Thursday, December 29, 2011

Okinawa World and The Mid-Autumn Celebration

In September, we had a four day weekend to enjoy Labor Day Weekend. We were pretty lazy on Friday and Saturday, but we were not going to let Monday go to waste. We decided to check out Okinawa World. Okinawa World is a tourist attraction where they have a snake museum, cave, and a lot of little shops. We paid for all three attractions, but if we were to do it again, we would skip the shopping part.

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A view of the Park entrance (left) and the Habu Museum (right).

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Here’s a picture to show just how long the snakes can get. Chris stands at around 6’1” and the snakes are longer than that (left). The picture on the right is of the Habu Pit. It’s literally a pit with a TON of Habu in there. There was no fence, however, to protect you from falling in or the snakes from getting out; this was quite terrifying for Chris.

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We then went to the Habu Show. They had this guy display a lot of different snakes, including this cobra. He would actually reach down and slap the snake on the back of the head, but because the snake can’t see back there, it wouldn’t react. Another cool thing they did was have a mongoose and a sea snake race in the tubes behind the snake guy. Can you guess who won? Then at the end, they brought out this huge snake that we could take our picture with. I was ok with it as long as Chris was the one holding the head.

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On our way to the shops, we saw a Dr. Fish exhibit. Chris, Whitty, and Teanna, were all for it, but I wasn’t feeling it, so I opted to be the photographer. Basically, you pay to put your feet in a tank of water for 10 minutes, and these tiny fish will eat the dead skin off of your feet. They all laughed at how weird it felt, but overall, I think they enjoyed the experience.

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Me and Teanna as Shisas (left) and Chris and Whitty as Shisas (right).

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Here’s a few views inside the cave. This is the same cave that we got to go exploring through a year ago. That experience made it hard to really enjoy just walking through it this year.

The Mid-Autumn Banquet at Shuri Castle

We tried to catch this festival last year, but because of inclement weather, they postponed it to a Sunday. This year, they held it on both Saturday and Sunday. The weather was much more cooperative this year and we get excited any time we have the opportunity to go to a festival. Usually, a festival has lots of great food and even better fireworks. When we got to the castle grounds, we soon discovered this was not the typical Okinawan festivals we’ve grown to love. We were not to have food inside the castle court yards and there were no fireworks. Instead it was two and a half hours of traditional Okinawan dancing. This wasn’t bad, but traditional Okinawa music is very slow. They finished the show with the Ryukyu Classical Musical Drama about a mother and her son trying to find their long lost husband/father.

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Shuri Castle (left) and Me and Chris excited for the show to start (right).

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Nubui Kuduchi Dance (left) and Amakaa Dance (right).

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Shuri Castle and the moon (left) and the Takaderamanzai Dance (right).

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Shundo Dance (left) and the mother and son from the Ryukyu Drama (right).

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