Cruising to Okinawa, Japan

After a nice relaxing night watching another act in the Savoy Theatre, an a Capella group called Metro that were very good, followed by seeing our new friends Val and Sal take part in the Love and Marriage Show it was time for a sleepin again! This time however we slept a little too late and missed breakfast in the MDR.

While on P&O I always preferred breakfast in the buffet but on this ship it is not my favourite place at all :(

9.45am and it is jam packed! Not a seat to be found and people walking around with plates of food and nowhere to eat it. We were about to give up when a couple got up from a table near us and we managed to get there before anyone else!
Nathan and I aren't really breakfast eaters but everyone knows I have to have at least one cup of coffee before I can feel human in the morning. Unfortunately the stuff they serve in the buffet doesn't fit the description I have of coffee, it was bloody awful! A couple of pieces of toast with marmalade was my substitute and as the morning was basically over we just lounged around our cabin watching movies again. Most people know I haven't watched TV in years but we came across a channel here that I really like, or at least one show I like, it's a cartoon called Dragons based on the movie How to Train Your Dragon. I managed to squeeze in about 4 episodes of this show before we went for a very late lunch.

The MDR on this ship is very unique in that it has a salad bar set up at lunchtime where you choose your ingredients and dressing and they toss and plate it for you, you can then add things like prawns, smoked chicken, tuna, prosciutto and Camembert from the salad bar area as well. This is aside from the regular menu items like soups, mains and desserts. The salads were so good that most of the time we weren't even tempted to order anything else. A couple of exceptions were the teriyaki chicken and the tandoori lamb skewers that were on the main menu on various days.

We finished lunch in time to go and watch the screening of The Croods 3D in the Savoy Theatre. OMG this movie is hilarious! Of course it has the teary feel good ending as well but so many great jokes :) If the movie hadn't caught our attention we could have gone to the adult dodgeball competition they were holding on Deck 13, that could have been interesting!

We seem to go from meal to activity to meal to activity, all this food would be terrible if not for the 7 decks between our cabin and the restaurant. Trust me, when you have to walk up 7 decks (14 flights!) of stairs after every meal you burn a whole lot of it straight off! I have a love/hate relationship with these stairs!

And that brings us to dinner!

Tonight was our 2^nd formal night so Nathan and I got dressed up again and headed off for another leisurely meal (we have also been having wine with dinner every night, this ship has a great range of sweet wines and tonight's was a lovely Moscato from Italy!) and the menu tonight featured lobster! We chatted with the people at the table next to us for awhile and then decided to go to the cabin to change into normal clothes before heading off to the show and that was when I had my first crash and burn! Got changed, laid on the bed and fell asleep! Woke up long enough to shower and get into PJ's and back to bed, I obviously hadn't been getting enough sleep and all the food wasn't enough to recharge.

Day 8 dawns and thankfully we didn't sleep in as I was not in a hurry to have to go back to the buffet :p

Today we dock in Okinawa, Japan at 1pm! It is a very short stay, we must be back onboard for sailaway at 8.30pm so we book an organised tour to maximise the things we can see and do in such a short time.
Our tour group is scheduled to meet at 1pm, as the ship is docking, to get organised and then go through Japanese Immigration, who have decided that they must meet every person face to face! I felt sorry for the people that had not booked tours now as they would have to wait for their face to face after all the tour groups were completed. We heard later that some people didn't get off the ship til after 3.30pm :/
We were the first ones off the ship, loaded on bus #1 and headed for the Naminoue Shrine. Not sure what I was expecting but this shrine was a little boring...and we were given 25 minutes to explore before needing to be back on the bus. I think most people were done in about 5 minutes ;)

Next stop was Shuri Castle and this was much better! The original castle had burned down during the Battle of Okinawa in WW2 and had been rebuilt in the early 1990's.

Last stop was Kokusai St, 1.6km of shopping and restaurants! Most of the stores looked like $2 shops but when we reached the original markets we entered the real Japan, street stalls filled with weird clothes and crazy foods and tea shops, fruit and veg, fish and meat.

It was fascinating and we bought some little cakes to share, walnut, coffee, brown sugar and caramel flavours. So yummy!

After the markets we continued to window shop and came across a McDonalds. The place was jam packed with people from the cruise! With all the food on offer on this street they picked this?
We then went to an ice cream parlour and shared a coffee float with brown sugar icecream, another yum! Our final taste of Japan was a filled crepe from one of the hole in the wall restaurants. 3^rd win!

Some of the stores sold the strangest things, would you buy a bottle of water that is called Pocari Sweat? Or a jar of alcohol that has snakes in it? We saw these at every bottle shop we went past! Creepy!!

We met our bus a short time later and arrived back at the ship at 6.45. The dining room was almost empty and we had a smaller than usual meal ;)

The show was another RCI production which we once again enjoyed. Their onboard entertainment is pretty slick and the shows don't go for too long either.

After the show we went to see a game show called 60 Seconds or Less where people had to complete (stupid!) task in under 60 seconds to win lame prizes. We left pretty quickly as there were very few volunteers and we were there to be spectators, not be roped into playing and they were getting too close to where we were sitting ;)