Countdown 2008 & New Year's Day - Okinawa Style

New Year's Eve

The night started with us picking Kevin and Kana at the airport.

They got in around 10.45pm then we headed over to Ole Bar in Matsuyama to countdown the new year!

The bar provided everyone with cups of soba noodles. Kana told me that is it tradition to have soba noodles on New Year's Eve.

Five minutes to midnight, the MC started to get the crowd ready for the countdown. Everything was in Japanese so I didn't really understand but once it was 12 midnight everyone cheered and wished each other Happy New Year. At this point, Japanese drinking songs were being played and the crowd sang along to the songs and cheered and drank. Too bad I don't understand Japanese as I would imagine that it would be so much fun singing and drinking to those songs.

Ole Bar ran an arm wrestling competition both for males and females. It was fun to watch especially watching the females arm wrestle. Both Kana and I were encouraging each other to participate in the competition LOL!

New Year's Day

Around 2am New Year's Day, we all left Ole Bar and headed to Naha Shrine for food and games!There were lots of people at Naha Shrine. I loved it! There were plenty of food stalls and game stalls. My fav is the Yakitori, which are chicken pieces on skewers on a hot fire grill... YUM :p

Once we climbed a couple of flights of stairs to the shrine, we tossed money into the shrine and clapped our hands twice, closed our eyes and made a wish.

The boys then were playing games trying to win prizes for the girls. Lets just say after a night of drinking, it is amusing to watch the boys play hehe...

Iron Man and Stealth Man = inside joke hehehe :p

New Year's afternoon we went to the Futema Shrine. It is tradition to visit the shrines on New Year's and to buy 'Omomori' which are like good luck charms. There were all sorts of charms. Good luck charms for the house, car, relationships and study to name a few. We made a wish again like the one we did at Naha Shrine. Before making a wish it is tradition to cleanse your hands first with water.

You can get your fortune told too for a 100 yen sort of like a fortune cookie but more detailed. You pick a fortune out of a box. Once you've read your fortune, you tie it on ropes like shown in the pic below.

After visiting Futema Shrine, Reid took me to a nice little restaurant for some Okinawa Soba! Yum~~ ^_^

I had the 'San Mai Niku Soba' set (top right hand corner). It is pork with vegetables on rice and Reid had the 'Tonkatsu Donburi Soba' set (bottom left corner) which is fried crumbed pork with egg on rice.

During my stay here in Okinawa, I've noticed that in a lot of restaurants there's this button by the table that you press when you are ready to order and it goes ping-pong when you buzz it.

I'm loving my stay in Okinawa!! It is different from mainland Japan though...it's more laid back and easy going pretty much like the Gold Coast. It is great experiencing life in Okinawa, Japan. I'll tell you more about my trip in my next post.