Chris and Kelly's Okinawa Adventures: August 2010

Hi family and friends! Chris and I decided that using a blog might be one of the best ways to keep you all in the loop on our adventures over the next 3 years.

Chris arrived on July 30, 2010 and I got there 2 days later. Our first 2 weeks were filled with a lot of meetings and paperwork, but also a lot of great adventures! On August 2, we had our 'housing' meeting, where we soon found out that we would be living off the base...and from there our adventures began...

So you may be wondering how the heck you find a place in Japan!?! We spent several hours that day driving around with random people looking for a place to live! In Okinawa, the military works with specific housing agencies and provides the housing agencies with our cost of living allowance...so the housing agencies drive you around to different places in your 'allowance' and you pick one! We probably looked at 6 or 7 places and ended up picking the first place! Here's a pic of what you see when you walk out our front door :)

We ended up in a 4th floor apartment with a nice view of the ocean. Our place is within a few miles to Chris's work and some great snorkeling/scuba diving places. We live in an area that has a lot of little shops and restaurants too, so we better start learning some more Japanese real fast! Below are a few more pics of the apartment and our view.

We live on the top floor left side!

Shout out to Jill!!

So after about 9 days of paperwork and such, we got to move in! Most of our stuff is still on a boat somewhere in the Pacific, but a few of Chris's things came early, and the government also supplied a few furniture items.

Some of our stuff! Whoo hoo!

Obviously very important :)

I can't believe my parents gave
Chris this picture! So embarrasing!
Chris was so excited to show me the
'surprise' on the shelf that he set up.

We also spent a lot of the first week shopping for a car. Chris was really excited about a few different types of cars/vans, but some of them were tough to find near the base and/or with a dealer that spoke English! We ended up buying a 2001 Diahatsu...small and boxy...just how most of the cars are in Okinawa!

The weather during the first week was straight up hot and muggy! We got up to run most mornings around 6am, otherwise the sun and heat did not make for a very successful run. Even at 6am, it was usually in the low to mid 80s with a heat index in the low to mid 90s. The heat index every day that week would usually reach the low 100s! After a week of newcomer's orientation, apartment shopping, car shopping and spending several hours trying to figure out how to get Yen, the weekend had finally arrived...just in time for some cloudy skies and rain of course...but that didn't stop us! We went out and bought snorkel gear!! There are some amazing reefs just a few miles north of our apartment...so we decided to take up a new hobby :)

The fish are amazing and we've only seen the surface! Chris signed up for scuba classes and is probably diving right now while I'm writing this blog lol :) He spent part of week two reading over some of the material. Yes, he's actually studying it... as if he didn't just do enough of that in school!

We also got a chance to hang out with some of the other optometrists over the weekend at their block party. Everyone has been so incredibly inviting!

During the second week, Chris had some meetings and more 'stuff to do' at the Naval hospital. He managed to escape a little early on Monday and we took out our new car for a drive! We had a little tropical system pass by the island that gave us just a small taste of what could come in the future.

ps. I'll try to post a video of the storm later :)

While Chris was busy at work one day, I had some time to do a little exploring on my own. The past weekend, we had visited an area called Zanpa Beach. It was a really cool beach at low tide because there were tide pools everywhere with lots of fish, starfish, sea cucumbers and Chris even saw an octopus in one! Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera with me since we went on a walk on a whim and it was raining, so I had to go back for round two! This time it was high tide, so I didn't see any sealife stuck in tide pools, but holy smokes was it beautiful! The pics below are from my little trip...which is only about a 30 minute drive from our new place!