Well we are as settled as we are going to get until January. The house has concrete walls, really high windows and resembles a jail cell. My guess anyway not that I've ever been locked up. Our first shipment came in last Thursday. It was suppose to contain our dishes, linens and Christmas Decorations. Our dishes were in there but they were all broken.

Our Christmas decorations survived so we put the tree up on Friday. The boys had fun with that. Tommy would grab and ornament run to the tree and throw it in and then run back yelling "more more". Joey would said "uh Tommy your not suppose to do that, now I have to fix it". Which of course meant double the ornaments that he could hang. I guess you could say they balance each other.

So far we like Okinawa. You really don't need a car to shop. We've parked our toy car at the USO a few times and walked right out the gate down Gate Two Street. There are tons of shops and then an interesting mall. You get into by turning down what looks like an alley and going into a dark tunnel. I wish I had a picture. It's almost scary until you realize it's a mall. Honestly the only reason we found it is because we followed other Americans to see where they were going. That's mostly what you have to do here.

The street is usually full of Airmen shopping and it's easier to follow them than attempt to read the signs. We bought a map of Okinawa and attempted to walk to a mall. It was suppose to be simple. It didn't occur to us that we would have no way of knowing which building it was. All the buildings here look like 5 story run down apartment buildings.

We did end up finding it. Luckily they had a 100 yen store (dollar store) and they advertised it on the side of the big pink 5 story building. I really wish I took pictures that day so y'all could see. We were so excited to find the mall until we got inside. That's when we discovered that aside from the dollar store, there were only two other stores and the rest was empty store space. Apparently they lost some big contract. Who would have thought? Well that's all I have for now. Hopefully I can post a few pictures with this article.

Julie