Exploring the Island

I have officially been in Japan by myself for one whole week now. One more to go before I pick Matt up at the airport. He had a dental conference in San Diego and then flew back to MN to visit family and be in a friend's wedding. I went back home in November and do not have any leave left for work, so I was unable to go this time. It is so hard knowing that Matt is home and I am not. This weekend was the hardest. There wasn't a whole lot going on and it has been very quiet and lonely. Chile and I went on a long walk up and down the beach to pass time and I went in to work for a couple hours. I have begun my countdown for our trip home in June...124 days! :)
Anyways...we have experienced a few fun things in Okinawa since my last post. We went to a professional Japanese basketball game, visited Dacho Land (Dacho means ostrich in Japanese), visited Neo Park (what we like to call the interactive zoo), and drove up north to see the beautiful cherry blossoms in bloom.
The basketball game was the Okinawa Kings vs. a team from mainland Japan (I can't remember their name). The games are nothing like pro basketball games in the states. It was in a gym that was about the same size as a high school gym. Everyone did yell cheers such as "defense" but when these cheers were not going it was very quiet. Unfortunately the Kings lost that night, but we found out later that they are in 1st place. Go Kings! We were able to take a picture with the mascot. While we were posing he kept saying"happy, happy!"

At Dacho Land we got to feed a bunch of ostriches. They are very funny animals. I was very scared they would hurt my hand, as you can tell from the video, I did not want them to get too close. Matt walked up to them right away and held out his hand. One of them tried to eat his thumb. In May we will go back and go on ostrich rides. See that ostrich sneaking up on me? They are sneaky!

Neo Park was very neat. When you walk in, you are all of a sudden surrounded by tons of birds. If you have a fear of birds, this would not be a happy place for you. You can buy food bags and feed them. They follow you as far as they can trying to get their food. Many of the animals are not in cages, including some monkeys, birds, flamingos, BIG bats, peacocks, and all those at the petting zoo. The petting zoo was very different than any I have ever seen. The big attraction there were dogs. They had dogs chained up for people to walk, and then they had the little dogs running around a closed off area for people to pet them. They also had a grown warthog and a baby warthog running around that area. The baby one was my favorite, but I felt so bad for him because as soon as you would pick him up he would cuddle into you and try to go to sleep. He was exhausted! Finally him and another dog were able to cuddle together for a nap. In the petting area, a Japanese guy gave me a carrot to share with a goat. :)
The Cherry Blossom festival is a BIG deal here. We were thinking to avoid crowds we would go look at the cherry blossoms a week before hand. We were wrong. There were soooo many people I wouldn't even want to see what it would be like at the festival. It took us about an hour to drive to Mt. Yaedike and then another hour or so to drive up the mountain due to all the traffic and people walking all on the same street. We walked around for a bit and took pictures of the cherry blossoms and then tried to make our trek back down the mountain. It took over 2 hours to get home. There was A LOT of driving that day. The cherry blossoms were very beautiful.

There were little green birds flying in the cherry blossoms. You could barely see them.

A view from high up on the mountain.
Yes, there is a car called "that's".

I can't believe it is already February! Six months of our Okinawan experience is over and 2.5 years to go! :)