The Long Way Home: Okinawa

Our final stop on the long way home was Okinawa, or as Michael likes to call it, "Japan's Hawaii". Located about 750 km south of the "main" Japanese islands, the Okinawan islands were, until 1879, the seat of the Ryukyu kingdom which incorporated cultural elements from China, Japan, and various south Pacific islanders.  Held as a Japanese colony until 1912 when it's inhabitants were formally granted representation in the national government, Okinawa is now a (usually) sunny tropical getaway and also home to a major US military presence.

After "roughing it" in Borneo for two weeks we decided to take it easy at a seaside resort.   We remembered pretty quickly that we're not really resort people, especially when the resort has as many fiddly rules as the ones in Japan.  It didn't help that there was a typhoon blowing in and so it was pretty cloudy and cool the whole time we were there. 

The hermit crab racetrack was pretty neat, though.

Our first night out we escaped the resort and found a fun Izakaya, or Japanese pub, up on the main road.  We got an array of sushi and noodles, and Michael discovered Awamori: Okinawan rice brandy.

Hooray for sushi in Japan!

Somehow our children got pulled into an origami lesson from the Japanese grandmother at the next table over

The next day, with the weather still crummy and the troops restless, we decided to brave the Okinawan mass transit system and go to visit a promising Soba noodle shop and the local cultural village.  Unsurprisingly, the bus system was great.  It was still Japan, after all.

The noodle shop had goats on their roof, a wide assortment of musical instruments lying around, and we got to order way too much food from a vending machine.  The food doesn't come out of the vending machine, that's just where you get the tickets to hand to the waiter who has been hovering over your shoulder while you try to figure out which buttons correspond to what food using Google Translate.  I'm sure this solution is more efficient in most circumstances, since we saw it at every hole-in-the-wall restaurant we went to.

Japan is super great.  The end.

"What the heck are Juicy Noodles?!"

After lunch we visited the cultural village, where the kids did handicrafts and then a scavenger hunt.

Middle child has opinions

We also found a fortune-telling tree, and all dropped coins in the box to get our horoscope that we could tie around the railing at the right zodiac symbol.

Three of us are "sheep", which is probably either really good or really bad.

There was the obligatory lion dance and musical performance.

Okinawa is actually closer to Taiwan than it is the rest of Japan, so there were a lot of Chinese cultural influences

And Maxwell found an animal to pet.  The village was comprised of historic buildings gathered from all over Okinawa and brought to this site to show the traditional architecture and way of life of the Ryukyu people.

Why yes, it was raining

Finally, treasure hunt complete and afternoon ice cream consumed, we headed back to the resort.

The next day we decided to walk up the coast to investigate something on the map labeled "Glassworks".  On the way we had a delicious cafe lunch and way too much dessert, and collected shells and played in a stream on a relatively deserted stretch of beach.

Ice Kachang meets S'Mores

A fine Borchert tradition

The region of Okinawa we were in was known for its glass, and the glassworks we found was merely one of many such institutions catering to tourists.  We declined to do our own glass-blowing (apparently you can spend a fair amount of money to have people shout urgent instructions at you in Japanese!) and just toured the showroom and eventually found a mirror maze up on the second floor.

America Time!

Never found the crystal minotaur, though

For our last dinner in Okinawa we went to a Yakiniku restaurant, where Michael and the big kids cooked meat and veggies over a little grill in the center of the table.  The kids all got to try the Wagyu A5 beef, but Michael declined to let them try to cook it.  Middle child was pretty terrified of the flame at first, but he warmed up to it.

Fire makes everything better.  Even vegetables!

Totally accurate

The next morning we took a taxi back to the airport, listening to the American military radio station the whole way in.  Then it was off to Tokyo, and onto our very last plane, good old Delta Airlines winging us back to Minneapolis, Minnesota.

On our way home!

Thanks everyone for following along with our adventures!  We've enjoyed having you look over our shoulders as we've explored Asia, even though we feel like we've only scratched the surface.  It was truly an amazing opportunity, and we'd love to tell you more about it or help you plan your adventure if you're ever headed to that part of the world!  We're largely settled back in to our lives in the US by this point, so don't hesitate to reach out if you're local and we haven't had a chance to connect yet, and if you're not local, you're always welcome to come visit!