Shuri-Jo Castle

Yokoso!! Or Welcome to Shuri-jo Castle Everyone!!

This is the Emperor's crown... I thought it kind of looked like a lite-bright!

One of the many gates throughout the castle grounds...

Where the Emperor rested his fanny...

A picture of the G8 summitt held here in Okinawa a few years back... well, quite a few actually becaus eif you look close enough, Bill Clinton is in the picture.

A huge umbrella!! The Emperor would sit under it while on the grounds... the material is a super thick satin type of material and all the decorations around it are hand-sewn... it's really really pretty up close.

A side view of the grounds... this building held a museum about the castle and some re-created areas that existed, like a tea room and a meeting room....

While standing in front of the Emperor's throne, you can see down into the original castel's ruins. The original castle was blown up by, you guessed it, us back in WWII, but they have pictures of what the grounds and castle looked like in the museum and mostly everything has been re-created. This plexi glass window shows down into the original structure.

The Castle, which sadly was under construction on this particular day...

A view of the West side of the Island and Naha city from the grounds, which are at the highest point on the island...

And this is the main entrance... all in all a very informative venture and I would recommend people come here. We missed the dancers, but a few times a day they have Aisa dancers and the drum players who perform...

The place was very cool and had lots of history to learn about, but as an American, I couldn't help but feel badly a little bit for pretty much destroying everything on this island during the war. A lot of places here if you read the signs with say "Such and Such RUINS" and you know it was something we destroyed... which is a lot of stuff here unfortunately.

This is one of the most popular places on the island and I hope that if ya'll come visit, I get to take you here!!

I'm an Underwater Digital Photography Class Graduate!!

So I'm sure you are all wondering why I would take an underwater photography class... well now instead of all our Scuba pictures looking like they were taken from behind a fuzzy blue film, now I can offer all of you out there lovely photos like these! Yay, aren't you excited?? So to begin... here is a starfish!!

And some coral...

And some more coral!

And a sea cucumber...

Ohh... and an anemonea!!

Some more coral...

You guessed it, some coral...

Cam you guess what this one is...??

And we round it out with a little more coral...

Unfortunately it was a little murky where we were taking our pics, and a little lacking in the fun fish department, which was fine by me because I was too busy playing with my camera settings to really have the time to chase down little fishies... I know these are a little bit boring, but I promsie they will get better!

Hope you like these and many more to come...

I'm sorry... so sorry...

To all my loyal readers out there... I owe you a huge apology... so here it is. I am sooooo sorry. I have been slacking hard-core on my blogging duties, and I feel horrible! So much has been going on lately, I don't know where the time goes! Before I knew it, it had been since like our Tokyo trip since I have blogged anything. Seems like we have been on the run the last couple months. Between working full-time, doing all our dive classes, and being the little social butterfly that I am, the blog took a serious back seat.

So, what you're probably asking yourself is what have you been missing out on... and here's some of the stuff that's gone on since we got back from Tokyo that I promise to blog about soon...

First, we went to the HUGE Naha tug of war, and let me tell you, it was VACA!! That's Japanese for crazy, by the way. Mike and I got our night and underwater digital photography Scuba certifications this past month, we went to Shuri-jo castle, an old friend from Mississippi was in town visiting from Korea, Charlie escaped our fenced-in yard and I went chasing him for like a half mile, Chloe somehow caught ringworm, Rob came back from Iraq safely, and I've been a couple more times to get my toes done. Actually, I'm sure there is more than that, but that's all I can think of for now.

The pics above are obviously the kids on Halloween. We didn't really do anything exciting here for the holiday, not even carve a pumpkin actually, but being the good dog mom that I am, I had to put them into something embarassing... so they were my devil children. We live off-base and the Japanese kids were probably too scared to come to our house knowing we vicious man-eating dogs here, or so it seems any time someone rings our doorbell!! We didn't buy a single piece of candy or anything, just stayed in, ate some popcorn, and watched scary movies all evening.

So I have lots of good pics to post soon, I promise. I had something to do every night the past week, but I swear with all the time off I have coming up on this 4-day weekend, I promise to get some blogging done!!

Until then, gomen nasai, or I am sorry.