Okinawa!

Okinawa!

I really did not know what to expect of Okinawa, but as I knew it was tropical, I guess my mind was automatically drawn to the little I saw of the Gold Coast in Australia.

Okinawa, or at least the part of it I have seen so far, is not that.

Tropical, however, it is. Hot and muggy and hot.

But it is also and island, and so does have quite a lot of wind, and the vegetation in many places looks a lot like the Atlantic coast in France. With loads of wonderful pine trees and sticky-leafed bushed in the undergrowth.

There are also about 2 billion cicadas, many of which live just outside my window, it seems. And big cockroaches (not in the rooms, luckily), and poisonous snakes (I have not investigated this), and big fruit bats (Nanae saw 2 on our first night here).

The rooms we are in stretch the definition of a dorm. Nanae and I are in fact in individual rooms, with small balcony, a small kitchen area, and toilet and shower in the room.

Ryukyu university is a american-style campus, so it takes about 15minutes to walk from the rooms to the biology building. Inside the campus, the vegetations looks much more tropical, with many palms and trees with aereal roots. The biology building is about as old and run-down as the one we had in Limoges, so I feel right at home.

It was raining a bit....

Jamie's team is quite international, and everyone speaks english, with varying accents, which will make it quite hard for Nanae. And, funnily enough, I find it quite odd to hear everyone speaking English, and keep wondering why they're not speaking japanese!

Our samples will arrive on Monday, so yesterday Nanae and I read over the protocols together. It is quite profitable for us, as she learns the English she will need to read papers, and I learn the japanese, which I will need when we get back to JAMSTEC.

And for our first week-end in Okinawa, we have been gifted a typhoon! Not a full-force typhoon, as it is passing westward of here, but enough to make it interesting.

Here is a series of photos taken from my bedroom window...

5pm

6pm

7am

8am, cicadas still going strong.