Ohayo gozaimasu, konnichiwa, konnbanwa!! Hello wherever you are. Again...sorry for this being so late. No excuses. May was quite a month for us. We made it out to the Kerama Islands finally! Only took 20 months. Aka Jima is this little sleepy island with a population of about 270. The ferry comes once a day with a huge horn blast bringing everything the island needs. All there is to do is read, beachcomb, snorkel and dive. It is a GREAT place and a GREAT place to get away. Also this month we caught some Tuna (and a mahi mahi). Then we finished over labor day with a trip to visit the Rivers in Korea where we stopped in Seoul, the DMZ and finally Daegu in the south.
Here Ellie is drinking from her favorite water bottle on the ferry out to Aka Jima.
The following photos are of our first trip out. It was during rainy season but we still managed to come home with a sunburn by the end. We had a wonderful time. One of the best parts is the minshuku we stayed at (Kawai Diving) likes dogs and Maddi got to come too.
Below Ellie, Maddi and Katie enjoy Hizushi Beach on Aka jima.
The little brown dot on the right is Maddi!!
This is Kawai Diving.
The grocery store...
THE restaurant
Will, Purple San and Ryumaru San
It has been so long I don't remember all the names but this is dinner with the other guests. I can tell you the man in the middle worked for Fukashima Daiichi and 'needed a getaway'!
This is Ai San, the owner pouring some Zampa Shiro after dinner.
5am at Naha port getting ready to fish!!
I can assure you there is no better sushi on the planet (not even in Tokyo) than what is on the plate in this photo!!
We had to throw in a photo of Ellie in her Royals shirt (taken when they were still pitching well).
Ahhhhh...you might think making it less than 1000 miles to South Korea would be easy, but you would be wrong. Terribly expensive and the flight times are uhber inconvenient...not to mention an approaching typhoon (which shattered Katie's windshield) threatened to cancel it all.
Finally we made it to dinner in Seoul with Chris and Kristine!
Chris and Ellie on the gondola up to Seoul Tower...
Ellie finally got bored of the tower.
This is in our hotel in Seoul...straight out of Alice in Wonderland.
This might look like a wall of rocks; well, it is. Each of these rocks is from a battle sight from across the world going back to the American Revolution.
Here you are looking across the bridge of freedom from North Korea.
If you blow this photo up you can see the ROK flag on the right and the North Korean flag on the left...the two countries continue a petty fight where they keep raising the flag poles higher and higher...currently the North Korean pole is higher.
This is a Korean feast fit for an obese American!!
Below are images from Sister of Saint Paul of Chartres...
Ellie likes to keep GOOD company!!
See these bugs...
See the veins in my neck as I try to eat the bugs...
Be thankful we didn't include the tiny puppies and kittens in the cages next to these chickens...they are NOT pets!!
This last photo is of Chris and Katie buys some kind of sweet pancake filled with nuts and seeds...what you see on the left though is a pile of pig innards that Chris and I just sampled with some weird salt mix and a Hite!
Well...sayonnara for now...see you next month!!
