Golden Week in Okinawa: Part One

I'm back from Okinawa! And since I finally did my laundry (whoops), I decided that this would be a perfect time to post some of my pictures. Like my Nikko series, the Okinawa pictures will be broken up into parts. Part One will cover the pictures I took around Kokusai Dori in Naha, which is the biggest city in Okinawa.

 Kokusai Dori ("International Street") is Naha's main street, and has a few large shopping streets branching off the sides. Here is a view down Heiwa Dori ("Peace Street"), which is full of souvenir shops and food stands.

Here is a shop selling a bunch of Okinawan liquor, including habushuu, which is "snake wine."

And of course I had to have a close-up shot of the snake wine. I kind of wanted to try it but these jars were really expensive. And what do you do with the snake when you're done with the wine...?

A lot of shops sold these cool clay figurines called shisha. They're basically little demons that people put outside their homes to protect them. Very Okinawan.

Here is another shot of the souvenir shops. Those boxes in the front are all Okinawan cookies and little sweet potato tart things. Most of the shops like this had little tupperware boxes of samples out, so I basically just went from shop to shop and tried all the samples without actually buying anything. Mwahaha genius. 

We walked from Heiwa Dori through a little alleyway to a park-ish place to sit down for a while before moving on, so here are pictures of that. 

Uh oh, found a cat.

And then I found a tree.

Finally, here is a souvenir I bought. It's a set of face masks made with shikwasa, an Okinawan citrus fruit.

Stay tuned for my next post, which will include pictures of the crazy Naha fish market and our trip to Shuri-jo castle.