I know, we're not even in Japan anymore. We've been back in the States for almost four months, and there are few excuses for not blogging. I can't blame my broken laptop (it's fixed) or the weird way my computer kept trying to translate everything into Japanese-inspired English. I blame jet lag. It's rough to get over.
Previously on the blog....(theme music)...you may remember that my mom, a.k.a. Grandma Jean, had arrived in Okinawa, post-typhoon. Let's continue with our adventures!
For Day 2 of my mom's visit, we decided to go to Culture Kingdom Gyokusendo, also called Okinawa World. It is a theme park (minus rides) of all things Okinawan. The drive was about an hour from OIST and required a great deal of faith in the GPS navigation. There was a great deal of "follow the road for a while."
To begin, we went through the Gyokusendo Cave, which is Japan's second longest cave. The entire cave is about 3 miles in length, though less than a mile is actually open to the public. The stalactites and stalagmites were impressive. Now that we are in New Mexico (hey, did y'all know that?), maybe we'll take a trip to Carlsbad Caverns and I can compare caves.
Watch your head! I hope this photo can give you some sense of scale of the caves and of the still-growing formations.
We then went to see the Eisa performance which was amazing, as all Eisa performances are to me. No cameras, but if we could have taken photos, you would have seen Grandma Jean and me dancing in the finale. Okay, so everyone was allowed up for the finale, but we definitely nailed it.
After some Blue Seal Ice Cream (of course), we toured around the crafts village, listened to a talented performer play "Let It Go" on a Japanese recorder of some sort, and bought screw-on earrings for Maddox. For some reason, she had focused on screw-on earrings early in our stay in Okinawa, and was determined to find a pair at a reasonable price. She has worn them exactly twice since then.
We saved the best experience for last, and braved the Doctor Fish! For a few hundred yen, you had the privilege of putting your feet in a pool filled with these fish for 10 minutes. They are apparently a big thing in Turkey (so naturally they should be in Japan, too?) and they love to feed on dead skin cells.
I expected to look exactly like this when we were finished:
Grandma Jean and I went first while Maddox debated on the sidelines. Our feet were like heavy hors d'oeuvres.
Maddox eventually braved the pool with her own feet and could not stop giggling. The fish feeding frenzy definitely tickled! Based on our multi-generational experiment, the number of fish around one's feet was directly related to the age of said feet, so Maddox didn't get completely swarmed.
This smile was worth any amount of yen.
Who would have thought that one day my mom and I would be in Okinawa using our feet as fish food while taking a selfie with this all-in-one phone-camera thingamajig? It's ridiculous and true.
Note to my post-sabbatical self: install pond with Doctor Fish in backyard. Or better yet, turn the baby pool at the clubhouse into a nice tank.
No comments:
Post a Comment