Al Hotel Fukuoka Ohashimae

... presence by the locals was very evident everywhere that we went.

We will miss Okinawa and hope that perhaps someday we can return to visit again. It was well worth it to make the trip down to this place not only for the warm weather and the friendly people but also to learn that, where we come from in Canada, we haven't known (and hopefully will not know anytime soon) the horrors that the ancestors of the people we visited experienced and still feel the pain from today.

... carnage that took place here -- basically a city the size of Regina wiped out during a battle that lasted several months. Let's hope that nothing like that ever happens again in this beautiful place.

To close out the day, we did something quite strange. As we were walking home we came across a small Russian restaurant called Perestroika. The sign on the front had a picture of Mikhail Gorbachev on it -- cheesy but strangely enticing nonetheless. We decided ...

... the US invasion forces landed near the end of the war. Apparently this was one of the most difficult and bloody battles of the Pacific War. It is hard to believe that this beautiful place was once a WW2 killing ground. Thousands of Americans died here and hundreds of thousands of Japanese died. I'm sure that the war memorials here will be very sobering.

It will definitely be an interesting couple of days.

... a walk to the playground in her extreme stroller. She and another very little girl played on the slides as we and the girl's parents raced around trying to keep them from falling. It was actually not a very toddler-friendly playground, as we had to scale a hill to get up there and navigate the stroller down a staircase to leave. Back at the house, we packed up everything, getting ready to say goodbye to Okinawa in the morning.

On Saturday, I managed to wake up a bit earlier, which is good because we had to be out of the house and on the road to get to the aquarium. Okinawa's aquarium is located near Nago, on the north tip of the island, and is the seconds largest aquarium in the world after the one in Georgia. It also has the largest sheet of plexiglass in the world for its main tank, which holds three whale sharks. We were very excited to see this, even ...

... but we did snag some Anpanman gummies.

When we got home, it was definitely Riley's bedtime, but then Mom, Julia, and I watched UP!, which I got for about 90 cents in Beijing. It worked, but since it is such a new movie, of course it was bootlegged and thus had a laugh track from the movie theater and also some of the writing was in Russian. It was still a good movie though. Afterwards, I fell asleep in about a second, despite this really not very action-packed day.

... with a ****** foot. Then yesterday I went to court to get back my bond from my last apartment. It was a rather fast and much easier process than I had expected. So much so that, it made the real estate company that was in the middle come out looking like a pack of liars. Well, at least I got some money back. But I'm disappointed that there'll be no change to the system. Everyone else will be ripped off. Well, back to the soy coffee.

... vez en Fukuoka, en la isla sur de Japón, Kyushu. Y la confirmación de si ir o no ir, pues eso, la tuve 30 horas antes. Inciso: por Dios, ¡qué gusto volar en Business en vuelos largos! Tumbado como un señor, dormí prácticamente la mitad de las 12 horas entre París y Osaka. Y nada más llegar a Japón, ¿cómo expresarlo? Si alguien ha visto la película Lost in Translation, sabrá de qué estoy hablando, ya que lo primero que choca es el idioma. De repente tuve la misma ...

... s like, they made you take off your shoes but not me. He's wearing white runners. Yea, I was the lucky one. So Stuart and I start talking. He's been teaching here for like 5 years... or something like that. A long time. He's taught me a lot about being here. Such a nice guy. We get on the plane and he is sitting by other foreigners. Me, I am stuck with old Korean people who know no English. And to make matters even better, I sit in the wrong seat. Oops. Stuart makes friends with Mark ...

... British bathrooms. They consider them filthy. But I am not sure why Japanese bathrooms remain so clean. Finally, to this topic, I never ever noticed a line at any lady`s bathroom. Again, I have no explanation for this, except that I did notice that the number of lady`s bathrooms are a lot more than men`s bathrooms, and probably the number of toilets in each such bathroom must be numerous. Maybe by now you are amused about ...