Base Life

Welcome to small town living...at least small town for a girl that came from a city of 100,000+. There are about 20,000 on the base daily and many of them leave every night. There are about 20 housing towers that look like this...

and they are all over the base. Among those are the little community centers and schools and gyms and the commisary and Navy Exchange. There are also places to eat, like McDonalds, Taco Bell, Subway and few other American food eateries. The base is surrounded by hills and those are covered in trees and are impossible to walk through. The picture here obviously doesnt show much but you can see the ship yards and on the top right of the picture is where are the stuff to do is.

When I first got here I thought the base was huge because square mileage it is but when you get down to the things you can actually do on base, it starts to feel really small. Soooooo....thats why you leave the base!

This is what we call Blue Street. There is a vast amount of things to see, eat and do here. There is a shopping center down the way called Mikasa and it has everything from a 100 yen store (like a 99cent store) to a grocery store to a beef bowl resturant. One thing that is different about Japan is that every floor is often different from what is on the ground level. On the first level they may have a cell phone store, on the next level a resturant and on the next could be an apartment, and they are all owned by different people.

One thing about the Japanese people is that they do not waste space. Much of the time you walk into a store front and it looks like it wont go back for more than a couple of feet but once you get inside you notice that the store is huge and that it twists and turns and makes use of every nook and craney.

I love it here. It is very different but thats what makes it wonderful.