Naha, Okinawa, Japan 2017

The port city of Naha welcomes visitors and commerce to the area near Okinawa Japan. We walked off the ship and headed toward downtown. At the port area is a sculpture of children at play.

Just about a block away a pair of huge dragons welcome visitors to the city. The dragons were a gift from Okinawa's sister city in China, Fuzhou City. They are 15 meters tall..


The dragons are granite from China and are placed in an appropriate spot to invite good wishes into the Shurijo Castle. Another pair of dragons is at the entry to the Castle. In each there is one open mouth dragon and one closed mouth dragon.

  

We walked about 25 minutes to get to the monorail station passing a truck-sized lobster on the side of a building while being reminded of South East Asia's heat and humidity. Do you think it might have been a restaurant at some time? 

The U S Military members stationed there have  had an influence on the food. One item we saw was Jerk Chicken and another was Taco Rice.  There's an A&W restaurant in the city and Rick had a strong urge for a rootbeer float but it came in a plastic cup with ice instead of the frosty mug he always found in Malaysia. Then, the ice kinda ruined it too. Close but not what was expected.

Some sidewalks had inserts or painted panels but I saw only one example of street art.

The monorail was clean, quiet and super smooth. Tickets had printed QR codes telling the turnstiles what payment had been made. The price of rides was based on the distance traveled. We paid 260 to go to Shuri Castle, a series of buildings built  hundreds of years ago, rebuilt after WWII and again after an earthquake in the 1990s.  film inside showed the process of rebuilding the stone walls. Of course, the rebuildings must have been the easiest since the were done at a time that included power tools and plastic templates for cutting and fitting the rocks. They reminded us of the stone walls at the Great Zimbabwe and even the walls of the Inca buildings in Peru.

The traffic here was louder than in China because all the vehicles had gasoline engines. There were also fewer bikes. This is a video of the monorail.