Off Base

All the campers are gone. We visited half of them at the air force base on the other side of the island this afternoon. I saw a whole line of F-15s ready to fly out at a moment's notice, in fact, I saw a few large bombs being loaded onto two of them. We had one of the youth group leaders with us who told us excitedly about her job, doing just that, and how a few days ago she had to wear a haz-mat suit while she was working because of some sort of biological weapon that they were loading on. Kind of scary, huh? Yes, in case you were wondering, our country uses those.
We spent the rest of the afternoon shopping and eating dinner in the downtown part of Okinawa. It's called American Village. That about sums it up. All the stores carried stuff that was trying to look American. I saw the words "happy beans" and "sexy girls" on the same hat. It was pretty incredible. I'm not sure what they were trying to say. There was also a shirt with the bio of some obscure film director, obviously copied off the internet. There were still some pieces of the html code in the text. I was looking for some crazy shoes, but I couldn't find anything different than what you would find at Wal-Mart in the states. I ended up being in one of those moods where I didn't buy anything. I almost bought a pair of chopsticks, but the line was too long and we had to leave right away.

I had sushi for dinner. It was pretty good, but not as good as the stuff I had in San Louis Obispo three weeks ago. Oddly enough, this was far more like a typical american sushi shop than I would of thought, but I was in "American Village".
I saw the China sea, but thought that it was just the Pacific, otherwise I would have stuck my head in it like I did when I was on the Mediterranean in Israel last year.
When we got back to the barracks on our base after dinner, we had to deep clean everything. The students did a pretty good job of cleaning their rooms, but all the hallways and common areas still needed a lot of work. I was already exhausted, I think everybody was, but we worked hard and worked quickly, finishing it in just over two hours.

I think we're going to a church, aquarium, and a castle tomorrow. Though, I'm not sure, since our plans seem to change every hour. We have just over 24 hours left in the country. I am glad that we are getting to see a bit more of life outside of a military base on this island. And, it's cool to be able to have some time to get to know the people on our team a little bit better. I think it would have been good to be able to do that before we started camp. I don't know.