00:05 John Daub: Hello everybody, welcome to the aquarium here in Okinawa. This is a wonderful place. It's called the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium. I've never been here before. It's one of those places I've always wanted to come to and now I have. I want to talk to you about the experience that I had in here.

00:28 John Daub: Right now it is the rainy season. It started actually today and the rain came down like crazy this morning. Driving here, it was about an hour. We're staying at Onna Beach at the Intercontinental Hotel there. It's a wonderful place and we'll give you a tour of that maybe tomorrow. But today I got to show you what it's like in here. We just saw a dolphin show. We just went in here and saw the aquariums. The prices, if you book online, I'll show you all this, how to get here and everything. Let's start from the beginning.

00:57 John Daub: I want to show you a video of our experience. It's about two minutes long from the start to the end. Here's the entrance that we came in at and the parking lot was 20 minutes to park the car, May 18th. On a rainy day, so a lot of people are thinking the same thing. Here are the ticket prices. It's 2,180 yen for an adult, half price for kids. But Leo is under six, so he's free, which is great. We booked online and we got those little teeny voucher tickets when we arrived.

01:37 John Daub: You can see there's a massive aquarium. It just passed right there. But the whole place takes a good solid hour to go around. There's some fugu (pufferfish). Leo could stand over them and see them from two different angles, which I thought was really great. Here's a conger eel, I believe. I think that's a Napoleon wrasse from my years of diving. It's been two years. Some really massive fish in the first aquarium that we went into. We even saw some clownfish right there. That's Finding Nemo, right? They have a lot of these little teeny aquariums as well, where you can see some unique fish, poisonous fish.

02:13 John Daub: These jellyfish with this purple light was just impressive to look at. I couldn't move my eyes for a good solid five minutes just staring at them. But it was the big aquarium right here, which was just so impressive. I think if you come on a weekday off season, it's a lot more relaxed. Oh, look at these little whelks. I forget what they call these things, but they were so cute. Here's the big massive aquarium. And there's also a shark tank.

02:46 John Daub: This is it right here. I could stand here for an hour, but I'm not going to do that. But I was only here for about 10 minutes because Leo had to leave. Look at that big whale shark up there and the manta rays. Beautiful. It is a massive tank. I don't know too many in the world that are as big as this. And here it is from the outside. Quite an amazing experience to come to the aquarium. And it's something that you can do in Okinawa. Again, this is one of the best aquariums in the world. Hey, that Peter von Gomm's here. Nice to see you. Yeah, it is one of the best aquariums in the world. That tank is just massive.

03:56 John Daub: Outside here, they also have other things going on. There's an area for sea turtles, which I thought was really cool, and a dolphin show that they put on here. The dolphin show, some clips I took here. They're very well trained dolphins and they will jump and do all sorts of amazing stuff here. Look at that. Whoa. That was a weak jump too. They get even better. Here's one in super slow motion. Of course, I had to do this. Look at that flip. Oh my gosh. That dolphin has earned its lunch. Look at that. Boom. There's nothing better than super slow motion.

05:06 John Daub: Also here, you can see Leo got a chance to pose inside the shark teeth. He asked Daddy not to get in the picture with him. And then he didn't even look up at the camera. It's crazy. They say call the terrible twos. But we're having a pretty good time here. This is the start of the sort of off season because of the rains. Just take a look at the view here. It's cloudy and there's a break in the rain. Again, when I was driving here and it's about an hour from Onna Beach, it's like a two hour drive, I want to say, from the airport. So it's quite far to get up to this part of Okinawa. I put a map in the description of it, but you can see the clouds do not look friendly. And I'm pretty sure it's going to rain again.

05:48 John Daub: But we're going to hustle back to the hotel now and try to get some swimming in. And then I'll film some of the hotel. This Onna Beach is just such a beautiful place. And a lot of people go in there just for the resort. It's not too pricey to go to this Intercontinental. And it's just a little bit of a hike. You need to come by rental car. There's a structure for the aquarium on the outside. The Wi-Fi is really not good here. So not the Wi-Fi, but the 4G signal. And there's a lot of people. So I had to find this one place that was able to give me a 1080p capabilities. There is a shisa (Okinawan lion statue). Do you know what that is? That's right there. They protect the island from evil. Kamisama right there.

06:52 John Daub: I'll give you a little more detail tomorrow when I bring you a livestream of the hotel area and the beaches. And then we'll see what else we can do. I'm thinking of also showing you Kokusai-dori (International Street), which is a street down central Naha, which is just filled with all sorts of foods. You know, my friends at Tabi Eats, Satoshi, I believe, has done a bunch of live streams there. But let's see if we can do something a little bit differently because he's so much more knowledgeable about Okinawa than me. But I might have a different point of view. So that's going to be interesting. We'll try to do that tomorrow, even if it's raining.

07:26 John Daub: By the way, Kanae and I got Leo this whale shark. And you can put your finger in his mouth, which is kind of creepy. It's a good creepy. Do you guys have any questions about it? It's kind of a neat place. I do think that you should book the tickets online. It's about 2,100 yen. What is that? About $16. That's a good exchange rate right now to get in. But if you book online, you can save 300 yen. And if you have a family of four, that could be enough to pay for lunch somewhere, maybe, sort of.

08:09 John Daub: The weather's not too hot. You can feel the humidity is way more than in Tokyo here, but because we're on the seaside, you get this feeling, this humidity and smell. It's kind of like Florida to me. There's like this subtropical vibe going on here. The air, you can smell it, you can feel it, and that is different than Tokyo. And there's a nice breeze here at all times, I think, but it can get pretty oppressive in the summertime, I bet, just because the humidity's got to be 10 times worse than Tokyo. I've only been here in October and May. Yeah, off of the summer seasons. So it's not too bad, the weather here.

09:02 John Daub: The name of the aquarium in English is the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium. It is one of the world's best. And I'm not joking. It is, I've been to a lot of aquariums. This is better than the one in Osaka. This is number one in Japan. And Japan's an island, so you know, in a very developed country, so you're going to have some pretty impressive museums and aquariums. And that main tank with the whale shark in there, I've never seen a whale shark in a tank before. That whale shark's massive. And he would just loop around, check it out, over and over and over again. And it's just super impressive. Look at this. Oh, man. And the mantas, check that out. Ah, sometimes they would fight. But to see the people down at the bottom, I love this angle right in the center, to see the people backlit in the shadow of it, it's just awesome.

10:08 John Daub: I don't know any other aquarium in the world that is as impressive as this one. It's just, I think it's on another level. What do you guys think here? There's a shark tank, which is pretty interesting. But this one just has a very good variety, a very good diversity of aquatic life in there. And I think that makes it better than the other tanks. And it's just so much bigger. And when you have a whale shark like that, that's just amazing. To be able to see it. To be able to have a habitat large enough for him is amazing. You don't really get a feel of it until you pull back. It is bigger than a movie theater screen. That is one big piece of glass.

10:59 John Daub: And this is my favorite though. For me, these jellyfish, I just couldn't stop looking at them. I couldn't pull away. I had to yank myself. I think it did something to my brain that made me not be able to look away. Maybe it's the colors. I had to go back in secret to go and film this because I didn't want to get in trouble. And I was like, don't you go back to those jellyfish.

11:27 John Daub: All right, we're going to go get some lunch now. It's getting closer to 2 p.m. and get back to the hotel. But we'll share a little bit more of our vacation from Okinawa. I'm taking some video in the background. But we're having a great time. And I appreciate all of you. There's a picture of us at the aquarium. I appreciate you guys being patient. I wasn't able to livestream yesterday because I was filming two episodes, two scenes for main channel. Which were really amazing, I thought. But we had a really nice sunny day yesterday. So we don't mind too much that it's cloudy today.

11:59 John Daub: So we'll leave you with this here. The weather of Okinawa. It could be better, yeah. But we'll take whatever we can get. And I'll take this because it's not raining. And that's a big deal. Show you from the stairs here and then I'll say goodbye. I don't know how this signal is holding up. There you go. A little slice of Okinawa for you. Thanks everybody. See you in another livestream tomorrow.