| JET Adventures 16 - Okinawa City Orion Beer festival |
| Saturday, August 27, 2005 |
We've just been paid and after living on a shoestring budget for the last week, Louise and I decided to go and find a shopping mall and blow some of our hard-earned *cough* cash.
This is Louise, btw. She's one sassy New Zealand girl.
There was also another Orion Beer festival going on in Okinawa City (the capital of Okinawa), so we got on a bus and found a mall pretty close to where the festival was going to be. The clothes shops were all ultra-posh but we found some cool CD shops and an English bookshop. There was also an amazingly good Indian resturant, which made us both a bit nostalgic for the curries back home. The Japanese version of curry (kare-raisu) is so bland it's nearly tasteless but this restaurant was run by an Indian dude and his Japanese wife and they really knew what they were doing.
We trundled off to the festival and loaded up on Orion beer, candy floss, shaved ice with syrup and hotdogs, and found ourselves a good place to sit and watch the dancing and drumming. Just as we were finishing off this gargantuan bag of candy floss, a huge thunderstorm started and drenched everything and everyone. Unfortunately that was the time the sugar rush kicked in from all the sugar so instead of taking cover like all the other sensible folk, we ran around in the rain like lunatics, screaming and getting covered in mud. Oh the shame.
Still, it was nice to have a final weekend of craziness before school starts for real next week. I got my schedule and I'm teaching 3 classes a day, starting Thursday *panic*. I've prepared some introduction lessons, I really hope they'll go OK.
My goals for this year are:
* Pass my scooter test and explore as much of Okinawa as possible
* Find an aikido school, maybe at one of the universities
* Study Japanese and take the 1st level proficiency test in December
* Start up an English language club at school or a community one for adults outside of school
* Get involved with the environmentalists here with their beach clean-ups
* Visit at least one other south-east asian country, Hong Kong, Thailand or the Philippines
* Find a dance dance revolution machine - there must be one here somewhere, surely! |
posted by Alice @ 8:49 pm  |
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