We're Scuba Certified!

There are so many exciting things happening right now that I haven't even been able to keep you all fully up to date.

First things first, we got certified to scuba dive last weekend. Most people here take a week long course for $240 through the Kadena Marina, but Audrey found a faster and cheaper one through her uncle who has lived on island for about 12 years. The diving instructor is named Larry and he's a retired Navy guy. He is in his 70s and has been on Okinawa for about 25 years. He is married to an Okinawan woman and teaches scuba diving courses on the weekend for a little pocket money. We had class on Friday night in the pool to learn a few techniques and then met at his house on Saturday to do some of the work from the book. We did two dives on Sunday and two dives on Monday and that was it. Now we're certified to dive without an instructor! The pictures were taken after our fourth and final dive.

Let me just say that diving is awesome! It's such a weird sensation to breath underwater but it's so cool and I'm sure we'll get used to it more and more as we get more practice. We saw lion fish, barracudas, poisonous snakes (which are found all over the waters surrounding Okinawa) tons of coral and beautiful fish and we also visited a clown fish colony which reminded all of us of Finding Nemo! It was awesome and we're really looking forward to doing a lot of diving while we're here.

We can rent gear from the marina for pretty cheap, but we would eventually like to get some of our own gear. They gave me an XS wetsuit to begin with which was a pain in the butt to get into. I may be short but I'm also curvy and XS wetsuits are not made for curvy people so I broke out into a sweat trying to get the stupid thing on and Audrey had to help hoist it up so I could shimmy into it. Once it was on I still couldn't get it to fit properly so the crotch was hanging pretty low. Despite many lunges to try to shimmy it up I was unsuccessful. After two days of trying to get in and out of that thing we went back to the marina to get a size small instead. Of course they only had a medium though so then it was too baggy. Oh boy!



Dinner with the Arakakis

For those of you who don't know, when I was a freshman in high school we had a foreign exchange student from Okinawa live with us for the school year. Her name is Chiharu and we have kept in touch with her family over the past 10 years. Her family has some friends that live in Sacramento so they go back to visit them just about every year and usually spend three or four days at my parents' house. Chiharu's younger sister Chiaki (20 years old) has also spent two different summers at our house in California and I was home one of the summers so we became really close.

Well Chiharu's family was thrilled to find out we were moving here and would be here for three years. They feel like my family has done so much for their daughters (they also have a son named Sho who is our age) and are so happy to have the opportunity to return the favor. Chiharu is now living in Germany with her husband (who is German), but her family wants us to think of them as our Okinawan family and got in touch with us after we had been here only about two weeks to have us over for dinner.

They live in Naha but drove up to Kadena to meet us because they said it is confusing to get to their house. Their dad owns two pet stores in Okinawa so on the way down to Naha we stopped at both of their shops so we could know where they are and recommend them to all of our friends with pets! One of the stores is only about 10 minutes from our house and the other one is in Naha on the same street that I work on - what a small world!



Chiaki and her mom did all of the cooking and boy did they make a lot of food. We weren't all that hungry but we ate like it would be our last meal for weeks. It was a very traditional meal and very delicious! Okinawans eat a lot of sweet potato (chips, fried, in soups, stir fry, pie and even ice cream) but it's different that our sweet potato. It's purple! They made us friend sweet potato as an appetizer and it was soooooo good. It was in some sweet sauce and I guess they normally eat it like that at New Years. They also made us tempura (lightly fried) shrimp, string beans, mushrooms and tuna - which I ate and like all of it (yay!) - dumplings, rice and soup.

While the ladies were cooking Giff and I tried to communicate with Hiroshi (their dad). He speaks very broken English so that was quite interesting. They are such a sweet family though and I know they were so happy to have us there. We both really enjoyed ourselves and hope this is only the beginning of many more visits with them. Next time they want to take us to this really good restaurant that they said has pork and it's fried so we said "Oh fried pork?" and they said no and repeated the pork and fried parts a few more times. We're not quite sure what this fried pork but not fried pork place is all about, but Hiroshi said when we eat there we're going to say "Oh my god" because it's so oishii (delicious)!


That is their 7 year old dog in the picture. I think it's name is Comet. Chiaki said the dog loves men and sure enough it loved Giff! Haha.