Okinawa day one

The hotel had a pool and so I wanted to get up early to go for a swim. We went down to find the hotel had both an inside and outside pool, cool！

I started to swim in the inside pool, which wasn't deep, but got distracted when old japanese women started coming in with full ankle to wrist body suits and walking round and round the pool, no swimming, just walking, apparantly good exercise!

I then went to the outside pool and it was lovely, cool and very refreshing, the only problem was the sunlight was so bright I couldn't see where I was swimming!

Mina had a car in Okinawa so she offered to be my driver and show me around the island and so we headed out to explore. The Japanese are so so polite, especially coming from China, and the guy who helped me to lift my suitcases into the car, bowing and being so so polite was great, so refreshing!

Our first stop was shuri castle (okinawa castle), we parked in a huge underground carpark and walked up into the heat above. It was a quick walk up through the huge gates and into the rukyu kingdoms capital. Okinawa used to be a seperate country until a relatively short time ago called the rukyu kingdom and their king lived and worked in the castle in a huge wooden temple like building, now open to the public. I took some lovely pictures, including down into the valley and the sea below.

After the castle we went for dinner in a hotel buffet on an island looking out over the bay and the sea, it looked an awesome hotel too, so beautiful, if I get the chance to stay I would definitely take it. The buffet was very nice, sitting on the floor at a low table and drinking local Okinawan 'orion beer', incidentally very nice. The only problem was that everything was labelled in Japanese so I had no idea what I was eating, bar the blindly obvious!

After lunch we drove up the north of Okinawa to Okinawa Aquarium, a world famous and very well reviewed aquarium, we arrived into boiling heat but luckily inside it was air conditioned. They had some amazing fish including a hgue tank with 3 whale sharks in, huge fish swimming around and even more amazing at feeding time. After a few mor exhibits, including a bisected whale shark which was very interesting, we went outside to the dolphin show which was amazing, although incredibly hot in the unsheltered afternoon sun, and then past sea tutles and many more.

On the way out the sunset was beautiful, and we stopped off to take lots and lots of pictures, well I tended to be the one taking pictures I admit, but they were beautiful!

On the way back to the city we stopped off by the road at a cafe for dinner, a really nice burger, and then made it back to the city and a new, cheaper, hotel. The room was small but I dont need much space, the hotel was awesome, it had a car lift / carpark, a garage sized entrance you leave the car in and it gets lifted away stored, I watched through the small window in fascination whilst the Japanese people around smiled in bemusement at what I was looking at, but it was very cool!