April Monthly Recap

Only a week late with what I was so excited to start doing. Our monthly recap!!!  Below you will find random photos of random experiences in random order that happened randomly in the month of April.  Sometimes were purposely left out because I intend to do a full blog post on, some I will expanding on in other posts both here and at Kacey's Kitchen, and some experiences aren't here because we didn't take pictures!  Enjoy!

If you are looking for a pet, they sell chipmunks at Tabata, a hardware store right at Naval Kadena.  I know.  A chipmunk, for the low price of $100(ish).  A freaking chipmunk!!!

Earlier in the month some of the squadrons here celebrated what's called "Warrior Week".  It's a moral event/tradition involving heritage room crawls (aka a bar crawl), pranks, gifts, a banquet, and yearly awards. I barely participated by helping sew and stuff tiger tails (Aaron's squadron is the "Young Tigers") which were eventually placed on squadron commanders cars in the middle of the night.  I also helped by making some tiger fudge as gifts.

My friends KayCee and Erin (and little Kaylee) came over to help with the tails.  Well, Kaylee managed to play with every item in the living room while Erin did a nice job sneaking up on her pulling out some dvd's.  

Because if you didn't understand the words 'rest room', or a picture of a toilet, someone sitting on a toilet should get the point across.

One day I randomly ran into Shin Koyamada at the Foster Exchange.  Running into the store for a can of spray paint, I managed to stand in a line of only 5 people waiting for an autograph and photo.  Koyamada played opposite of Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai.

Driving over to a fabric shop, I ran into some insane traffic.  I eventually arrived to the source, a building had collapsed into the main road. Whoops. It appeared to have been undergoing construction or demolition already...but I don't think they intended it to fall where it did.

I found an amazing store called ETWS here on the island.  A strange big store that's half housewares half Spencers gifts, with some interesting costumes.

After lunch and a stroll on the beach, we found some rubber shisha dogs.

Please clean away your dog's dung.  With a picture of a pooping dog.  Nice job Japan.

The sunsets here are gorgeous.  What's great about living on this little tiny island is, we can drive 20 minutes to the beach to watch the sun rise, and 5 minutes to the beach to watch the sun set.  While having dinner and drinks one night with friends, we caught this beauty.

A monthly roundup wouldn't be complete without an appearance from the cat.  Never before has she been interested in the dryer, but lately, she wants to climb in it all the time.  We'd like to say she's helping us do laundry, but we know that could never be the truth.

Aaron spent a couple of days working in Guam.  'Working'.  Here's his view from the hotel room.

Here's a photo from my seat at the warrior banquet.  It was held in a hanger and TONS of people we there.  I think something like 6 or 7 squadrons and all their spouses.  Here they were presenting some awards, looks like we may have won something here with how many of our team is standing.

The base offers lots of free (and paid) classes/presentations.  I took a 3 day Japanese For Busy People class and followed it up with a Washi paper craft class.  We made a Japanese candy box.  Might not have been the most exciting hour ever, but it's a great way to get out of the house and meet people.  Know I have no idea what to do with this thing.

Another class I took was a Kimono wearing class. We learned a little about the history of them, and then we each got to learn how to put one on.  It takes forever, even for people who wear them often, depending on the style it could take up to an hour or more to put on.  Fun Fact: A kimono are typically made from a single piece of fabric that's almost 40 feet long.  I'd post more photos, but they weren't at ALL flattering.  This was a lot of fun to do, and now I would actually consider buying one, and actually wearing it.

Oh man, the signs here are great.  Good thing it was here, otherwise I would have tried to pet a snake.  Or not.

Exploring on the island is always amazing.  There are lots of castle ruins on the island, and this was the first one that we checked out.  I'll do a little blurb about this later.

Believe it or not, not every day is sunny and perfect here.  In fact, there were a few weeks in April where it rained and poured every single day.  I used this time to do some crafting.  We have intentions to build our own dining room table at some point, and in the meantime, I found 5 chairs in 2 different styles for FREE (only 1 style shown).  They needed to be stripped down, re painted, and reupholstered.  I'm not sure on the colors of my finished product, but it works for now, and much, much better.

 One of my favorite beaches here.

Beach time always calls for ice cream time.  A famous American ice cream shop here adopted by Okinawans.  Everyone loves Blue Seal...and I mean EVERYONE.  They have some amazing flavors, mine is Ube (purple yam) and Aaron's is Beni-Imo (Japanese sweet potato), both are purple, the beni-imo has a smoky flavor.  Plus, look at their cute cones!!!

Another exploring day (aren't they all exploring days?) with some new friends, we checked out Okinawa World, which is a little heritage park filled with underground caves, craft/heritage village, habu museum and demonstration, and Eisa dancing.  More on that later, but I just wanted to share with you these awesome Shisas! I want to build one!!!

More snake signs.  BTW, there are a shit ton of snakes on the island.  They will bite and kill you, and they will eat your children.  Just saying.  Also...don't throw stones or trash at THIS snakes.

Another beach (I keep showing you pictures at low tide) on the East China Sea side of the island.  This was a great little spot.  When the tide is down you can walk out really far...all the way to the dark part of the water past those last rocks/coral.  Lots of locals were here this day picking scallops.

When on a beach with millions of hermit crabs, the only logical thing to do would be to race them.  We held 2 races, mine lost both.  Next time, Aaron's not allowed to pick out my crab.  We did have couple cross the finish line though.  It was waaay more exciting than it should have been.

Well, even though that doesn't show you everything that we had done this past month, I hope it gives you a little window into our daily life.  I'm excited to share with you some of the food we've been splurging on over at Kacey's Kitchen soon.  Keep an eye out!

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