Japan's Hawai'i

Last night after writing my post, we went to the Okinawa Aquarium, which is huge and beautiful and full of interesting things to see. It sits right on the ocean, pretty far from any of the big cities of the island, and is almost situated like a college campus, with different buildings for different things.

They had baby turtles!

And whale sharks!

And happy manta rays!

But the real story happened as we were leaving. From behind us came an "Excuse us!" When we turned, two white (well, one white and one very red) girls were climbing up the stairs after us. "Are you heading down south?" 

We looked at each other. "Yeah." 

"Can we get a ride to Naha?" Said the white girl. "We misread the bus schedule."

"I can take you as far as Hanson." Coston told them. Hansen is the base he is stationed on. 

And so Sandy and Kasia climbed into the back of the car and off we went. Kasia lives in Tokyo and is obsessed with Japanese and Korean pop music. Sandy was from the UK and had been traveling in Japan for three weeks. They had actually missed their bus by about 4 hours, and would have been pretty screwed on their own up in the northern part of the island. Kasia told us all about G Dragon, a Korean pop singer who had belonged to a band but set off on his own and always had different color hair. She also told us about akb48, a Japanese pop group made of three groups of 48 girls who all look like they're 12 and whom old men lust after in Japan. We were made to listen to some truly terrible J-pop, while Sandy just laughed along. 

Sandy had been out in the sun and was burned. Burned bad, like the color of tomato juice. I don't even think she realized how badly she'd been burned. My guess is she had a pretty bad day today. Coston offered to get them on base so they could shop at an American grocery store, which they gratefully accepted. He dropped me off to start dinner and whisked them away, where I'm told Kasia bought about a million cool ranch Doritos. 

This morning I woke up to go diving with Angie, and found a heavily acronymed set of orders on the table waiting for me to decode it, instructions apparently for tonight. But it had to wait, and I hauled all my borrowed dive equipment down the stairs and into Angie's van. We went to the pool and knocked out the remaining pool skills I had to demonstrate, then loaded it all back up and drove to the ocean. 

We got all the gear on and then walked down a steep flight of stairs directly into some pretty rocky ocean. There were a lot of Japanese tourists snorkeling and diving, but once we got down in the reef it wasn't so bad. We practiced a few skills, but mostly just swam around. The fish were so used to tourists feeding them that they swam right up to our outstretched fingers, or right up and under our floating bodies with not a care in the world. Angie pointed out a poisonous Lion Fish, and something they call a False Rock Fish, which legit looks like a part of the coral but has some nasty spines that with fuck you up if you get to close. On the second dive, a fish bit Angie on the calf and I hit some coral with both knees. The worst part was having to haul my ass back out of the ocean and up the stairs strapped into all the equipment. Despite my liberal use of sunscreen, my face and neck got pretty burned and the weight belt left a pretty sizable bruise on my hip. Angie dropped me back off and made plans to pick me up tomorrow, where I will finish my last two dives to get certified.

I decoded the message, which was hard because apparently the government uses one acronym for about 38 different things. It told me to look in a cupboard where there was a box with my name on it. Inside was a slinky black dress and a pair of earrings. The instructions said to be ready to Depart Friendly Lines. It meant we went to a fancy dinner on the water, where I had some AMAZING cream sauce pasta with crab and sea urchin and drank scotch. I also accidentally flung half a crab leg across the restaurant at an unsuspecting local when it flew out of my hand while attempting to crack it. I didn't even make eye contact with her, I just laughed into my food and got very embarrassed. 

Now I am tired and ready for bed. So night night all, see you soon enough.