Okinawa Vacation - Day 5

Our last afternoon in Okinawa was spent checking out their markets. Our favorite (and the most interesting), was the indoor food market. You can find every kind of pork product imaginable.

Including feet!

...and pork head skin!

The market also had fish and a bunch of vendors with baskets like you see below. I imagine most of these are pickled.

Seaweed!

We would have liked longer at the market, but we had to head to the airport to catch our flight. Back to home, sweet, home - the Navy Lodge.

Okinawa Vacation - Days 2-3

After a couple days in Okinawa, we took a 2 hour ferry ride to the island of Zamami. Zamami is known for it's turquoise, clear water and excellent scuba diving. We arrived just at the start of whale watching season, so it was still pretty quiet on the island. It felt like we had the beach to ourselves!

Most of our time on Zamami was spent walking and exploring or chilling by the beach. Perfect! Our bed and breakfast took us for a van ride along the island. There are 4-5 observation towers that have great views of the ocean and surrounding islands.

Here is the town of Zamami.

We had a traditional Japanese breakfast for our last morning in Zamami. We ate fish, rice, miso soup, pickled vegetables, and a salad. It was really good, although I have to admit it's a little hard to get used to such savory tastes for breakfast.

We took a faster ferry back to Okinawa for one last afternoon before our flight.

Christmas in Okinawa - Day 1

We spent 5 days down in Okinawa (Japan's Hawaii) over Christmas. On our first day, Dec. 24th, we rented a car and drove up to the Northern part of the island.

For lunch we went to a small restaurant. Right after we sat down, the woman turned the santa on for us. He played 'Rocking Around the Christmas Tree' for the 30 minutes we ate. We figured Ian should get his first picture taken with Santa Claus. There was no crying involved - just staring. Ian was amazed at how well Santa could swing his hips!

The restaurant had open windows that overlooked the water. What a great setting!

We both ordered curry rice. (very popular in Japan) It came with a salad that had 2 types of sweet potatoes in it. You can see that one of Japan's sweet potatoes is purple. They actually make a soft serve ice cream out of it that's also purple.

After lunch and exploring the island we headed to the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium. It's huge. We saw an outdoors dolphin show (with views of the ocean in front of us) and also saw fish in the 2nd largest fish tank in the world. They had 3 whale sharks. (see picture below)

Here's a picture of the dolphin show.