Tuesday, April 29, 2014

White Beach Festival and Japanese Holidays

Another weekend, another adventure. Saturday we tried out a new cafe with some friends. I cannot get enough of the cafes on this island. All of the food is so fresh and delicious. The cafes are family owned and run and you can tell they put so much love and thought into their food. I would try a new cafe every day if I could. It was a beautiful day so we took a walk on the seawall and then did a bit of shopping. We also gave in and finally stopped at the Chilis on base. American food is sometimes a necessity. Chips and queso, come to mama! We finally bought a weed eater for our jungle of a yard. Jake spent the evening doing yard work and grilling himself a few brats. It got me so excited to spend evenings in our backyard this summer. Right now it is pretty bare, but we plan on building a table, getting a fire pit, and planting lots of flowers. I am always scared to do too much, though, because I don't want to take away from our wonderful view.

Sunday we got up and cleaned the house and did some work. Then, we headed off with friends for an adventure. We took them to the Don Quijote, which is like a Walmart with an extra amount of sensory overload. There are blink lights and colorful signs every where you look. There are so many cool things to see and they pretty much have anything you could ever want. It originated in Tokyo and has recently become very popular in Okinawa. We then headed to the Navy base just south of us, White Beach. Each base has a festival throughout the year where locals are invited to come onto base. There are food booths, games, and performances. The food ranges from local street food to American food. At this particular festival, they had dragon boat races because it is dragon boat season. The dragon boats are really neat to see because they are teams of around 30 rowing in synchronization to get the boat to move very fast. There was also a riff raft boat race, where the boats could only be made out of cardboard and duct tape.





It was kind of a gloomy day, unfortunately, so we didn't stay too long. We were planning on going to our favorite comfort food restaurant on the base, but it was closed so we ate the festival food instead. Jake got some ribs and they ended up being even better than the ones at the restaurant anyway!

This boy likes his BBQ

On our way home we passed a stream in our neighborhood and saw that they had put up tons of carp flags in celebration of Children's day on May 5th. This week is Golden Week in Japan, which is basically an accumulation of lots of holidays. Many Japanese take time of work during this week. It is the Emperors Birthday, Children's Day, Showa Day, Greenery Day, and Constitutional Memorial Day.  In Okinawa they also have the huge dragon boat races on May 5th. You can see the carp flags all over the place and they are really colorful and fun.





We decided to take Lexie to the beach even though it was very windy. We got to our favorite little beach just in time to watch the swells come in and all of the surfers to head out. We watched big waves hit the shore and waited for the surfers to catch some waves. Unfortunately, they were not having much luck.



Interesting pineapple looking tree. It is not a pineapple, I'm just not quite sure what it's called.

Why do weekends have to end? I think we should just switch and work Saturday and Sunday and then have Monday-Friday as the weekend. Who is with me??

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