July

In July, we bought our first car! A 2000 Honda Civic. It takes some getting used to driving on the other side of the vehicle and road. Fortunately, the pedals are the same - brakes on the left, gas on the right. However, the turn signal and windshield wiper knobs are switched. So it's easy to tell when someone is new to driving because when they go to turn their blinker on, they hit the windshield wipers instead. Chris and I have both been guilty of this. I am proud to say I have not accidently started driving on the wrong side of the road, but Chris has done it twice, of course both times I was in the car! Here is a few pictures of the car:

As soon as we got the car, we decided to start exploring. We took a ride north to Ocean Expo Park where a festival was being held. It took us about an hour and a half to drive there because we took the main road, rather than the one and only Express Way. But the scenery was beautiful and the road ran along the coast the whole way. When we got there, we had to park a ways away, and catch a shuttle to the park. Chris accidentally stepped in a drainage ditch and had a soggy shoe all day.

Ocean Expo Park is most known for the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium, but also has other things to see and do there. We went to the aquarium first and were very amazed with the different ocean life there. Here are a few pictures, but there are way too many to include all of them:

The picture above is of a Banana Spider. This was our first encounter with them and we had know idea what they were, but let me just say, they are HUGE. We decided to go exploring through the greenery area because there were some paths that led into it. We were moving through and Chris said, "Stop!" He pointed to this giant and we both were terrified. We turned around and realized that we had passed a few more on our way. Chris said, "RUN! Nothing ever gets hurt when it's running!" So we booked it out of there without any harm. We eventually found out that these spiders are not poisonous, but we still have no desire to mess with these suckers!