Naha Marathon

While I know people who have run marathons and I've thought about running one myself, I'd never actually seen one in person...until now, and I'm glad it was the marathon here in Okinawa that I got to see. I love anime. I love cosplaying (dressing up in costumes as anime characters). I'm inspired by runners. But to see a person running in the Okinawan sun in costume...it's really awesome. Such varying degrees of awesomeness and madness, but I guess in a crowd of 30,000 people, there are going to be a few mad people who think they won't get heat exhaustion running in paper mache and nylon. But let me start from the beginning.

I woke up early and met my friends at my base school. The runners were starting off in Naha but would be running right on front of our school pretty quickly after the marathon started, so we all assembled and broke out the red scarves from Sports Day and went to wait across the street from the school. While waiting the teachers decided to relive some moments from Sports Day using the red scarves to do the choreographed movement...in the street. Now this is before they blocked off traffic.

There were kids there, but we didn't have to tell them not to try what we were doing. Odd, but nice. There were also two ambulances tucked away behind the shrubs as though to say, "nothing's going to happen, but just in case..."

Finally the race started. Everyone was yelling "gam

barre!" and "fight-o!"The first group of runners were your stereotypical looking runner. Oddly thin but muscular kind of wearing professional type of gear. The the next group appeared and then a few stragglers to the first group and that's when I saw the first one: a runner in a wig.

Then a monkey. 

Then more in all kinds of costumes:

Cranes and cows (for the new year), the salaryman, Christmas elves, Christmas trees, Frosty, Pikachu, goya (Bitter melon, I think is what it's called in English. Goya is an Okinawan word.) and others. My 

favorite was when the Asahi beer woman ran by because the teachers saw her and started yelling, "gambarre biru!" which essentially means, "yea, Beer! Go, fight!" Then came the craziest one. I like to call him The Heatstroke Zealot. 

It was fun, but by the end I had little desire to run a marathon, which was further weakened by people who had run the race swearing they would never do it again. I just don't think it's for everyone and probably not for me. I guess I'll see how I feel after doing a 5K or something.

Taco Rice

Yes, more on food. I'm not a connoisseur or anything. Food's just a daily part of life and that makes my daily life different here. Let's take, for example, taco rice. Now, I love Tex-Mex food. Really. I told my supervisor the other day on the way home that if Mexican food were a person I would marry it. If it were a child, I would adopt it. Yes, in case you hadn't realized this yet, I can be quite silly, but I digress. When I arrived here in Okinawa, I wasn't really expecting to find much in the way of Mexican food, so when I heard about a dish called taco rice, I had to investigate. 

Taco rice is just that. Think of a taco, but instead of a taco shell, it all sits on top of a bed of rice. It's not too bad and it's cheap. It costs 150 yen at school, which about $1.50. Maybe a little less. And it somewhat satisfies my cravings for Tex-Mex, but I really miss the chips and the crunchiness of taco shells. If I really needed a chip fix, I could go all the way to Okinawa City to get them at the import store, or I could go all the way to Chataan to the somewhat decent Mexican food restaurant there, but I can't, so for now I will just count the days until I return home for Christmas break where I will probably gain ten pounds eating all the Tex-Mex food I can. Good thing I have to do so much walking here, ne?