Cherry Blossum Festival!

The cherry blossums have bloomed! These trees only bloom for a few weeks a year, otherwise they just look like dead tree branches... so, when they are in bloom, they have a huge festival about an hour north of us in Nago.
Little booths line the streets...



Here I am, picking out some sweets to eat! I don't know the name of what I'm looking at, but they're really doughy tasting and filled with a sweet paste on the inside, made from beans. It sounds really unusual, but they eat them all the time here... I like them because of the doughy consistency. But I made Chris take a bite of it because hadn't tried them and I thought he was going to start gagging... then proceeded to say "this is awful!"





At the end of the long path of food/game booths, there is a huge set of stairs that supposedly led up to these "castle ruins." Here we are at the bottom of the stairs... the picture is kind of misleading, as you can only see the first 50 of the 500+ stairs.








At this point I'm sweating... and we're on the first portion of stairs...
I put "castle ruins" in parenthesis because there were no castle ruins... in fact there wasn't much to see at all at the top of hill... I wish someone would have mentioned that as we were climbing up!
However, the view of the cherry blossums was gorgeous!


















Here's a close up...



































Chris's friend from Cedarville came with us... he's actually stationed in the states somewhere, but is "deployed" to Okinawa. Again, I put "deployed" in parenthesis because you think of a
deployment to Iraq, Afghanistan, or at least the desert... not to the gorgeous tropical island of Okinawa. It's a tough life they have, I'm telling ya....

So, here's Jon, trying out Japanese food...


















They had an adorable group of Japanese children putting on a show with their drums... they were dancing around, banging on them. It was so cute!


















And here's a picture of a banyan tree we saw when we were leaving the festival... I love the trunks of the trees. They're so unusual looking... this particular one had wooden ladder-looking things on each side to help keep it standing up...























We took one more tour in our car up a mountain-side to see a few more cherry blossum trees. I almost decided I wanted to get one, but then thought I would be sad the 49 weeks of the year that my cherry blossum tree just looks like some dead twigs...







So many fun things to do in Okinawa!!!