Good morning after another wonderful night at sea. This morning we awoke to fog! So much fog that we couldn’t even see the dock! This morning we got breakfast delivered from room service and enjoyed some time on the deck. We were disembarking late today and we knew it would take even longer because Japan loves paperwork every person on this ship (There are 4500 people) had to go through a multi step interview before we could leave the ship. Lets just say it took forever.
Once we were off the boat we then had to line up for the shuttle bus as the city was really far away (we were parked in the shipping port) the weather was very overcast and as we got into the middle of town it started raining. We ducked into Lawson to get some umbrellas and Anthony decided that he really needed another Karage-Kun.
We wandered down the main street looking for a particular shop and I saw the giant lion statues. Okinawa is known for many things but two of the main things are Sisha (lion statues) and spam. Shisa are seen everywhere all over Okinawa we saw them on nearly every house and business. They are always shown as a couple. A closed-mouth female supposed to keep in the good spirits and an open-mouthed male supposed to scare evil spirits away.
Our next stop was to a shop that sells Pork Tamago Onigiri (Spam & egg onigiri) We found what is considered the best place ordered some and it was actually pretty good. Why is SPAM so big in Okinawa you ask? Well after the War during American occupation it was considered a luxury imported food and became very popular here.
We needed to get to get down to the dock area to catch a underwater viewing boat so we hiked across town and grabbed the monorail. Okinawa have these pools of water along the streets with fish in them. I am unsure what they are for but they are cool.
We arrived and found where we would take the Orca Cruise from. We checked the conditions of the day which based on the weather were not the best and then we were taken out to the boat.
This cruise was really cool. We got to head out onto the ocean and actually pass the cruise ship! Once we had gotten a little further out of the bay we were invited down into the underwater observatory. We saw so many fish although it was so hard to take pictures of them. We also got to see many types of coral. The best bit is there were only 7 people on the boat so we had so much space.
We had one last thing to check off our list and that was to go to Blue Seal. Blue Seal is an ice-cream company that have been famous in Okinawa for a long time its slogan is “Born in America, raised in Okinawa”. We tried all of there local flavours and they were really great. We also saw so many people walking around in the merch of the store.
With that it was back to the ship on a very crowded bus, so crowded that people even sat in pull down chairs in the aisle. It was a great day even through our time was shortened by Japanese procedures and the weather.
