Nago City

I have finally found a little bit of time to do a bit of walking around Nago City and here are a few images from my travels. This gentleman was collecting his dried laundry from his roof top.

This is a shrine pathway on the way up the mountain to the youth center. I hope to get a chance to see the actual shrine before we leave. For now I seem to simply pass the pathway everyday as we ride the car up the mountain.

I imagine it is quite a strenuous walk especially in the Okinawan heat.

Here we are picking up our lunch. The meals have been great!

Here is an example of one of the meals.

This little guy was speeding around inside the youth center.

From the hill one has a nice view of the town and can also see the ocean.

This is the shopping area not too far from our hotel.

There is a honeycomb of interior stores many of which are shuttered and closed down.

This is the Nago City (Historical) Museum.

Inside there are all kinds of interesting documentations of older ways of living.

Here is the traditional musical instrument of Okinawa. It is called the Sanshin.

There were a lot of stuffed boars in the museum.

These Habus (a very poisonous snake native to Okinawa) were pickled and on display.

I thought this display of traditional Okinawan foods was pretty interesting:

The students enjoyed seeing some of the old artifacts.

I walked by what I though was a trash can, but when I looked closer I noticed it was a cage.

If you look closely you might be able to tell that this is a bat.

This garden was across the street from the museum the ragged edge plant is perilla, I think. (Shiso).

The school children painted these pictures on the wall outside the museum. The wall below seems to be made of broken roof tiles.

We saw the wall on the way to our next site - the orion beer and soft drink factory.

We had a ovely tour - all in Japanese, so I haven't got the slightest idea what was going on.

I could make up some stories about storing beer in the tanks above.

The beer ferments here. I did understand that the mash is sweet, but the hops make it bitter. There were jars of hops, malt, corn starch and sugar water as models, so those are probably the ingredients.

I loved the above poster - I suspect it means they use plankton to stop the fermenting process, but I have no real idea. I like the idea, though!

At the end we got to see the bottling and then went out into the big Egyptian inspired hall for a tasting.

I had an acerola soft drink, since I'm not much of a beer drinker. What was really good was the beer nuts that they gave us with our drinks! After the tour we went past the giant Banyon tree that is the hallmark of Nago City.

My final shot of the day was this little old woman who was finishing up her day's shopping.