Grandpa's Here

Like I said below, Grandpa Dave is here on Okinawa. I am about 6 days behind on posting our little adventures, but I thought I should jump ahead to wish Chris a Happy Birthday and share that Dave is here!



His trip was long and tiring, but he has adapted to the 14 hour time difference VERY well. I hope that it is as easy for him to adjust heading back the other way :)

Birthday boy

My baby boy has turned 16! Grandpa Dave is here to help celebrate so that made this special milestone even more special.

Just TRY it!

WE drive past this place almost every day and I was intrigued by the name, Viking TRY. What kind of restaurant calls itself TRY? This one does and it called to me on our way home from all that sightseeing, so we stopped in for a late lunch.

Viking TRY is a Yakiniku restaurant, so it has small grills imbedded in the center of each table. It is also a buffet, so we went up to the meat cases, picked the meat we wanted to cook and took it back to our table.

In addition to the grilled food we had our choice of curry, rice, potatoes, a few prepared meats and salads, as well as desserts!

Chris enjoyed cooking our food, Lyle enjoyed eating it :) The little grilled cubes of frozen teriyaki hamburger were everyone's favorites.

For dessert we each had mini bowls of ice cream, two different cakes, shaved ice and make it yourself cotton candy (yep, Chris did that one too). A fun place to try and since our other Yakiniku joint closed down, this might have to become the place to take visitors!

The Haunted Hotel

From the main gate at Nakagusuku Ruins you can see one of Okinawa's strangest landmarks, The Royal Hotel. While there are many version of this story, some of the "facts" are consistent.

In the 1970's a Naha businessman saw an opportunity to make some money off the tourists coming to visit Okinawa. He thought a luxury hotel, casino and waterpark was exactly what people needed. He acquired some land and hired some workers, despite the warnings from a nearby monastary that the site was sacred.

He began construction without any blueprints, which is pretty obvious upon walking into the building. There are staircases and hallways that don't go anywhere and rooms that don't seem to have any purpose. Soon after starting this building the workmen began having accidents and dying. Eventually the business man fell ill, went bankrupt and eventually insane.

The building was never finished or inhabited. One version of the story says one of the monks from the monastary lives in the building to maintain a shrine, easing the angry spirits.

This has definitely become the spot for local kids to hangout, with graffiti covering almost every surface. There is even the body of a rusted out car on the second floor!

Lyle and the kids made it to the top, I refused to go down the dark hallway, littered with trash (rats, ya know!). They say I was scared, I say I was safety conscious :)

After the hotel, we headed off for a late lunch.

Nakagusuku Castle Ruins

After finishing up at the Nakamura house we headed just a little ways up the road to our original destination, Nakagusuku Castle (or what is left of it)

We parked in the lot at the bottom of the hill and paid our admission fee at the gate. There was the traditional Japanese music playing over loud speakers at the start of our hike up to the top. Chris and Stephanie hammed it up and "danced" their way up the hill. The first view of the ruins was breathtaking. We had never heard of these ruins (you really only hear about Shuri Castle) so we weren't expecting much, but they were incredible. Okinawa is trying to preserve this historical landmark, and there were some signs missing or unreadable, as well as a few pieces of construction equipment, but overall it was a great place to see.

The highlight of the ruins was definitely the Ufugaa well. We were able to walk the slippery steps down to the bottom. Chris slipped on the last few steps and joked that they called it Ufugaa well because that was the last thing heard for the person that fell in.

Here are the pictures:

From the top of the ruins we spotted a landmark we had only heard about:

The Haunted Hotel, but that is another post :)

Tourist Stop #1

On Monday I gave Chris the Okinawa Guide book and asked him to pick a spot to go see. He chose the Nakagusuku Castle ruins, but on our way there we saw the sign for the Nakamura house and decided to take a small detour.

I am glad we did! The house and the grounds were beautiful. It was a nice walk around the original home and the inside of the house was incredible. At the end of our tour we stopped in to the gift shop to buy some fish food and were suprised to find that our tour included a small snack - Hot tea, to be sweetened with Okinawan brown sugar, and Brown Sugar gelatin dessert. Both were definitely an experience, but good :) Okinawan brown sugar is sweet, but VERY rich, a little goes a long way.

After our treat, we feed the fish then were off to find the castle grounds.

200th post

This is my 200th post on blogger.

This was supposed to be a view of the first of four stops we made on our Martin Luther King Jr Day holiday. But like blogger, slide.com is having a slow upload day. Maybe it is our wonderful server here on Okinawa.

I am off to my knitting group at Starbucks so this is gonna be it for today.

Maybe you will get lucky with two posts tomorrow (if slide ever finished loading my photos)

Just a quick trip

Saturday was a busy day. Stephanie has taken over Chris' paper route and had to deliver the base paper to everyone in our housing area (253 papers in all). Right after that she had to go sell Girl Scout cookies. So when we asked if she wanted to go to a new shopping area off base, we weren't suprised when she said no.

Chris, Lyle and I decided to go without her. We have driven by the Plaza House shopping area many times, since it is on the way from Kadena to Camp Foster (the big Marine base on island), but have never stopped. We were going mainly because we had heard of an Italian Ice Cream shop there called GelloBello that was supposed to be yummy.

We found a spot to park in the garage under the open air mall and decided to start at the top (3rd floor) and work our way down.

The top floor had a few restaurants and an arcade. We wandered to each menu poster and decided we definitely need to go back to try the Indian place. We watched one of the chefs making bread against the sides of a pit oven - very cool! The other places didn't grab our attention (and the arcade was calling "Chris... oh Chris..."). We went to the arcade and tried our luck at the skill games. I was thrilled to find the 10 yen games, there were also slot machines, but since I can't read Kanji, I didn't try them.... yet! Chris won a couple of trinkets for me, then we moved on. After tourning the second floor (mostly clothing stores) we hit the main floor. Before going through these tho, Lyle wanted his ice cream.

We went in search of GelloBello, and found it in the strip mall portion of the shopping center. Unfortunately it was closed, with an official looking sign on it's door. I wonder what it said? Lyle was bummed until we realized there was a small grocery store in the mall. We went in, looked around and found the ice cream freezer:

Chris chose the treat on the top. It was plain vanilla ice cream in a funky bottle type plastic container:

I chose the middle ice cream since it looked like a Toffee bar - I wasn't disappointed, dark chocolate over yummy vanilla ice cream:

Lyle opted for one that looked like it would be a Dreamsicle (the one on the bottom in the picture above):

Turns out it was a Peanut Butter type flavor (very faint) but the big suprise was the Mochi center (gelatinous rice paste). He liked my ice cream better!

Tune in tomorrow for more of our weekend, I am tired of fighting with blogger for today!

Scrappy day

I have been neglecting my family scrapbooks. I keep taking pictures, but have not had any motivation to do anything with them. So I planned today as a scrapday. As soon as I kicked the kids off to school I got out all of my stuff.

I started by finding an 80's station on the computer, set my goal for 20 pages and got to work.

I finished the 20th page as the kids were walking in from a long day at school, I even made them help clean up LOL

I thought I got pictures of all of the pages, but I missed a South Dakota layout and on other (can't figure out which since it's all put away)

I missed all of my scrapping friends today, and thought of each one of you while I was dancing around my living room

Ya Winds some, Ya lose some

(Title courtesy of Lyle)

Star pupil

I finished my "how to knit cables" class just before Christmas. While taking the class to learn the basics, I was also looking up patterns online to show off my new skill. I found a scarf that I really liked, then while browsing some more I found a matching hat. The hat pattern mentioned some wrist warmers...Perfect!

I started the scarf on December 15th, and finished it on January 1. The wrist warmers took a day each, and the hat took me 4 days. What do you think?

School..

A poem by a mother:

My kids went back to school today
Only one word for me to say

HOORAY!

As much as I love being a stay at home mom, there is something to be said for public school :)

I very much enjoyed my quiet day - I vacuumed the whole house, did 3 loads of laundry, loaded and returned my government loaner table and chairs (thanks for your help, Rita), went to my doctor appointment and Chris' doctor appointment, got my hair colored and cut, and even managed to get a couple hours of knitting done.

I hope tomorrow is as relaxing

Vend-A-Lunch

I had heard about a restaurant that used vending machines instead of waitresses. On Friday I dragged Lyle and the kids to check it out
We spent some time looking over the menu, only half was translated into English :(
Put our money into the machine:
Pushed the button for the meal or item we wanted and it gave us this:

Which we gave to the cook behind the counter. We had a seat and he brought us our food, nice and hot:

I got the Garlic Pork Rice with 3 Gyoza,

the kids both selected plain white rice and 5 gyoza

Lyle was adventurous and got a ramen soup with pork,nori (seaweed) and a slice of hard boiled egg floating in it.

We all agreed that the garlic pork rice was the best (in fact, we bought a second meal to share before leaving), Lyle's soup was pretty good, and the gyoza were incredible. We love vending machine food! I heard there was another like it in American Village.... we may be going there next!

How to say "love" in German?

I am sure it is some 15 letter word, but Susan did it in 9 (CHOCOLATE).

She sent me this:

There was another box of chocolate covered gingerbread snacks, but those got opened first and quickly disappeared. I am glad I can't read German to decipher how many calories that might have been LOL

The Cappucino:

is incredibly good. Especially with the cookies :)

Thank you Susan you are wonderful!