Wednesday and Thursday

Wednesday:
In the morning around 8:00 okāsan woke me up. I got ready to go snorkeling! I packed a change of clothes and a towel into a bag, ate a quick breakfast and headed out to the car. Okāsan, Katsuumi and myself went. Katsuro had to go school. From home we drove to Onna, a 40 minute drive North on the West Coast of Okinawa. In the ocean front parking lot we met up with Takuma(a friend of Katsuumi) and our snorkeling tour guide. The tour guide had a difficult time finding flippers??? that fit my feet. We were outfitted with life jackets, and snorkeling gear and hot dogs. From the parking lot we headed down steep stairs to the ocean. There was no beach, no sand, just rock walls and coral reefs. The stairs were cut right from the rock. We carefully climbed into the water. The flippers were really hard to use! difficult to manuever in! I feel over a couple times and had to balance my self on the tour guide when we were getting in the water. The tourguide lead us out further into the water and along the rocky shore till we reached a cave, grotto worn into the rocky wall of the shore. It was really deep, 20meters and very cold! The tourguide brought one of those underwater cameras and we could see schools of fishunderneath us. After we left the grotto we swam out to the reefs and feed the fishes with the hot dogs. The fishes would come up swim right near you. You could here them swimming. There was a rainbow spectrum of colors! Fishes of every color.

At 4 I met up with Shiori and Ayame in Chatan and went to the beach! Lots of time by the ocean Wednesday. We spent about 2 hrs swimming at Sunset Beach, Chatan's take on Waikiki beach. Then we ate McDonalds in the mall food court. We looked around the shops in the mall, took Purikura and around 9 my host mom picked us up dropped Shiori and Ayame off.

Thursday: I woke up around 10. My host mom planned for Katsuumi, herself and me to meet Ayako-san, Chiemi-san and Hayato to meet up at the bowling alley. In Kitanaka the bowling alley and the karaoke bar are connected and you usually do karaoke and bowl together. We played 3 games and then headed over to the karaoke bar. You (as a group) are given a room equipped with a karaoke machine. It's no rinky-dink machine either. Theres a wireless touch pad where you choose the song you want to sing and then the lyrics come up on the screen on the wall. It was fun! We Ayako knows a lot of American music, well old music and we ended up singing lots of Beatle's songs, Journey, ABBA, and Michael Jackson along with some Japanese artists but they were thoughtful and tried to pick stuff I knew. At the end of every song the machine tells you how many calories you burnt! I thought that was really amusing. I burned a whole 7 calories singing We Are the World! Haha. We finished up around 7 and went home.