I’m pretty sure I screwed up my day count somewhere far back, so I’m just going to stop with the day counting altogether. Ah well. Onto more important things…
Okinawa Trip Day 1!
The weather when we arrived in Naha was BEAUTIFUL. It was 23 degrees and I was sweating everywhere. It was awesome. We started off by trying to find our hostel…but we didn’t know which direction to walk in from the station, so we went to a nearby tourist info centre to find out where to go. The ladies there were really nice, but they had never heard of our hostel. Because they had never heard of it, they were telling us it was probably sketchy and were trying to convince us to book another one. One of the ladies even called the other hostel asking if there was room…despite us not asking her to do so. In the end, they gave us directions, but since we fail at directions it ended up taking us like an hour to find the hostel which was only 7 minutes away from the station. Go figure. At least it was a nice day out.
After checking into our hostel (which did seem pretty ghetto (but clean!)…but we only paid 1000yen for it so we got what we paid for) we went looking for food since we were starving. We made our way to Kokusai Doori and found a nice restaurant with pretty affordable lunch sets. I got a set with a little bit of everything Okinawan:
Taco rice, Okinawa soba, sata andagi (Okinawan donut) and shikwasa juice

We topped off dessert with mango soft cream (mango mango everywhere! but still expensive as hell ToT) and decided to go wandering.
We wanted to find the beach, so we tried following the map that we got from the tourist info centre. On the way to the beach we found a free Chinese garden place, so we stopped to have a look. It was really pretty.


As we approached the beach, the area seemed to become more and more rundown and sketchy looking. We also found another hostel that we were planning on staying at. We’re glad we didn’t stay there because the area was SO sketch.
Random restaurant on the way to the beach

Thanks to our fail-map, we ended up passing OVER the beach without realizing it. We backtracked to try and find the beach, but it was nowhere to be found, so we took a break to rehydrate and rest our feet. Then we noticed a ball being thrown into the air. We were resting about 50 feet away from the beach. Fail, Jess, fail!
To be quite honest…the beach itself was pretty fail looking. It was tiny and the swimming area was covered by a bridge, and the view was covered by some form of construction. I was surprised that there was virtually no one there. You’d think people would flock to Okinawa for the warm weather. Apparently not.
Naminoue beach

We ended up back on Kokusai Doori for dinner (Mos Burger FTW!) and did some more window browsing.
Goya bench!

Palette…fancy(ish) department store at the south end of Kokusai Doori

And then we called it a night.
