Well, it's been some time since my last blog entry, so this will be rather on the longish side.
Okinawa has been great, people are very friendly and it has a more third-world country feel to it, as opposed to high-sophistication Japan mainland. You get the not-quite-clean streets, old buses, people walking around in whatever clothes are comfortable - as opposed to suits and fashionable clothes.
At some point, I lost my pen, so I've been taking notes at a local Starbucks, where I borrow the pencil for feedback forms and write on a paper napkin. Sad but true. Another interesting item is that there are tall / large / venti sizes, as opposed to the short / tall / large sizes in most S-bucks of the mainland. Also, the first place I went into was a coffee shop, to buy a drink and ask for directions - what coffee shop? - Seattle's Best. Ah, the ironies of life :-)
What else has been going on, let's see... A Chinese garden - very close ties to China here, an open-air market, very few people on the beach (we're not in season yet, it seems), a lot of sunshine :-), a couple of lions / guardians that can be found everywhere, great people at the tourist center, a Starbucks on main street at the 'happening' corner (where all foreigners drop by, of course), a Simpsonesque train (can't recall the name right now), more Japanese-oriented tourist shops, clear waters on the beach, and who knows what else... Anyway, this was my first day in Okinawa.
The second day, it was a bit cloudy, so I took a couple of buses down to a memorial site, with a lot of information and some very good displays of the battle in Okinawa during WWII. Again, a very memorable place, for all the wrong reasons. After that, walking around the beach, dinner with steak a la Fedex (raw on the inside), tried a drink called Sima-Uta (vamo' Casero), and started planning for the rest of the trip.
The current plan is to take a ferry from Beppu to Osaka, from there a train to Nagoya, and spend the night there before my last day going to Tokyo and from there to Narita airport. We'll see how it works.
In the mean time, I'm still having problems sending email, and I need someone to confirm that Fedex can pick me up at the airport. Can someone forward this page to him with the flight info? Nevermind if you all do it, it'll just help remind him he needs to wake up early on a Sunday :-)
