After a couple days in Naha, we moved to a hotel on the beach. Moon Ocean Ginowan is (obviously) in Ginowan, a city to the north of Naha. It was pretty relaxing. You can see the ocean from the bathtub! Also, the hotel rooms are HUGE (especially for the price). I definitely recommend checking out a beach resort or hotel if you’re ever in Okinawa.

The hotel is also across the street from “Convention City” in Ginowan, which is a brand new mall with a fancy grocery store, a Tokyu Hands, a Matsumoto Kiyoshi (drugstore) and lots of clothing stores. We actually thought it was the convention centre itself until we walked inside and realized that it’s a mall.

A lot of Ginowan is made up of Futenma, a US military air base. I know that Okinawans are very opposed to the air base (so am I!) but again, it made me feel kind of awkward to be an English-speaking tourist. Next time I’m bringing a tshirt that says NOT AMERICAN on it.

The lobby

The room (more space than most of the Japanese apartments we’ve stayed in)

Kitchen

Bathtub with a view of the ocean

Me in the bathroom!

Toilet room

Separate living room/bedroom

Mike on the balcony

The nearby beach. The water is incredibly clear and blue. The only bad part is the noise from the US military aircraft overhead. We even saw Ospreys flying above the beach — which was cool on an airplane nerd level, but there have been large protests by Okinawans about the use of the Ospreys at Futenma.

I found a cute little sea snail of some sort. (Whoa, alliteration.)

Mike checks out the sea creatures on the beach. (It’s low tide.)

Tiny crab!

Seashell collection

Mike writing postcards. If you got a postcard from us from Okinawa, it was written on the beach!

How Japanese people do the beach.

Just kidding — they do expose themselves to the sunlight occasionally.

I thought it was interesting that the sand wasn’t really sand — it was entirely made up of tiny bits of seashells and sea debris. (Mike pointed out that this is called coral sand and is an actual thing with its own Wikipedia entry and everything.)

I think I liked staying on the beach better than staying in Naha. Naha was fun but not very interesting for more than a few days (except where eating is concerned). I’m sad that I missed going to a baseball game though — Japanese baseball spring training was going on in Okinawa while we were there. The Rakuten Golden Eagles were even staying in our hotel. But I still have a couple months to go a real Japanese baseball game. (GO KYOJIN!)

Trains are awesome. This is a fact. So Mike and I were excited to take the shinkansen to Osaka from Tokyo simply because we are nerds and like riding trains. We took the Nozomi train (because it’s the fastest one, obviously) from Shinagawa Station in Tokyo to Shin-Osaka Station in Osaka. If you have a Japan Rail Pass, you can only ride the two slower shinkansen trains, Hikari and Kodama. (We’re not on tourists visas, so we can’t get the Japan Rail Pass. But if you can, you SHOULD, because it’s a really good deal and train travel is expensive in Japan.) It was just over two hours, with brief stops in Yokohama, Nagoya, and Kyoto.

HOORAY FOR TRAINS, thinks Mike.

Mike trying to capture the shinkansen with his iPhone.

My bags always have cute things attached. We shipped our larger bags to Osaka via the amazing Yamato takkyubin service, which you should definitely use if you ever need to send your luggage anywhere in Japan. You can drop your bags off at any conbini, or have Yamato pick them up. Your bags will then arrive, stress-free, anywhere in Japan by the next day for around $12.

The Nozomi shinkansen car. More space than economy on any airline.

We picked up train bento boxes (or ekiben) at the station to eat on the train.

Mike’s ekiben was a bit more… uh, Western.

Speeding through Japan at 300 km/h.

A stop in Nagoya. It seemed like a nice place. I should visit.

Speeding again!

Once we made it Osaka, we took the subway to Namba Station to get to our hotel. We stayed at the Fraser Residence Osaka, which I would recommend because it’s EXTREMELY well-located. It’s right outside the station and close to Dotonbori and fun things.

View from the hotel window. Just to the left (outside of this photo) is Namba Parks, which you may have seen on Reddit.

The room even had a combo washer/dryer!

Somewhere around Namba Station, I came across an AKB48 cafe and shop! Unlike the store in Tokyo, there was no lineup to get in, so I was happy to wander inside and soak up all the AKB48 goodness. I didn’t eat at the cafe, but I wanted to…

…BECAUSE LOOK HOW CUTE THE FOOD IS! Wah, adorable!

Instead of animal-shaped AKB48 food, we went for real Osaka food, okonomiyaki.

SUPER DELICIOUS! I looooooooooove okonomiyaki.

After dinner, we walked around Dotonbori for awhile (and spent too much time in a Round 1) before heading back to the hotel. The next day was our early (11am is early for me, okay?) flight to Okinawa — more on that in the next entry!