Pottery Village

Pottery village is a little like Ryukyu glass. They do all the blown glass stuff but they also have more clay works, hence pottery village. Instead of just a couple stores though you walk down the street to each shop that is also connected to their houses. The things these people make are amazing and they get to work so close to home too! Some of the pieces are extremely expensive and there are quite a few that are display only because the artist/creator? is dead. At the bottom of the village is the huge kiln where they fire all their pottery, it's neat but I wish I could've gone inside.

Rolly slide!!

All around Okinawa you can find fun parks. At a few of these parks they have amazingly awesome slides. The first ones are made of metal bars that roll as you go down. If you go down bare legged I hear it's very painful so you have to take a piece of cardboard to slide down on. The one I went down was pretty long and I got going pretty fast! I'm telling you, they need these things in the states!! The second type of slide is like those water slides you see where you drop pretty much straight down. It took me about five minutes of hanging before I finally let go the first time but after that it wasn't so bad. The only problem with this one is that my cardboard kept slipping out from under me so I never made it all the way down but I still had plenty of fun laughing at myself for being scared to let go!

Three in one

Okay here goes the rest of the Nago trip. At the ocean expo park we made a stop at the culture museum. They had bits and pieces from Micronesia, Southeast Asia, Polynesia, Japan, and a few others. There were a lot of cool old artifacts and lots of cool ships and small boats. My favorite was the spirit ship. It was the biggest display and I didn't get a very good picture but it has a lot of lanterns and papers on it. I'm not sure at all but I think it has to do with bringing their dead back to them...

The last place we stopped at the ocean expo park was the tropical dream tower. They have three greenhouses, a lot of pretty gardens, and a spiral tower you can climb to see the view. The best greenhouse was the fruit tree greenhouse. They have some majorly weird fruit trees there that I would have loved to have sampled if I wouldn't have been kicked out.

Our last stop before leaving Nago was Cape Hedo. It is the farthest north you can go on the island. It is pretty with a great view and great scenery on the way but I expected much more. I think if I could read all the signs and whatnot it would have been better but it is still not something I would have wanted to miss. It is a bit abandoned and not many people were there when we were but like I said, the view is amazing!

The Okinawa Marriott

For our trip up north we stayed in the Okinawa Marriott which is pretty nice. We had a package that gave us 3 meals and a free trip to the spa! In the room we all had our own little bed and they give you these awesome kimonos for sleeping and slippers to wear in your room (super comfy by the way). There was a little balcony and our view was ridiculously cool if only for the face that there was a soccer field right below us. It just so happened that there was a soccer game starting as we got there too. Can anybody say free soccer? Woo!! Our trip to the spa was nice and I got a few pictures but there were four different hot tubs and a cold tub, showers, and a big mirror with brushes, hair dryers, toothbrushes and anything else you could possibly need! So, after the spa we went to dinner. We picked the traditional Japanese style meal and was for the most part delicious. They served us fish, octopus, jellyfish, some weird turban shell thing... Also boiled green peas, but as you'll see on the picture it says boiled green peace... The one thing I had to try while I was here is the sake. I really expected it to be very gross but I found that it's actually pretty good, at least the kind I had was. The other good thing about all the hotels up there is that most have their own beaches. My mom and I went out in the morning before everyone got there and I'm pretty sure we saw some people making a music video. Too bad I don't speak Japanese otherwise I might have had a famous Asian's autograph...