Day 360

JAPAN - OKINAWA (DAY 2)

I got into Okinawa at night.  My flight had been delayed, and I couldn't find my rental car service.  Eventually someone helped me, I found the shuttle to the rental car place, and they hooked me up with my cute little car:

A Mazda of some sort.

It was cute and roomy and it had glorious air conditioning, which I used 100% of the time.  (Did I mention it was about 90 degrees, sunny, and super humid in Okinawa?  Well, it was.)  It also came with an English-speaking GPS, as promised by the rental place.

Technically they didn't lie to me, as the GPS did in fact speak English.  But because you had to input the data in Japanese, the stupid thing was next to useless.  The only way to use it (for me) was to put in a special phone number (that wasn't really a phone number, because you couldn't call it, but they called it a phone number nonetheless) and hope it got you close.  It didn't always work, and several times it took me to the completely wrong place.  But it was better than nothing, and it at least showed me where I was on the map.  So no, they didn't lie, but they definitely misled me!

Anyway, as you may or may not know, Japan is an island and therefore they drive on the left.  All the controls, like the blinkers and headlights and windshield wipers, are also reversed.  It took a bit of concentration, and I was glad there were lots of cars on the road.  I drove about 4km to the GPS location of my hostel (not the actual location, it took about 10 minutes to find the real place) and was told that I had to find a carpark.  This was significantly more difficult than it sounds, due to lots of one-way streets, and the fact that I didn't know what a Japanese stop sign looked like.

Pro tip: it looks like this.

Amazingly, I only turned into oncoming traffic once!  And here's where it gets crazy: nobody honked at me.  About six cars around me came to a complete stop and patiently waited for me to get into the correct lane.  It was nice to be able to think without a bunch of horns and screaming.  Thank you, kind Japanese drivers.  That would never happen in America.

I finally found a parking garage, parked my car, and had no idea how to pay.  I ended up leaving a hastily-scribbled note in (probably poor) Japanese that said something to the effect of: "I am a foreigner.  I don't understand this carpark.  I will pay tomorrow.  I'm sorry."   And then I went to Family Mart for a lackluster dinner of ramen.

The first night, my hostel was... like a kennel, I guess is the best way to describe it.  It was called the Kerama Guesthouse in Naha (the main southern city of Okinawa Island, where the airport is) and it was very very cheap.  That's about the only good thing I can say.  The beds on the women-only floor were actually wooden box-capsules with a hanging sheet for privacy.  Like dog crates.  They were uncomfortable.  The single shower was very dirty.  Nobody spoke any passable English.  But hey, it was cheap!

Here's some photos from their website, which look much nicer and cleaner than when I visited.

If there's one thing I have learned from this trip, it's this:
don't try to find hostels at night.

The main room.  The kitchen is on the right.

The kitchen, again, much cleaner than when I visited.

Inside the dormitory.  There are six 'crate' beds, each with a privacy sheet pinned on.
Ladders help you get into the top bunks, but they're awkwardly placed and hard to use.

This is one of the 'crates.'  It was not comfortable by any stretch of the imagination.
It did seem fairly clean though, to be fair.

A photo of the Kerama Guesthouse from their guest photo page.

On a related note, if you snore in a hostel dormitory, you're going to burn in a very special level of hell.  A level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater.

The next morning I woke up at 6am, packed up, and got the heck out of there.  My car was still in the carpark (thank goodness) and I discovered it was actually stuck there.

Carpark.

See those metal plates between the yellow concrete?  When a car parks in the spot, the metal plate raises up, effectively trapping your car.

Another trapped car in the carpark.

My car in a different carpark, but with the same barrier.

The payment machine had zero English whatsoever and not even any pictures to help, but I figured it out and miraculously released my car from the carpark prison.  (Okay, it wasn't actually that difficult to figure out.  You got me.)

I had planned to go camping instead of getting accommodations, and the Marine Corps Community Services (MCCS) people had assured me that civilians could rent equipment from them.  Just one problem: they failed to mention that they couldn't get me onto the base to get said equipment.  I tried my best, but they wouldn't help me out.  Camping was a no-go, and I had no plans for the night.  But hey, a car is a place to sleep if you're desperate, so I decided not to worry about it.  Like a dead fish, I would go with the flow.  

I wanted to get out of Naha as quickly as possible, but there was one thing I couldn't pass up: the Tsuboya Pottery Village, a historical area where they make and sell traditional Okinawan pottery.  You may not know this about me, but I love pottery.  Specifically teaware.  I love tea, teapots, teacups, anything tea-related.  I currently have... oh, seven or eight teapots.  The only souvenirs I buy are teaware and fridge magnets.  They're useful!

Anyway, I got to the pottery village at 9am and quickly realized that nothing in Japan opens until 10am.  I puttered around until the Tsuboya Pottery Museum opened, which was cheap and had air conditioning and gave me an iPad with an English video/audio tour.  It was a nice little museum, and I'm glad I visited because I learned what all the different types of pottery were for.  If I hadn't gone, I probably wouldn't have had a clue what anything was.  It was a nice way to spend 30 minutes, and when I got out everything was open!

The English is REAL proper English!  Yay!

Cute upstairs part where they've got the remains of an ancient kiln.
Notice those little lion-dudes on either side of the stairs?  We'll get to them later.

Here's some examples of traditional Okinawan pottery.  The main theme seems to be fish, and the colors blue and red.

Fun story: I tried to buy one of these here teacups because they're cute and they cost Y7000.  I thought that was about $7.  I was off by a power of ten; these babies are about 70 bucks each.  I have no idea why.  I didn't realize my mistake until the shopkeeper had already packaged it up nicely and fed me candy and coffee.  Thank goodness I was paying with cash and not my credit card, or I might not have noticed!  (No, I didn't buy it.  I just apologized a lot and ran away.)

What are these tiny teacups?  They're not for tea, they're for the traditional Okinawan liquor, awamori.  It's made from rice, and it's distilled instead of brewed.  (I don't know how that makes a difference, to be honest, but now we both know a useless factoid.)  It's strong stuff.

Awww wittle baby cups!

These weird-looking things are awamori flasks.  I think they used to be carried near the hip or shoulder, and these are just baby ones; I saw some pretty gigantic ones that could intoxicate a whole party.  I'm 95% sure these are just for decoration now.

Looks like a heavy way to carry alcohol.  We've come so far in flask technology.

They are pretty though.

There were also lots of dragon teapots.  If you think they look cool, you should watch a video of someone making them.  Waaaay cool.  After watching someone craft one of these, I feel like a talentless troll.

The most popular type of pottery is Shisa statues.  These little lion-dog dudes are called Shisa, and they're used to ward off evil spirits.  They typically come in pairs, and usually the right Shisa has an open mouth (to ward off the bad spirits) and the left Shisa's mouth is closed (to keep in good spirits).    They're often placed on rooftops, entrances, and basically anywhere one might fit.  They're cute or scary, depending on the artist, but also quite expensive and not particularly useful, so I didn't buy any.  (I did buy some Shisa-head magnets though.)

I bought a few teacups, but they were packaged up so nicely that I don't have any photos; I mailed them back to the States with the really slow/cheap option, so they should get there around the time I return.

I also found this gem, but I didn't buy it on account of it being ridiculously impractical:

BUT SO COOL.

Most of the pottery shops looked like this:

Almost all the people working in the pottery shops were old Japanese women.  Several of them insisted on feeding me Okinawan sugar candies, which are basically crunchy chunks of molasses.  They weren't very good, but I was polite and ate about seven before I finally started saying to them.  "Dieto o shitemasu."  (I'm on a diet.)  One women refused to let me leave without having hot tea, hot coffee, and candies.  (Both the Japanese and Koreans believe that drinking/eating hot things will make you cool down in the summer.)  I talked with her for about 20 minutes, switching back and forth between broken English and broken Japanese.  It was very, very cool to be able to communicate, even just at the basic level.

Right next to the pottery village is a cool market, which has a large variety of offerings and is covered--and boy did I need a break from the sun.  There were Y100 stores (like dollar stores), used item stores (with some very cool stuff), food shops, and clothing stores.  I saw my favorite shirt set ever, and I wish I had two other people to wear it with, or three children to force it on:

Whaleshark shirts!  This is ridiculously cute.

There were also lots of souvenir shops, which featured various Shisa stuff, awamori bottles, and a variety of goya-themed items.  What's a goya, you ask?  This is a goya:

...ew.

It looks and feels like somebody tried to make a cucumber out of wax, but then left it standing up in the sun so that the wax started to melt.  Alternatively, it looks like a cucumber with a severe case of herpes.  It tastes very bitter and bad.  It's also extremely healthy, very popular in Okinawa, easy to grow, and is often attributed as a main reason why Okinawans have the longest lifespan in the world.  (But it's gross.)

The inside.

Got some weird seeds.

The proper scientific name is Momordica charantia, in case you want to buy the seeds and live forever too.  It's got a bit of a cultish reputation, which is probably why I found a small variety of goya sex toys in the souvenir shop.  Just out in the open next to the cash registers, near floor level.  There were kids in there!  Doesn't seem right.  And who exactly looked at this herpes-ridden-pickle fruit and thought, "Yes, that will do nicely, I should definitely make a variety of sex toys in this shape"?

But I digress.

After my shopping, a very nice and English-speaking man at the museum helped me figure out what beach to hit that day.  I didn't come to this island paradise for pottery, after all.  He directed me to Tropical Beach, and even helped me find the GPS-phone-number for the beach.  (Yes, the beach has a phone number.  No, there is no phone there.  I don't get it either.)  

Here's a map showing the stuff I've been talking about.  Naha Airport is the red square at the bottom left.  The circle is the Pottery Village, and the diamond is Kerama Guesthouse.  The blue square the top right is Tropical Beach. 

For scale, the airport and the guesthouse are about 4km/2.5 miles apart.  The island's not that big.

Tropical Beach was... a beach.  I can't say I thought much of the beaches in Japan.  They are very small, crowded, and have less skin showing than your average ski resort.  There are lifeguards and shops, so I was able to buy a towel.  (I was backpacking, and I left my baby towel at the guesthouse by accident, so I shelled out the $20 for a beach towel.  It was worth it.)  

It doesn't get very deep, maybe 5 feet.

There's a shop in the back, and lots of pavilions for cooking meat.  A great place for a picnic, really.

A very limited swimming/tanning area.  (Not that anyone tans here.)

There's a nice little short walking path nearby.

From a bit farther away.

That's the whole beach.  Right there.  The building behind it is a gym.

Remember how I said something about not seeing much skin?

DUDE IT'S LIKE 95 DEGREES AND 80 PERCENT HUMIDITY, WHAT ARE YOU DOING??!

IT DOESN'T EVEN LOOK THIN OR BREATHABLE.

Asians all seem to have this unnatural fear of the sun.  The only people wearing swimsuits (without a long-sleeve shirt and shorts/pants) were foreigners.  It's downright weird.

Not a single inch of skin is showing.  Check out the plastic sun visor.
IT EVEN PROTECTS HER EARS.

Oddly enough, it was ridiculously difficult to find sunblock here.  And waterproof/sweatproof?  Forget about it.

I spent a few hours at the beach, then realized that it was almost 6pm and I didn't have a place to sleep yet.  My phone didn't work in Japan, so I had no internet access.  Fortunately there was a very classy hotel near the beach.  I walked in with my salt-crusted hair and (in Japanese) asked if it was okay to use the business center.  Surprisingly they said it was fine, and about ten minutes later I had booked a last-minute hotel about 30 minutes away through Agoda (a booking website).  

Fun factoid: Japanese keyboards have a smaller space bar than American ones, so you can only hit the space bar with your left thumb.  If you use your right thumb by accident, you'll hit the button that switches you from regular Western letters to Japanese kana letters.  To the best of my knowledge there is no way to turn it back, so if you make that mistake you have to exit the program and open it again.  I wasted a lot of time because of this.

After getting my hotel booked and writing down the GPS-phone-number, I got back in my car and headed to Chatan, to the north.

Right above Ginowan is a little tree in a circle; that's Tropical Beach.  Chatan is at the top.

On the way to Chatan, I found a proper grocery store.  It was glorious.  They were selling rolls of sushi for 77 yen, which is less than a dollar.

Awwww yeaaaaaah.

My shopping basket, which includes a liter of peach iced tea, another peace tea drink, a coffee drink, some awamori (alcohol), sushi, tea (the pink tube), some pokemon-shaped seaweed decorations, an apple (which was disgusting), bananas, and more tea.  I really like tea.

Shopping time!  My favorite place to shop is the grocery store.

Next to the grocery store was my second-favorite store: DAISO.  We have Daiso in Korea and it's my favorite store here, although it's a Japanese company.  Everything you could ever need is in Daiso.  And just when I thought it couldn't get any better, I experienced... JAPANESE DAISO.

It's entirely pink.  It's perfect.

It's like a smaller, Japanese version of Walmart.  I also found some real gems in here:

It appears to be a fake pop-up duck-shaped phallus toy.

Instant boobs!  Surprise!

Also, shampoos and conditioner and body soaps all come in bags here.

This is shampoo.

I finally dragged myself away from Daiso without buying anything--remember, I was backpacking and the airlines have a 7kg carry-on limit that I really did try to stick to--and drove up to my lodgings in Chatan.  It was called the Hamby Inn, and I had a bed in a 6-person all-women dorm.  It was lovely, and the bathrooms were clean and had free toiletries for people who forgot theirs, like razors and combs and toothbrushes.  Just lovely.  

The only downside was a rude Japanese dormmate, who was on the phone for over an hour until at midnight I finally asked her to take it outside.  She had the gall to look annoyed, tell me she was "almost finished," and then continue to talk for another ten minutes.  Oddly enough, Americans seem to be the most polite people in hostels; everybody else lacks basic etiquette.  

Day 2 in Japan was a bit of a whirlwhind.  I definitely slept well that night!  More of my Japanese adventure coming soon.  :)

Cheers,

Ashton