>Okinawa World and Date Night, To Boot

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My parents also had no compunctions about contacting my teachers in advance of a family vacation to get my homework and classwork assignments; I remember several April vacations where we spent not just one but two weeks in St. John, during which my parents had me sit down for an hour or so during the day to do some school work for when I returned.  Recently I was talking to a teacher-friend of mine who told me she believes that under almost any circumstances, family time spent together outside the home trumps anything a kid will learn in school on that particular day.  That a child can get caught back up in school, but quality time spent together as a family is much harder to come by these days.

So when Friday dawned clear and sunny and Tony announced that he had the day off of work, I knew this would be a good day to begin this tradition with Bear.  Tony only took four days off, total and not consecutive, over the Christmas break; during that time we were working particularly hard to get Bug potty trained and had mostly consigned ourselves to staying home.  We haven’t really done anything fun or as a family outside the house since my mom visited in the beginning of November, and my self-imposed shingles exile for the past week was making me itch to get out of the house.

At the risk of writing too much about this without getting to the point fast enough, I’m feeling the itch.  We’ve reached the point in this tour where we’re on the downslope; it’s just a matter of months now before we leave and I highly doubt that we’ll return to Okinawa.  And because we’ve been focusing on putting our money toward paying off debt while we’ve been here, we just haven’t done as many of the things that we might have otherwise.  I’ve been working steadily for Okinawa Hai in the past few weeks, editing past posts and figuring out how to get the site and its information more organized.  As a result I’m becoming a bit of a subject-matter expert in the things that have been written about and everything that there is to do here.  Which is good for us, because now that we’ve got this push to do these things we’ll make it happen.

We started off our family day by going out to breakfast, then stopping by the travel office here on base to get directions to Okinawa World. The directions seemed clear and easy enough, but Tony and I can’t seem to manage to go anywhere without getting lost at least once.  This time it was a matter of not being able to find the right exit off the expressway, which – in my defense – was not explained well.  There’s Exit 2, then a Junction exit, and then Exit 1.  We were looking for Exit A2 which wasn’t labeled on the road signs and was a sub-exit off of the Junction exit.  Confused yet?  Yeah, that’s what we felt like, too.  We ended up driving back and forth along the expressway for an extra 20 minutes…  and we spent an unnecessary 1000 yen (about $11) in tolls.

But then we got to Okinawa World and all was forgotten.  Because there was this huge cave with over a million stalactites alone, not counting the stalagmites.  That’s the largest amount of any known cave in Japan.

Note: stalactites grow down from the ceiling and stalagmites grow from the ground up.  You can remember this my way (stalaCtites have a c as in ‘ceiling’; stalaGmites have a g as in ‘ground’) or Tony’s (stalacTITEs have to hold on tight so they don’t fall down and stalagMites are like mountains).  We taught both methods to Bear. I don’t think either one stuck.

I was shocked to find out that Tony had never been in a cave before.  As many touristy caves that dot the Blue Mountain range, where his college was located, he never visited any of them.  Or maybe I just grew up the daughter of a man who likes amateur spelunking.  Who knows?

Believe it or not, this is a stalagmite.  You can’t see it well in the picture, but there’s a pool of water on top that cascades over its sides.  It was beautiful.

This formation was called ‘Gathered Drapes’.  According to the sign they’re a rare formation and take a couple hundred thousand years to grow to this size.

One last note that I found interesting: apparently stalactites and stalagmites grow at a faster rate in tropical and subtropical areas than in cold-weather parts of the world.  Here in this cave they grow at a rate of 1 millimeter every three years, and some were even beginning to form on the concrete and metal grated walkways where the lime from the water on the ceilings repeatedly dripped down.  The temperature in there was a steady 70 degrees F (21 degrees C) with a humidity level of 90%.  We were actually glad to get back into the cooler, but sunny and drier, air outside when we had walked through.

We exited from the cave to a tropical fruits orchard, which unfortunately wasn’t bearing much fruit because we’re smack dab in the middle of the winter season here.  But we did walk through a Okinawan pottery village setup, and took these pictures of ourselves as shisas (Ryukyuan half-dog, half-lion statues that homeowners and businesses put on their roofs to protect the people and possessions within):

The shisa on the left keeps its mouth closed to keep bad spirits out; the one on the right has its mouth open to allow good spirits in.  These were our best efforts at being shisas.

So then we walked through a pottery village and a textiles village where vendors pushed their wares on us every ten feet or so, and through the on-premises brewery where, from the signs, it looked like they use cave water in the brewing process.   (Tony said, “No thanks, I’ll skip that one.”)  But they did have this huge vat where they were brewing habu sake, or liquor made from the indigenous poisonous snakes that live here on the island.

 

This beverage is crazy expensive; from this sign it seems that this jar (which, granted, would last a long time because the stuff is potent) would cost 43,365 yen (converted to the current US dollar: $477, give or take depending on what exchange rate you get.)  And that’s with 30% off.

From there it was on to the Aisa dancing show, and the first time we got to this point it was already halfway through the performance.  So we sat down to watch it, then headed to the Habu Museum to learn about snakes and see that show.

So it turns out that snakes are another thing Tony doesn’t like (heights being another, airborne jumps and pay notwithstanding).  He sat three rows back from the stage but I convinced Bear to sit right up front with me.  We opted not to have our picture taken with a large python draped over our necks, but we did get to see the wranglers play with a habu:

Then there was a swimming race: mongoose vs. water snake.  The mongoose won by a lot.

And a cobra:

who apparently has peripheral vision but not 360 degrees’ worth like other species because of its hood.  And we know this because the foolish wrangler had the audacity to slap the cobra on the back of its head numerous times.

After the show ended we were able to pet turtles and large lizards that looked like a cross between geckos and iguanas, as well as hermit crabs and non-poisonous snakes. And then we headed back for the next performance of the Eisa show, getting there early. And then Bug and his daddy got to learn to play these little tambourines while stage-skittish Bear and I stayed in our seats:

and even do a little performance for the audience:

And then there was the show, which, unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures or video of because there are signs everywhere saying that’s not allowed and I’m too much of a rule-follower to go against the grain. But I did find this short video that is a short little compliation of the 30 minute show that I would pay admission to the park to see again:

But it was an incredible performance, to say the least, and Bear’s best part was when the naughty shisa dog seen in the video above approached us and put her entire head in its mouth. 

In the car as we headed home I said to The Critters, “Why don’t you close your eyes and take a nap?” to which Bug replied, “I don’ like taking naps!” and promptly fell asleep 30 seconds later.  He only got to take an hour-long nap before Tony and I woke him up to get some food in him; our unit’s chaplain had set up free childcare for couples to get two hours of alone time, and Tony and I jumped on that train quickly.  We dropped the Critters off with a warning that, “Oh by the way, Bug doesn’t wear diapers anymore” and headed to this Italian restaurant we’d heard great things about and which we learned – upon walking up to it – is currently closed for renovations.  So we backtracked a mile or so to a restaurant closer to the beach that we’d been to for lunch before, hoping we wouldn’t have to wait to be seated. 

As it turned out, we had the entire restaurant to ourselves, save for the cook and the owner/server.  Our meals were perfectly portioned and absolutely delicious, and we almost didn’t know what to do with the sheer quiet surrounding us (though Enya was quietly playing in the background).  We did everything short of licking our plates clean of the sauces (Tony had meat curry; I had garlic and ginger chicken) before heading to a nearby German bakery for dessert and later picking up our babies.  Baths were given, hugs and kisses administered before we climbed into bed to watch two or three episodes of Glee (I found it online for free!) and falling blissfully asleep.

Bear called this “The Best Day Of Her Life”.  I wouldn’t go that far – I think there are at least three other days that qualify for that title in my life – but it was well worth pulling Bear out of school for the day. 

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