received our tickets, split them randomly, and headed for our terminal, number 11. The sight that awaited us was one so terrific and unbelievable that there was no room for doubt that the trip was going to be good. How good? Pikouki good. First, some quick background- since Japanese uses two syllabaries instead of an alphabet, words can rather easily become six or more syllables long, and thus be a bit of a pain to say. To compensate, many longer words and compounds in Japanese have compacted versions- Tokyo Daigaku (University) becomes Todai, Dance Dance Revolution becomes Danrebo, atatakai (warm) becomes attakai, etc. Hence, Pikachu + Hikouki (airplane) becomes Pikouki (my own brain child, I'm eager to note), our venerable means of conveyance to Okinawa. Not to disappoint, the interior of the plane sported Pokemon head rest cloths (I stole one) and Pokemon cups.

Damn, I'm on a Pokemon plane, this is pretty crazy. But low, more surprises were yet in store. Not being entirely without eyesight, I noticed (not nearly as quickly as Loren or Ryan, however) that there were perhaps no more than fifteen other men on our full flight. Apparently Okinawa in February is a girl thing. Whatever the case, as our plane took off about 12 of the girls raised their hands in the air and went 'wahhh' in roller coaster like fashion. A few minutes later, one of them started accosting Ryan- and then Loren- and then the rest of us. Apparently they'd just graduated (college) and were traveling to Okinawa to celebrate. Two of them, Asuka and Kyomi, are planning to study abroad in the US and thus were quite eager to make some American friends. All in all, it made for the most interesting plane flight I've had to date (unpleasant memories of Northwest In-flight movies spring to mind.) Ryan and Loren did the phone email exchange game (seemingly the primary tenet of Japanese social life), and have been keeping in correspondence since (conveniently, the girls live rather close to Nanzan.) But back to things actually Okinawa related. After about two hours we arrived in Okinawa, greeted by pleasant temperatures approximately thirty degrees warmer than back in Nagoya. The clear skyways and ramparts from the airport out to the adjacent monorail deck yielded a pleasant view of the surrounding foliage (the usual fair with numerous palm trees added in). The monorail was a small two-section model that ran perhaps twenty stops- our hotel was located seven stops down the line at Makishi eki. Being rather impressed by the exceedingly clean windows, I decided to take a brief movie of the surrounding cityscape.

Having paid approximately $270 for round trip airfare and bedrooms, I was expecting, say, something resembling a prefab POW hovel from the 1970's with some nice engrish tacked outside. Clearly kami-sama was on our side, however, as the hotel had complimentary breakfast, ample lighting, and awesome shower/ bath combos (in the nice Japanese style were the whole bathroom is water proofed with a drain somewhere, so you can run around the thing and spray water everywhere without worry). I'd also like to note that the hotel had these awesome compressed sponge things and three different soap substances (body wash, shampoo, conditioner) which were re-supplied everyday. After dropping off our luggage we headed out for a cheap dinner at a nearby Taco place down the road. I enjoyed some Taco Rice. After dinner we did a little bit of exploring down the main street where dozens and dozens of (identical) souvenir [read: crap] shops defined a bright, lively path extending a mile or two across the island. Statues of the local guardian deity, a Shisa (lion-dog looking thing), were particularly abundant. Prices ranged from about 10-1200 dollars, depending on what size shisa you were in the mood for. I was in a small chisa mood.

The next morning we woke up at some early hour (probably before 9), nabbed complimentary breakfast, and set about finding an open beach. With remnants of winter still lingering about, many beaches hadn't officially re-opened, but thanks to some quick intelligence by Aeko, we were able to find one. Approximately 4 minutes into our walk to the necessary bus stop, we bumped into a friendly, middle-aged Japanese taxi driver parked on the side of the road. Wearing one of those beige knitty looking vest things, he had that credible small town old guy air about him. Which was fortunate, as he soon persuaded us to employ his services, having offered a "hyaku en" discount off the bus fair. Shortly after departing, he started to give a rather persuasive monologue as to why some place X would be more interesting than that-beach-Aeko-had-found Y. X's and Y's being rather equal at the time, we soon found ourselves whisked off to some highly remote location where various incarnations of kami-sama (god) were said to dwell. A veritable polar bear plunge ensued, with much shivering and contemplation of 'why the hell didn't I bring a towel', which soon migrated into 'maybe I could subtly make use of that shirt lying down there...' which further digressed into 'what if I simply stay in the water'. After many a frigid thought, I somehow found myself dry enough to re-dress to 80% capacity (my undershirt was soaked through, and thus un-wearable for the remainder of the day.) Two hours or so after arriving, we met back up with our convoy (taxi drivers) who had returned to take us to Okinawa World (A.K.A. tourist trap, part #2.) Our first stop in Okinawa World was the hebi (snake) museum, which was pretty neat, though filled with lots of rather disgusting splayed apart snakes and rodents. Directly adjacent to the museum building was a miniature amphitheater- the location of a brief 25 minute snake show which proved entertaining, though full of jokes which when passed through the Scott Japanese Language Babel Fish (S.J.L.B.F. for short), amounted to approximately 011110000100101001000. Afterward, we ventured through an elaborate, exceedingly humid cave (thus ensuring the my undershirt remained water laden for the rest of the day) about 3/4 of a mile in length. Within, blue, green, red, and white lights provided illumination which culminated in a bizarre (and somehow creepy) Batman Christmas lights display. In a rather nihon rashii (typically Japanese) manner, we exited the cave via escalator.

We finished our stay at Okinawa World by watching a fun, crowd-interactive dance performance which involved lots of percussion instruments and brightly colored clothing. For dinner, we ate out at a steak restaurant just down the street from our hotel. I had a rather tasty pepper steak.

The next morning we visited a rebuilt Sino-Japanese style castle, then headed out in search of another beach- this time, via monorail. Bitter winds and seaweed patty monstrosities (they call them "Goya Burgers") put up a strong resistance as our fellowship made its way towards the long aspired to little beige square (nestled amongst a swath of less exciting grey matter) indicated by our map. It took about 2 hours. Upon arriving, I proceeded to entertain myself by writing various dumb things (in Japanese of course) in the sand. A few minutes later we walked over to a nearby park; one of those systematically green affairs with lots of concrete paths with children's play areas and homeless people tucked inside. We spent most of our time on a particularly dangerous seeming jungle gym. A twenty foot steel pole acted as an anchor for a web of inter-tangled ropes which tapered outward towards the ground, while four patches of fabric located at each corner (at its base) could be jumped upon to swing the whole structure back and forth. Jared and I quickly made it to the top, from which I took a couple photos of Maiko and Steve.

That evening we headed out to one of those girl photo place things (they probably have a name, though I'll take care never to remember it.) Generally, it's a building packed with theoretically non-identical photo booth things where girls (and occasionally their boyfriends) have their picture taken, then use a stylus to draw lots of cute [stupid] things on top of it. In exchange for your time and five dollars, the booths spit out several dozen miniscule postage stamp size copies of your highly colorful, 'cute', photos. Steve and I had fun sticking little clipart mushrooms and those turds on a few of them. Also of note, our bards (Yasuhiro and Jared) performed impromptu jam sessions for unsuspecting (though highly amused) high school girls. To top off the eve, we happened to walk by a radio studio shortly after a show had started- a loud speaker located just outside the studio window was relaying broadcasts out into the square. Jared and Yasuhiro took the opportunity to play a particularly well-coordinated piece (Yasuhiro playing samisen, Jared a small hand held percussion set.) The radio personality woman broke off mid-sentence, amused, and informed her audience of the foreigners* who had started playing music outside her window. Naturally, the glass was sound proofed, so she apologized to our bards for not being able to hear them play.

*It's worth noting that Yasuhiro is quite Japanese, but due to his highly outspoken nature at the time, she assumed he was a foreigner.

Our final morning went by quickly (and sadly lacked a Pikouki.) However, I did have the opportunity to wake up to an old guy staring at me rather conspicuously. Despite sitting four feet away from (a now awake) me, he continued to stare at me unperturbed. My compatriots soon informed me that he had been staring at me most of the time I was sleeping! Weird old guy (I suspect he's never seen anyone sleeping before.) On the flight back we bumped into the girls again (Ryan and Loren got pulled into a photo with them), grabbed lunch, then returned home. http://homepage.mac.com/mchughs/newsArchive.html#22