Cream and Coke Tour

Summer offers a lot of cool tours around Okinawa through our travel office. While other people are heading to mainland Japan to climb Mt. Fuji we are doing things close to home. Gabriella and I took a day to visit two very important factories here on Okinawa. The Meiji milk factory which makes over 50 different kinds of ice cream. They also make a lot of different kinds of milk, coffee products and juice. But really the important part is the ice cream. The tour was really just a video, in Japanese, of how the milk is collected from local area cows and eventually turned into delicious ice cream. Our tour guide did her best to translate for us, so we were able to get the gist of what the process entails. We received a delicious milk ice popsicle which we ate at a park located close by. After about 20 minutes of playtime we were able to get on the bus and head to our next factory stop. The coca cola factory is located just a few minutes away from the Meiji milk factory. They have many different kinds of soda and canned coffee than they do in the US. I found out that there are only 150 "official" coke vending machines here on Okinawa, that's a fraction of the 400,000 vending machines located throughout the island. That's 3 vending machines for every single person on Okinawa. The factory line was filling water bottles and cans of Aquarius sports drink when we walked through. At the end of our factory walk through we were offered a tiny can of coke or juice to drink. The coke was deliciously refreshing. We were able to ask questions while enjoying our beverages, we found out that while the coffee products are made by coke they are not distributed in the US because of a lack of interest by Americans. Also the formula for coke is the same here in Japan and if the coke tastes different it's because of the natural differences in water and other locally sourced ingredients. I also learned coke has no artificial additives.

When our tours were complete we headed to a local restaurant for lunch. Yakiniku is where a buffet of raw meat and vegetables are offered and you the diner cook the food at a little grill on the table. This was our lunch stop. The place had a nice variety of meats, some a little more exotic, for example liver, kidneys and a duck sate stick. The summer noodles were delicious as was the soba. The best part of the meal was making my own green sno-cone for dessert. The whole day was a great opportunity to explore the island a little more.