Home Sweet Home, Okinawa Style

the view from my balcony

I've been here close to 6 months and I'm finally getting around to posting pictures other than my office. Incidently, I moved into a temporary office yesterday while they are fixing the building up...

But here are pictures of my home.

Had a storm coming in during the above picture. Still an hour away, but the water changes color so quickly here...

There's my little nerd-corner where I find myself often.

I do have two other bedrooms that aren't pictured, but one is my 'art' room with a big table that I keep my portfolios on and boxes filled with tubes, shipping materials and prints and art..

the bathroom, however, is interesting, and I'll get pics of that up later. Here, in Japan, you shower off on the floor of your bathroom (which is rather large like a walk-in closet with a drain on the floor) before you step into the bathtub. The funny thing is that you cannot fit into this bathtub so it can only be used as a shower.. which makes the shower room, well, useless, I guess.

I will eventaully put up my trips to Tokyo, Osaka, Mt. Fuji and Kyoto plus my trip to Beijing to see my brother and his family- but this beach life has really made me lazy!

Where the heck is Okinawa, and what's the new office look like?

Well first of all, Okinawa is not on the main Japanese mainland. It's a seperate
island a couple hours flight south right in the middle of the East China Sea
between Japan mainland and Taiwan. It has close to the same climate as
Hawa'ii
though Okinawa is, on average, more humid and a little less hot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okinawa

Above is a picture taken on my base: Torii Station. Okinawa has many US Military bases on the island, especially Marines(Foster, Hansen, Courtney) and Air Force (Kadena AFB), but there are not many Army personnel (I am an Army JAG and only have to work with them) and Torii Station is a very nice smaller base away from the crazy Marines and Air Force dependents....There are close to 25,000-30,ooo Military members on the island PLUS their families, civilian employees and other government workers and there are about 1.2 million total Japanese as well.

Down the hill into the main Torii Station base entrance. This view is opposite of the previous picture which was taken on base, looking out. What is really spectacular is that the base is built on a hill overlooking the ocean and if you
keep driving straight through on the main road, it would take you to the private Torii Station Beach.

Since it's a smaller base, there is not alot of traffic through the gates, making getting to and from (and around once on base) very easy.

This is the view from my office. **EDIT! They are doing construction in our building and my temporary Office ROCKS! I'll get some pics up this week...

Follow this main road, and...

....you end here. notice my sweet low-rider mini-van 'thing' parked there.

Multiple volleyball courts, cabanas, grills,

and they are even building a children's area with water slide. **Edit- all of this is complete now and it's actualy really nice, there's a whole water park down there now.

and now the walkways to the beach.

Well, the next post will be my new abode. A little nicer than what you saw in the Iraq Blog, and what's better, I get to live on the economy and not on base, so I get the best of both worlds.