June 2013 Monthly Recap

I feel like I've been getting busier and busier, which makes me really glad I started this monthly recap.  Although it doesn't cover everything we've done, it's a good little summary if I haven't gotten a lot of posts in throughout the month.  Aaron has stayed busy with work, and we've gotten a lot done around the house.  We've I gotten a lot more plants, which is a chore in itself to maintain all of them, but they make me happy.  We've also been doing a bunch of wood working projects which I'll share at some point.  We made our own end-grain checker pattern cutting board, our own 6 foot long floating shelf, and a console table behind our couch.  It's finally starting to feel cozy here.  Below are some other things that have been keeping us busy.

One of the bases here held a flightline fair with lots of planes on display for sofa status folks and locals to climb in, take pictures, and ask questions about the planes that are stationed here.  I finally got an up close and personal tour of Aarons tanker.  In typical Kacey style, I climbed all over everything had to get a picture of me in the pilot seat pretending to fly and then laying in the boom pod.  While he worked the fair, I climbed in and out of every osprey, helo, and cargo I could.  More pictures in a future post.  It was pretty neat to see all the locals wanting to learn about everything and how grateful they were that we are here.  

This next picture blows my mind every time I think about it. I've known Aaron nearly 16 years or so, and never EVER once have I seen him eat a pancake like this before now.  Hell, I've never seen anyone eat a pancake like this.  He hollowed it out and poured syrup completely in it.  By the way, these were the best pancakes ever....brown butter is the secret!!!

People ask us a lot of there are weird bugs or rodents here.  From my experience, I'd say not really.  We experienced tons of bugs in Florida, and here I would just say that there are A LOT more of them.  EVERYWHERE.  There's definitely a larger variety of spiders.  And then there's this guy who's been hanging out on our recycle bin for a while.

I dropped a friend off at the airport a few weeks ago and decided to take advantage of my trip south.  I got lost and found some new neighborhoods, and then headed to the Itoman Farmers Market which is now my favorite market to go to here, but a trek from our house. There is one huge building of fruit and produce, one building of fish, one building of restaurants and gift things, a garden center, and a handful of food stands.  I bought myself a couple of the largest oysters I've ever seen, they were shucked and wrapped up in ice for me to go.  I drove down to the southern most cape of the island and ate my oysters on the cliffs with this view.  How is this even my life?!?!?! Seriously...it's just a normal Wednesday.

While I personally didn't care to see the headliner American pop band that played here last weekend, I was curious about the turnout and how the base put on this type of all day music festival.  It was pretty freaking professional, I was impressed. And I couldn't believe how many people there there. It was insane to see that many people on base, never mind that many Americans in one place in Japan.  I couldn't get enough of the sunset, and left shortly after it set.

I've been trying to get some volunteer hours under my belt, and am still in the process of applying through different places.  I'm officially a volunteer with the USO - which just reminded me that I need to pick up my volunteer appreciation certificate!!! Earlier this month I volunteered at 6am to set up a tent and grills and whip up hundreds of pancakes for the runners of a 5k.  It was a lot of fun and everyone was super nice, so I've already signed up for future events.

I was really excited that I got to dog-sit for 2 labs for a few days. It made me miss Bosco a whole bunch, but it felt good to be appreciated by a Labrador for a while.  Those of you with labs know exactly what I mean.

We spent a hot day up north and hiked Hiji Falls.  Bring lots of water, there are 5 million stairs.

Spelling gone wrong.  Cantion = caution and an undocumented wraning = warning.

We've got bullfighting here in Okinawa, and it's a little different that what you probably think.  This time, there are bulls fighting each other.  The first one to chicken out and turn to run away loses.  Trainers are there to encourage the bulls to stay mad and against one another.  It was really awesome to go to a local event like this.  I'd like to do a post on it soon.

Oh! Here's a picture of me going wood shopping.  This is for our console table.  Do you have any idea how awkward it is to put a 10 ft board in a itsy-bitsy car (that is NOT 10ft long) all by yourself in the tiniest parking space ever while chasing down your lumber cart as the wind whips it around the parking lot?  It's awkward.  I'm surprised no one stopped me with it sticking out the window.

One of the most exciting this I did this month happened just this past Sunday.  We went deep sea fishing with  some friends about 3 hours off the coast of Okinawa.  Our boat of 10 people caught about 70 fish, mostly Yellowfin Tuna and Skipjack Tuna.  This is one of the smaller tunas, on average they were 2-2.5 feet long.  Someone on the boat caught a 70lb tuna on a drift line and a 3.5ft wahoo while trolling.  It was a crazy long day, being on the boat for about 11 hours, but it was so much fun and I'm such a happy girl seeing all of the fish in my freezer.  Oh man, the amount of raw tuna we've consumed the past few days is probably criminal.  So amazing.

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Iejima (Ie Island)

After reading my last post on my adventures with Kassie on Kourijima, I know you're just dying to find out if we ever made it to Iejima, our original adventure destination.  We woke up early, drove up the oh-so-familiar-by-now highway and arrived at the ferry terminal to find a packed parking lot and long lines.  This looked much more promising!  The lines moved fast and within a few minutes, Kassie was loading her bike up in the storage area of the boat and I was wading through a sea of people to find a spot to claim for our 30 minute ride.

Be sure to check out Kassie's blog and recap of our trip here.

As soon as the ferry hit land, I hopped off to find a bike rental place.  The day before I totally forgot that I knew how to say bicycle in Japanese, but this time I took the opportunity to practice asking where they were.  They were right around the corner.  Duh.  The ferry cost about $14 round trip per person, and I think Kassie paid about $12 to bring her bike, which, if you have one is definitely the way to go.  I rented a bike for the day for $10, but being out in the salty island air, it was rusted to shit, and I had even harder of a time this day than I did the previous.  If you were to bring a car to the island, you would need to make a reservation and it costs something like $40-$50, which isn't bad if you have a car load of people and are staying for a few days.

We caught up with each other and headed off to find some cool stuff.  We ended up finding a neat little beach all to ourselves and hunted for sea glass, interesting shells, and this guy.

I played with the hermit crab for waaay to long trying to get a focused picture of him/her while Kassie went exploring along the cliff.  She was gone for a while and I thought I should go look for her, but then I dozed off for a few minutes laying on some coral.  Good friend I am, ha!!!

We biked a few kilometers to the Hibiscus Garden which housed over 1,000 different varieties.  While they had really nice walking paths and outdoor gardens, they hadn't bloomed yet, so we headed inside a giant greenhouse, which was still really fun.

There were so many, each on more beautiful than the last.

We couldn't get over how tall the plants were and how large each flower was.  I had never seen anything like it before.  Some were literally bigger than my head!!!

Next up was the feature of the week.  The Lily Festival!!!  We followed tour buses and the crowds through the windy streets until we found a place to park our bikes unchained next to about 2034982349 other bikes.    Walking just a little ways down a path, we came across this view!

Here we grabbed some lunch from some food vendors, listened to music playing from the stage and people watched.

I think we both expected something a little different from this.  For some reason I was thinking that all these lilies would be growing wild, but it made total sense that they are maintained and cared for.  There were people working in nearly every patch of lilies picking off dead petals and fallen leaves to keep everything looking pristine.  I thought that was pretty impressive.

Don't get me wrong, we both loved the Lily Festival, and I would definitely recommend anyone who lives here to go to it.  I mean, come on, how could you not love being in a field next to the ocean in a middle of these gorgeous flowers.  The whole island as a whole was awesome, and definitely go exploring outside of the 'festival'.

Mandatory Japanese pose of the day.

We strayed off the beaten path, not far at all from the festival and climbed over a ton of coral (that stuff is SHARP!  It ripped through my sneaker!) to spy on some fisherman on the cliff.  While we were standing there, some water shot up through a little tiny crack in the coral, so we had fun getting as close as we could to it without being blasted and taking a ton of pictures.  Check out Kassie's blog for a hilarious but mega unflattering picture of me posing 'terrified' of it.  Hehe.

We knew it was about time to get back on our bikes and check out at least one more place before we had to catch the ferry.  Ugh...there were hills, and my rusty bike didn't want to peddle and we were tired and my butt hurt.  But then....we arrived at Wajee View Point, which was worth every second.  Seriously, check out this view!!!

Time to head back.  We had only seen a fraction of the island, and thought we had missed all of the historical sites until we passed this building which had been destroyed during WWII.  It was too bad we couldn't read about it, all we knew was that it was a historic site.

Iejima played a major role in Japan surrendering to the US during the war.  There are 3 runways that still exist, one which is still used for civilian aircraft.  The US Marines use the island as a training facility, and we were able to watch some paratroopers jump out of an Osprey!!! Farming is huge on the island (as is most of Okinawa), well, as huge as could be on a 9 square mile plot of land, and raise tons of things including ducks, cattle, flowers, tobacco, potatoes, fish, and probably tons others I don't know about.  There is even a rum distillery.  We got the impression that you cannot tour the factory, but we did bring some home to try!

We headed back and returned my bike, and as we were walking away, we were yelled at in Japanese to come back and get a free snowcone!  We each got one and enjoyed our surprise treat sitting in the shade.  It was very appreciated after being in the blazing sun for hours!

After buying some treats for the boys back home, and some lilies for ourselves, we headed back.  The ferry ride back was uneventful and quiet.  We plopped down in our hidden little spot on the top deck and relaxed, uploaded photos of the day, and talked about how awesome our island adventures were.  We'd love to go back, maybe bringing the guys and check out the other side of the island, some of the historic stuff, climb the mountain and go into the caves.  Maybe we could stay at the resort of even camp in the winter.

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Kouri-Jima (Kouri Island)

I'm so behind on blogging it's crazy, but I've been busy, so definitely no regrets going on here.  A few months back I met Kassie of Mr. & Mrs. O and Crafts and Carafes online and after following each others social media accounts for a few weeks, it was obvious we were meant to be friends.  I sort of fell in friend-love with her when I learned she doesn't wait around for her husband or anyone else to go off exploring.  It's harder then you'd think to find people like us!

So for our first get together, we planned on biking around Ie Island and visiting the Lily Festival there.  Honestly, I was a little nervous.  Over the past few years I've gotten really out of shape, and while I've been working on that pretty religiously, I still had no idea what kind of 'biking' my new friend expected to do.  After all, she was bringing her bike, and I was renting one.  I just imagined me at the bottom of a hill passed out yelling "Go on...leave me....save yourself..." *Gulp*

It wasn't like that at all.  We realized we both wanted something easy going and casual.  To be outside and explore.  And it was actually pretty funny, apparently Kassie got a little freaked out when I showed up at her house in exercise type clothing, she thought I was so marathon biker or something.  HA!  I quickly explained that comfort and sweat control were my biggest priorities while biking all day in 500% humidity.

Anyway, we drove over an hour to the ferry building for our trip to Ie Island, and both of us were thinking, "Wow! There's barely anyone here, that's awesome! So glad we came on a weekday." Um.  Nope.  Turns out that the ferry runs hourly during the lily festival except for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday - when we showed up.  Sooo....basically if we waited for the next ferry, we would be able to spend 30 minutes on the island before having to go back.  Not going to happen.  That's the sort of adventures you encounter when can't read the local language. We grabbed some more pamphlets and using those combined with the ferry building signs, we were able to decipher the schedule for the next day and headed out to find a new adventure for the current day.

A short drive later, we found a few other islands accessible by car (later to learn we drove across the largest bridge on Okinawa), Kouri Island.  We found a bike rental, and started off strong.  Until we hit the first hill.

We worked hard getting ourselves up that first hill, and decided to reward ourselves with lunch at the first cafe we saw.  It was pretty tasty, my meal below was a pork set, with some soup, custard, salads, fried veggies, rice, etc.  It hit the spot for sure.

The view didn't hurt either.

Lunch gave us a much needed boost of energy, and I appreciated that we both wanted to stop a lot and take pictures.  We explored down some trails (which got a little too crazy for the bikes) and found some gorgeous spots.  We also joked/not-joked about habu snakes while making our way through the jungle.

It was well worth a little mud and bushes to find this view on the other side.  Kassie climbed down a little ways, but the tide was coming in and the waves were crashing pretty hard.  It was awesome and so peaceful!

I couldn't resist taking a picture with the cow with the largest nipples in the world.  But really, who could?

There were the cutest little island homes, farms, and vegetable stands all over the island.  These buoys remind me of Maine a bit.  You don't often see this many strung up around here.

It was such a perfect day for a bike ride, and it was pretty hilarious how much we struggled up hills.  And I learned how much rental bikes suck.  My brakes were barely working and made this awful screeching sounds every time I touched them, so we constantly laughed about it and imagined me flying off the road into the ocean, but all worked out well.

We were pleasantly surprised to see the bridge again, while we were biking for quite a long time, we thought we had only gone half way.  When I handed in the bike, I noticed this little guy hanging out next door.  I tried to say hi, but he didn't really want anything to do with me.

We walked around the beach area, which had a couple little food stands and a nice produce market, where we picked up some goodies to bring home for the boys.

After leaving Kouri Island we found another little spot on Yagiji Island and sat there watching the tide go come in and taking pictures.  I think it was here that I realized it was my first day in Okinawa that I didn't see one other American.  It was really peaceful and nice to be explore areas the locals do, a little bit off-the-beaten-path from foreigners.

Kassie took some great photos of our day, including the one of us below (Thanks Kassie!!!), so definitely go check out her blog.  I don't think we realized how tired we were, but before we even got home, we planned for another Ie Island and Lily Fest trip early the next morning.

Check back soon for our Ie-Jima adventures!!!

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Okinawa World

I might have mentioned this before, but it's totally true.  We often run into the problem of what to do, because we have so many options, it's hard for us to narrow it down.  Last month it rained a ton, so when the clouds parted, even slightly, we jumped on the opportunity to get outside.  We decided to go to Okinawa's theme park - Okinawa World with some new friends.

This park is all things Okinawa, including Gyokusendo, the second largest cave in the country, Kingdom Village, a replica of old time Okinawa with hands on folk craft workshops, and a Habu Center, a museum of Okinawa's famous deadly snake!

These Shisa dogs might be my favorite I've ever seen, and I really like this picture of us with them. I just wish that damn bench was better placed. 

We bought tickets to see the entire park, which cost about 1600 yen (approx $16.85 at time of purchase), and we spent maybe 3 hours here without doing any hands on activities.  The park was nicely laid out.  As soon as you enter, you can go downstairs into the cave where you walk all the way underground to the far end of the park, and then you make your way back to the entrance seeing all of the above ground attractions.  Here is the largest room of the cave.

In the 850 meters open to the public (I believe you can go spelunking here also), there was a small stream, and tons of beautiful stalactites and stalagmites.

Once emerging from the cave, we were immediately at the villages.  Here I got myself a cup of delicious fresh made sugar cane juice, here's a woman making mine.

Right next door we watched some Ryukyu glass making and watched as some people were taught how to make it.  We didn't participate this time, but it's definitely something I want to do while we are here.

In this little area, there were tons of buildings where you could learn how to do basket weaving, fabric dyeing, paper making, pottery, etc...  There were also small museums and attractions going over folklore and history.

While in the village, we were able to watch an Eisa dance show.  Eisa is a folk dance originating in Okinawa and incorporates singing, chanting, drumming, dancing, and sanshin playing. They wear beautiful costumes and it's really mesmerizing. I can't to go to more festivals with these performances.  We weren't able to take pictures, but if you get the chance, definitely google or youtube it.

They did have a beer and habu sake brewery on site.  We do plan on getting some habu sake at some point, but it isn't cheap, so I snagged some Okinawan beer to bring home instead.

One thing we were looking forward to the most was the Habu center and show.  The show was entirely in Japanese, but we were able to figure out what was going on, the host was very entertaining.  Later we realized there were pamphlets in English for us to follow along - but it was even more fun figuring it all out.  Here they raced a mongoose and a habu snake in water to see which was fastest.  I expect Sammy cat would run just as fast as that mongoose did in order to get out of the water.

Another demonstration showed how snakes can feel the temperature change around them, and how they know what is a predator or not.  The pink balloon was soaked in water water while the white balloon was room temperature.  We all kept our eyes on the habu the entire time and he moved so fast you could barely see...but it went from curled up to popping that balloon in a fraction of a second.  Yikes!

This next one was the most fucked up demonstration of a snake I've ever seen.  If you are reading this on Okinawa and haven't been or heard of what he does to this cobra, then stop reading now.  Go there and watch it.  Don't let me ruin the ending for you.

So anyway, this guy throws the cobra down and he shows how the cobra can only see in front of them and 45° to either side.  They can also only strike in those areas and as far out as they are sitting up.  To actually show us this, because apparently just telling us this (even in Japanese) wasn't good enough, this crazy motherfucker teased the snake with his foot.  While the snake was paying attention to his foot, the guy bent down OVER the snake and WHACKED it on the back of it's head.  Like...not just touched it.  He smacked this thing crazy hard, which pissed the snake off, but it didn't know where it came from.  So he laughs as the audience gasps, and then the guy DOES IT AGAIN.  He bends over the fucking snake and punches it in the back of the head.  What the fuck?!?!!?  So why not.....he DOES IT AGAIN!!!!  Jesus....

So now the snake is really ticked, and the guy, in order to calm it down, grabs it by the back of it's tail (what the fuck, right? and picks it up and SHAKES the things senseless.  I'm not even kidding.  He picked it up and shook and spun it like you would a rope, the snake is flopping around everywhere, and when he puts it back on the ground, the cobras hood is back down and it's all mellow again.  The end.  Sheesh.

After the show, we wandered around the museum and small wildlife center where we saw pits full of snakes, the mongoose from the water show and a bunch of other creatures.

I'm not sure what it is, but we tend to really like giant tortoises.

Sorry if this makes you gag.  Apparently people had that reaction when I posted these next photos on instagram.  I thought it was grotesquely amazing!

We had a lot of fun here.  Sure, it was touristy, but we learned a bunch of stuff and it turned into a great day trip with friends.

On a final note, please don't throw trash at "this snakes".

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