Regina Glei's Blog, page 3

More Ryukyu Glass and the Cats of Itoman

I spent some more time in the Ryukyu glass village, the idea being to get something nicer for my cocktail endeavors than the standard glasses I used so far. The martini glass was the biggest challenge since it is not among the Ryukyu glass standard but I think I found a nice solution with this one. They have some very fine stuff in the Ryukyu glass village! It’s a formidable place and I hope it stays in business during these rough times when there are so much fewer tourists than in the past.

On my last day I rode my bicycle to my favorite beach of Kita-Nashiro and along some more coastline, then went to sell the bicycle. I had hoped for 4000 yen for it, since it was used only for ten days after all, but they gave me only 3000 yen for it. I am not the negotiating type and left it at that. Had I rented a bicycle I would have paid around a thousand yen a day so that’s what I paid for the new bicycle also. The investment was completely worth it and I wouldn’t have had the holidays I enjoyed without it.

There is one story left to tell and that’s about the feral cats of Itoman. The Minamihama park at the sea, which was a few hundred meters down the road from my hotel, was crawling with feral cats. Some of them looked quite well and healthy, but around half of them had chipped ears, presumably from fighting with each other. Some run away when you come too close, but some, especially this one was very people friendly and allowed you to pet her.

Several people were distributing cat food, but I wonder if they do it regularly and if it’s enough for all the cats around. I would have liked to take one of the cats with me. It makes me sad that they are not having homes. I counted some twenty cats, but I’m sure there were even more. Well, at least some people are feeding them from time to time and play with them.

All in all Itoman is a hot candidate for my retirement plans It’s close enough to some nature and also close enough to civilization. I’m far from done exploring though! Apart from remote islands, I also want to explore more of Okinawa’s main island’s middle and north. So until next time, which I hope will be for Golden Week 2021? Let’s see what corona will say… stay healthy, folks

Okinawa Peace Park and Todoroki Cavern

 Another “must” when you are in the south of Okinawa’s main island is to go to the peace park next to Mabuni hill in the very south.

I went there on first of January in again brilliant sunny weather. Unfortunately the peace museum was closed for new year, but I made new friends when another metalhead noticed my Be’lakor t-shirt. He’s from Australia and Be’lakor are an Australian band We chatted for half an hour He and another Australian lady are teachers in the JET program and were posted to the remote Okinawan islands of Yonaguni and Aguni. I have been to neither island yet, so that’s a nice opportunity for future trips Lessons learned is: always wear your metal shirts, they can be highly communicative! Lol. I rode on to the Mabuni hill and (from the outside) checked out the cave riddled rock, where the locals and also soldiers sought refuge in the last stages of WW2.

Between downtown Itoman and the peace park is another peace museum, which had open. It was telling the story of the Himeyuri girl-student corps who were working as nurses and also forced to bury the dead during WW2. Many of them were killed and the museum commemorates them.

The whole south of Okinawa is riddled with caves and in many locals sought refuge in them from the bombing during the WW2 battle for Okinawa. One notable cave is the Todoroki cavern.

I had intended to go inside, but man that cave was scary and spooky! I’m really amazed they just let it sit there and people can enter it if they want to. I mean it’s hella dangerous, if you fall and break a leg, you have to wait for the odd chance of another idiot stumbling into the cave. It’s apparently huge also. Very interesting but no thanks for going into the pitch black dark. Lol. After the almost cave visit, I rode my bicycle further south again to the rugged but beautiful coastline of Odo.

Naha and Kariyushi Aquarium

Due to not so great weather I went to Naha twice by regular bus. On the first trip I did my round of shops that I like and also went pottery shopping in the pottery street, which has become kind of a ritual for me when I’m in Naha. I bought a rice bowl, a plate and two small “plates” where you put your cutlery on (like a chopsticks holder, but for fork and knife), all in Okinawa blue
I also went to Shuri castle. I was surprised they actually let you onto the castle grounds. The main hall of the castle and several other buildings unfortunately burned to the ground on October 31st 2019. You can walk past where the main hall stood. So sad and I’m very glad I visited the castle when it still stood. I think they plan to rebuild it by 2026… sigh… It’s a nice way to get a bit of money though that they let you in. It’s only 400 yen mind, but better than nothing and there were some people around too, not overly many, but a few.

Picture taken Dec. 2020Picture taken Dec. 2018 (I wore masks very often also before the pandemic…)

On my second trip to Naha a few days later, I went to a shrine I had not been to before and also a bunker south of Naha where the Japanese navy made their last stand. They hacked a significant tunnel system into the hill and it’s an interesting site.

The weather turned even worse with pretty much of a winter storm, but despite it I went by bicycle to a large shopping mall which sports a new aquarium. It’s in the town of Tomigusuku between Naha and Itoman where I stayed. I almost got blown away and froze my hands off to get there and got pretty wet. Winds were at 50 to 70 km per hour or 15 to 20 meters per second. I almost gave up but then pushed through.
The aquarium is super modern. There are no explanatory signs around, instead they make you download an app and there are sensor pads instead of signs, which then load the information about the animals into the app. The aquarium isn’t big but quite nice and you could get astonishingly close to most animals. The sloth and the toucans were just behind a line! So you could even take a selfie with the super cute sloth.

Cape Kyan and Gyoku Sendo Cave

Cape Kyan at the southern end of Okinawa’s main island is one hell of a beautiful place. It also comes along with a peace memorial. During WW2 much of Okinawa was bombed to bits, but the south was especially affected. Ever smaller and lonelier roads lead to the cape, through sleepy fishing villages and then fields. It was a beautiful bicycle ride. At the cape were four people and it was a quite lonely affair.

Then I discovered a great natural beach called Nashiro or Kita-Nashiro (its northern section). Three islands stretch out into the sea, during low tide you can walk to two of them but the third is separated from the others by a quite deep looking canal. It’s an utterly beautiful beach and I especially liked this rock with trees clinging to it. I went to this beach on about every second day of my stay.

My longest bicycle trip was to the Gyoku Sendo cave and the tourist park they created around it. The cave is fantastic! It’s one of the most impressive stalactite and stalagmite caves I have ever seen. The cave is very wet and comes along with underground waterfalls and an underground river.

It’s also lit up nicely. Another bonus point was that there were very few tourists. Of course there are still no overseas tourists and also the number of domestic tourists was quite moderate. I thoroughly enjoyed that cave, even if the bicycle ride there was not so nice with trucks thundered past me half the time. I actually visited the cave on my very first trip to Okinawa in the 90ties, but it was only one stop on a bus tour around the entire island and we were rushed through. It also was probably drier than it was now since it was at the end of summer when I visited back then. I don’t remember it being so jaw dropping. If you ever go to Okinawa’s main island, make sure you visit that cave.
Around the cave they built the “Okinawa World” theme park with dozens of huts in which all local crafts are displayed and you can try out a lot of them yourself. Further, they have a small zoo centered around the Habu snake, which is a famous, highly venomous snake living around the Ryukyu islands. But the cave remains the main attraction of this park.

Traveling in Strange Times

Originally I had wanted to spend Japan’s Golden Week in early May 2020 in Okinawa. State of emergency made me stay home and cancel everything way in advance. In summer I wanted to make the next try but canceled everything 36 hours before departure, as Okinawa declared a stand alone prefectural state of emergency in our second corona wave. Then I waited anxiously for the end of the year and whether the third attempt to get to Okinawa would be successful. It didn’t look good, since we got into the third wave and the new infections per day were higher than ever.

I booked a hotel a week in advance and a flight 48 hours before departure. I debated extensively with myself and others whether it was okay to fly to Okinawa or not. There were no official domestic travel restrictions in Japan at that moment. I booked an apartment with kitchen, so if I go to a supermarket in Yokohama or the city of Itoman it makes no difference. If I ride around with a bicycle in Yokohama or Okinawa, it makes no difference. I didn’t plan on going to any party or even a restaurant in the evening.

So in the end I headed for Haneda airport after all and it was actually pretty crowded. Also the flight was 80 % full. Wow! I was lucky and there was no one next to me, but there were many rows without a free seat… masks were of course mandatory. The flight to Okinawa takes around three hours, since it’s against the jet stream, back it’s only two hours. They break out no food on these flights, but only some soft drinks. Hardly anyone was eating anything so as to not have to take the mask down in contrast to previous flights were people broke out their bento boxes as soon as it was allowed.

I took a taxi from the airport, because my target, the city of Itoman is only 10 km south of it. I was even prepared for something like, we don’t take passengers who arrived from Tokyo, but luckily there was no such thing. My taxi driver was about 80 years old and basically just happy that I could speak Japanese, lol. He didn’t ask where I come from today, or which country either. He only told me proudly about a highway they started to build south (so far there is only a highway to the north) and that some military area has been taken over by the Japanese navy instead of the Americans, those are now only up north. The driver didn’t mention corona in any form. 

While there are a few apartment hotels around in Itoman, it’s basically a “normal” town. Checking around in the internet revealed no bicycle rental anywhere. I only found a bicycle shop on the internet about 2km away and walked there first thing in the morning. As I already expected the bicycle shop only sold but did not rent out bicycles. But then again, if I rent a bicycle for a 1000 yen for ten days it’ll be 10,000 yen. The cheapest bicycle that they had was 13,000 yen. I asked them if they would take it back on the 4th of January if I bought it now, the answer was no, but they also told me about a recycle shop around the corner. So I went there and asked if they’d buy it off of me and they said yes and thus I bought the thing.

I promptly rode to the Ryukyu glass village, which was one of my targets and it was only three km away from my hotel. They have a fantastic shop with works of art and of course also usable glassware. They also offer a make-your-own-glass experience. Usually they let you do more process steps by yourself, but due to corona they cannot let people blow glass anymore. They blow it for you and you only do one step of finishing it up yourself.
I also checked out the beach 500 meters down the road and enjoyed a fantastic sunset. All that would not have been possible without some means of transportation = my lovely new bicycle!

Ryukyu Glass Village main building.

My personal glass in its infancy



My personal glass is growing



My personal glass getting blown into form. After the blowing is done, I got to “widen” the glass by myself in one process step.



My personal glass in its finished form

Mixologist

I’ve always had the collector gene in my body and have been collecting one or the other thing as long as I can remember. My first collection was dog pictures, lol. I’ve been great at collecting movie and music memorabilia over the years, from select Star Trek figures to heavy metal t-shirts. Last year I got a short spleen with minerals and collected 50 of them, but then stopped, because: where to put all this beautiful, but essentially useless stuff? I am well aware of the curse of collecting. You gather stuff you don’t really need or wear. I have around a hundred heavy metal band and festival shirts and I wear maybe twenty of them.
This year, having to stay home all the time I was (subconsciously mostly) looking for something new to collect with the premise of “it shall not last” or “how can I avoid cluttering my apartment with more useless stuff” and now I found it! lol. Alcohol! lol.
I already made myself a small bar two, three years ago, mostly filled with port wine.
Who knows me knows that I hate beer… it’s bitter and it stinks! Sorry, beer lovers. I have a sweet tooth and thus port wine and also cocktails have always been my preferred choice of drink. So, welcome to the new spleen – cocktail mixing!

Angel’s Delight – gin, Cointreau, grenadine, cream

For every collection there is an initial investment necessary and then a continuous investment, lol. The past few weeks, I have bought quite a number bottles at different liquor shops in order to not raise any suspicions! lol. This is the hunting part of the collector. The joy of hunting for that particular item (bottle). They don’t have e.g. Heering Cherry in store A but in B. Store C is the best place for item X, store D for item Z, oh that’s fun! Lol Our poor ancestors had to do hunting and gathering in order to survive, how lucky are we that we can do it for the joy of it.

Old Fashioned – Bourbon whiskey, dash of bitters, sugar, orange peel

There were also quite some bottles I actually already had. I bought a nice bottle of vodka in Vladivostok in March 2019, it just sat there, never opened. I bought a few miniature (100ml) bottles of sugar cane schnapps from Amami. I tried one of them, but the stuff is not the nicest alcohol in the world by itself and the other four mini bottles just sat there since 2017 unopened. I bought a bottle of Southern Comfort a year ago and it just sat there, unopened. But now I bought a cocktail mixing set with shaker, muddler etc. It came with a small cocktail book and thus started the hunting for ingredients.

Blue Hawaii (though it got more green than blue) – white rum, blue curacao, pineapple and lemon juice

Cocktail making is also very educational! Until a few weeks ago I didn’t know what a “dash of bitters” is. Neither did I know what is a dash (in a cocktail), nor did I have any clue about bitters. Now I have a bottle of Angostura aromatic bitters made in Trinidad and Tobago and know how to dash my cocktails with it, lol. Until a few weeks ago I had never heard of a Hawthorne strainer before or knew how to use it, now I do, lol. I now know that Cointreau and curaçao are actually the same thing – orange peel liquor, as is blue curaçao.

Grasshopper – white creme de cacao, creme de menthe, cream, mint

Luckily many liquors can be found in small bottles in Japan, which reduces the amount of initial investment

A Re-match 27 Years in the Making

I’ve been making good use of the company closure days due to the coronavirus crisis and have visited plenty of day-trip targets during the past few months, Kamakura a stunning six times, Mt. Takao, Enoshima, Odawara castle and so on. Looking for new targets, one place jumped back into my mind and that is the castle of Matsumoto. I’ve been to the town of Matsumoto in Nagano prefecture, central Japan, once before and that was on my very first trip to Japan in 1993… OMG! That’s 27 years ago! Ahhhhh… It was quite a trip. I flew with Aeroflot, which was a drama of its own. I was a penniless student back then and yet wanted to stay for almost 3 months in Japan. I cut the visit short by two or three weeks, because I ran out of money, hahaha… After arrival in Tokyo, I soon left it and traveled up the Pacific cost, then on to Hokkaido. On the way back I rode (always with trains) down the Japanese sea coast side and stayed for one night I believe, maybe it was two, but not more, in a youth hostel in Matsumoto before heading back to Tokyo. The northern Japan and Hokkaido trip I did on my own, but I had guest families in Sendai and Sapporo.
I also spent a week at a Buddhist temple in Aomori (unplanned). They let me stay for free in exchange for temple cleaning duties (I got lost in search of a famous temple, ended up at a “normal” temple and the priest and his wife invited me to stay after we chatted for two hours, it was a great experience). After some time in Tokyo, I went on a trip south and west together with another German student and we went to Kyoto, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and several other places along the way.
But back to Matsumoto. I might not be doing the town much justice, but the absolutely main thing to do in the town is to visit its magnificent castle, which is one of the few original castles that have not been destroyed by fire and war and been rebuilt in concrete, as so many other castles. In 1993, it must have been end of August or early September that I was in Matsumoto and it was hot and humid. The weather was bad, it was raining and stormy, it might even have been the outskirts of a typhoon. I went to the castle but I did not go inside because it was too expensive!

I seem to remember that the price back then was a thousand yen or even more. It was 1993, we still had the German Marks, not the Euro. Lol Japan was just out of its “bubble economy” times where money was let me call it “abundant”, but alas, I was a poor student and didn’t have that money. The choice was, do I eat for those thousand yen today, or do I visit the castle? I chose to eat and did not go inside. But I never really forgot the disappointment to not have been able to visit the Matsumoto castle properly.
For many years this was not in focus of course and there would have been plenty of opportunity to do the Matsumoto castle re-match, but it did not creep back to the surface until now. Suddenly it was like, hm… 2.5 hours by train one way, that’s doable as a day trip, I could go to Matsumoto and get my “revenge” after all these years. And that’s what happened on the 13th of November 2020. After 27 years (!) I rode that train to Matsumoto in glorious autumn weather and went to the castle and even the fee had become cheaper and was 700 yen, lol.

While the castle garden is very pretty, the castle itself is dark and cold inside and they make you walk around on socks to be gentle to the ages old wooden floors. I cannot deny though the great satisfaction to have now finally made up for the failed Matsumoto castle visit those staggering 27 years ago. It’s a fantastic castle and now I’ve finally seen it proper

In the Grip of the Dome of Souls

It is done! The first draft of my maybe last Dome of Souls novel (number 6) is finished. It is a mess yet of course, but to finish a first draft is always a tremendous relief and achievement. I started on 16th of August and finished it on 10th of November. Length around 103,000 words. For not knowing where this would be going when I started in August, that’s a pretty damn good pace. I wrote those 103,000 words while on a demanding full-time job, during a pandemic and its worries, during the US election and its daily anger caused by the Orange Fart Face. Therefore, I am allowing myself to be proud of this first draft achievement

I’m Even Sadder than in 2016, America

After the US election in 2016, I wrote this blog entry:
Now I’m even sadder than in 2016, but also angrier, much angrier.
Let’s look a bit at history. The last elections in Germany, before Hitler became a dictator, were in March 1933. At that time around 65 million people lived in what was Germany back then. In the 1933 elections there were 44.6 million registered voters, around 39.7 million people voted. 17.3 million voted for Hitler’s NSDAP, that’s 43.6 percent. Hitler did not have a majority in parliament. The simplified version of what happened then is that he made some coalitions with other parties and pushed the “enabling act” through parliament, which gave him a ridiculous amount of power = which made him into a dictator.
Let that sink in please, (only) 17.3 million people voted for him.
No matter who will eventually come out as the winner of the US elections in 2020, around 70 million people voted for what I have come to call the Orange Fart Face.
Let that sink in please, 70 million people.
Despite the ginormous pile of bullshit from the Orange Fart Face and his joke of a government over the past nearly four years, there are still 70 million people who voted for him. There are 70 million people who do not care about or even welcome racism, fascism, lies, dishonesty, meanness, bullying, zero care for others and and and. There are 70 million people who have voted for a creature (I refuse to call him human) who is lying whenever he opens his ugly snout, who is a sick narcissist, who has zero respect or compassion for other human beings, who is an egomaniac and throws tantrums like a five-year-old and and and…
This means there are 70 million people whose ethics are questionable, whose values are screwed up, who hide behind “freedom” without realizing that they are destroying it, who live in a fantasy world of fear, lies and fake news.
Even if Biden wins the election – how the hell is he, or anybody, supposed to deal with these distorted 70 million people?
My underlying optimism had hoped that Biden would win in a landslide, that there would be a hell of a lot of people who would have realized and learned from the past four years of bullshit that their Fuehrer is fucking sick in the head. But no, there are 70 million people who are as mad as the Orange Fart Face they voted for.
I feel endlessly sorry for the these 70 million, who must be living in quite a hellish fantasy world. I feel endlessly sorry for the sane people in the US, who have to live as neighbors of those disturbed 70 million.
Nobody knows how to get out of this. Nobody knows how to heal this deeply divided nation. It would be madness to expect of Biden to heal the nation in case he will manage to become the next president. If the Orange Fart Face wins somehow after all, cheating, lying and threatening his way through the swamp, then good night, four more years of the Orange Fart Face will break the place for good and maybe the whole world with it.
One thing is for sure, democracy in the US is broken, presumably dead already, considering 70 million people who give a shit about democratic values. Those 70 million should make their own state and call it Gilead and leave the rest of the world alone.
Where does the madness come from? In my humble opinion it is rooted in the relentless version of capitalism of the US, in greed, Darwinism and “everyone for him or herself”. Too much “freedom”, without a social safety net, has led the place to the edge of the cliff.
My optimism is down the toilet, my faith in humanity with it. The only hope that remains is that Biden will win and that we don’t have to see the utter ugliness of the Orange Fart Face on TV anymore.
So far the opinion of a sad, angry and disillusioned German.

A Trip to Sadogashima – Part 3: Bathtub Boat

For my last day on Sadogashima I decided to go with the public bus to the other port town of Ogi on the south-western edge of the island. The main port is called Ryōtsu and located in the northern bay. The ride from the southern town of Sawata to Ogi took about one hour and fifteen minutes. It followed the coastline for a bit, then cut inland and climbed over the southern mountains. It was one hell of a lonely ride with only some ten people on the bus. Nevertheless they had a tourist information center in Ogi and you could rent a bicycle with battery assist for a few yen. I of course promptly did that and rode on to the target, the “bathtub ride” at the tiny islands of Yajima and Kyojima. In the old days locals used such tubs to ride along shallow reef coastlines, hunting for urchins and muscles. According to the lady who was my tub’s captain, some people are still doing this even today. I have the feeling though that more tourists are shipped with the bathtubs than urchins are being caught these days. It was fun but quite a wobbly affair and the danger that the tub will lose balance and empty you into the ocean was high