Meeting The Locals in Okinawa

If you’ve followed our blog for any length of time, you’ll know that we love to kick back and hang with the locals.

Whenever we get the chance, we eat at local, hole-in-the-wall restaurants and we’ve wandered around the back streets of dozens of cities around the world including the streets of Madrid. One of our best memories is hanging out with a grandmother and her (seemingly) dozens of charges in her little hut in Sumatra.

It’s those moments of connection with people all across the globe that make traveling so special, which is what I feel this Okinawa Prefecture video is aiming at. It’s called Meet The Locals.

Intrigued about the island of Okinawa, we delved more into what makes the place so special.

For one, residents are famously known for living extremely long lives and the island has one of the largest proportions of people over 100 years old in the world. Whether that’s thanks to the near subtropical weather (it lies far south of of mainland Japan) with the daily highs in the winter rarely dipping below 65 °F or the world famous Okinawa Diet, rich in green and yellow vegetables and the sweet potato being the staple ingredient versus rice like the rest of Asia.

No one knows for sure however the fact that the island also has some of the best snorkeling and diving in the world, with visibility up to 40 metres and warm water in the summer, would definitely be a good incentive for us to keep active if we lived there.

On top of all this, Okinawa is the birthplace of Karate and it’s home to the largest tug of war in the world. How cool is that?

Of course, subtropical weather and thriving marine life means we found some gorgeous photos of Okinawa while we were researching this article. We hope you enjoy.

Meet the locals (pub version): 

This post is Sponsored by Okinawa Prefecture, but that doesn’t change our love of getting to know great people from around the world or checking out future places to travel to.