Kurisumasu Omedetou! Merry Christmas! Part 2 - Christmas Day

Like I said in the last post, Christmas in Japan may be popular, but you still have to work. So, on Christmas Day, Dave and I rolled off our futons and headed over to Miya JHS. My students (the boys especially) had been eagerly anticipating this day since my JTE and I told them Dave would be visiting. It's been a REALLY long time since they had a male foreign English teacher; at least 2 and a half years. Which means they were all in elementary school the last time it happened. But I digress.

We began the day just like any other at school, with the exception that I shouted "Merry Christmas!" after the usual "ohio gozaimasu!" (good morning) as we entered the teacher's room. We had our Tuesday morning meeting, in which they made Dave get up and introduce himself, heh heh heh. He did a good job though.

Hard at work on Christmas Day. Trying to figure out my Japanese cell phone

ok I admit, I played with it too ^_^


We taught 4 classes that day, of which I remembered to take my camera to only one >.< Ichinensei was just a regular English class but they got to have two Americans doing the dialogue instead of just one. The ninensei listened to Dave talk about himself, and once they found out he played baseball, peppered him with questions about what position he played and what his favorite team was.

For the sanensei class we did Christmas! And I remembered my camera. We started out just talking about the holiday, with informative stuff like "we eat lots of food"

and a turkey is too big for a Japanese oven

And then we followed that high-brow discussion by making snowflakes!


After the sanensei English class it was time for lunch. And Dave got to experience his first kyuushoku (school lunch). I was hoping they would feed us something like the dreaded shishamo, whole fish stuffed with fish eggs

but he got lucky and we had chicken.

And special Christmas dessert, either this pancake-looking thing or a kind of pudding. I got the pudding

He spent the hours leading up to lunch furiously trying to remember how to say "I don't understand" (wakarimasen), but I went easy on him and had him sit next to the best English speaker in the school. From where I was sitting it sounded like they had a nice conversation, and I'm sure the boy was thrilled to have another American to converse with ^_^

I sat next to one of my favorite students, who told me he wasn't looking forward to winter vacation because "I won't get to see Jen". Awwww. A+ for him!

After lunch, Dave was dragged off to the gym by the ninensei boys, who were keen to see just how good his soccer skills were after he said he liked to play. Heh heh heh, he was really sweating that one too. "Why didn't I say I liked basketball? Everybody can play basketball..."

But he did ok I think. There wasn't really enough room in the gym for a wild game of soccer, what with those of us playing badminton and all.

During soji (cleaning time), the boys took turns trying to tip him over in this arm-wrestling-balance-game-thing. They all failed, of course, as Dave is like twice their size at least. Although, and this is especially for Derek-sensei, Dave told me to point out that it wasn't just his size, he was "extending Ki".

All in all, I'd say he's picked up quite a few fans at MJH. The girls all thought he was handsome and the boys all thought he was cool. Well done Dave!

After school finished up we had to haul ass home to get ready for Christmas dinner! At my apartment. Once again, my contribution was apple pie. Which I had to make. From scratch. After school...

This time I put a full top on it. Always gotta be challenging yourself...

This time dinner was a rather small affair, with only four of us who live here still being around. My friend Sandy had a couple of friends in town that she brought along, Theresa came, and another ALT from Takayama, Martin was there. Martin, Sandy, and Sandy's friends are all from Canada, so as it turned out there were more Canadians than Americans at Christmas dinner this year. Although, technically speaking, we were all Americans, just from two different countries. It's too bad we didn't have anybody from Mexico, we could have rounded out the whole North American continent.

We managed a pretty good dinner. Ham, stuffing, mashed potatoes, salad, bread, cheese, wine, and good conversation

We finished it off, as all good holiday parties end here it seems, with tacos from home. mmmmmm.

And of course, pie!

I even went all-out and bought a special pie server for the occasion

And just to prove that I did it, since it seems all of my pictures are facing into the kitchen for some reason, here is the wreath I made. Yes, I DID decorate for Christmas! And I made that wreath all by myself. Well, I didn't make the wreath itself, it was given to me by a friend (her dad made it), but I decorated it. It's amazing what you can find at the 100 Yen Shop these days.

Kurisumasu Omedetou! Merry Christmas! Part 1 - Christmas Eve

Christmas may be a big holiday here in Japan, but it's not one of those fabulous ones like Respect for the Aged Day, which you get off. Unfortunately, as fond as they are of Santa and Christmas trees and giving gifts, I still have to work on Christmas day. However, thanks to the Emperor's birthday (December 23) falling on a Sunday this year, we did get Christmas Eve as a "substitute" holiday.

One of the ALTs in Takayama, a fantastic Irish lass named Fiona, hosted a party at her place this afternoon. My contribution: sugar cookies ^_^ I'm becoming well-known for baked goods, it seems.

My favorite part of the sugar-cookie-process is the making part. Eating them is enjoyable of course, but there's just nothing quite like putting together a bunch of seemingly unrelated ingredients and coming out with something that's soft and tasty and looks like home.

Since the party was this afternoon, we made them this morning. Meanwhile, Theresa was busy making mashed potatoes on my stove, ha ha

As everyone knows, you can't have good sugar cookies without an unhealthy amount of butter... which I softened in my microwave prior to mixing in as I have to do EVERYTHING by hand here.

And I mean everything. I really should invest in a mixer I think..

I put Dave in charge of "shape-engineering"


He did a pretty good job ^_^

And I baked them in my little toaster oven. It worked pretty well!

In fact, it worked so well that I was swatting Theresa and Dave away from the cookies so we would have enough to bring to the party, ha ha

The party was pretty awesome. We had a big crowd and lots of tasty dishes. Whole chicken, homemade stuffing, mashed potatoes, carrots, various other things...

and the dish that got the biggest oohs and ahhs from the Americans and Canadians

mac and cheese! KRAFT mac and cheese! sent from one lucky ALTs wonderful wonderful mother in Canada (^-^)v
Santa made an appearance

we won some hats..

Dave tried a Hot Toddy

And our favorite Brit, George, provided the Christmas pudding. Which tasted suspiciously like fruitcake, only less dry. And more British.


After all the afternoon festivities, our partying wasn't quite over yet as we had been invited to dinner by one of my Japanese friends. Patty, you should be proud, even half way around the world I ended up in church on Christmas Eve.

We sang songs, the kids played bells

We ate Christmas Cake

We played games and made balloon animals


And we even had a sermon. In Japanese, of course, but everybody knows the Christmas story so we weren't too lost. I think.
All in all, it was a fun party. A bit more wholesome maybe, than the one before it, but it was cool to be celebrating the other side of Christmas, in Japan, with Japanese friends ^_^

Take another little piece of my heart now...

A tragedy of mammoth proportions has befallen my humble apartment. Ok, not really the apartment so much as me, but it happened in the apartment.

About 2 months ago I purchased an external hard drive to store important data on, a place to keep all my pictures and various other questionably-legal (ie tv shows) items. Sunday night, while transferring my computer from my desk to my fabulous kotatsu, I knocked the hard drive over >.<

I've dropped it before and it's been ok, but this time apparently my luck ran out as my computer refused to recognize it when I plugged it in. I took it in to the local electronics store, but they've told me that it can't be fixed.

So, all of my pictures... ALL OF MY PICTURES from October on that were on the hard drive are gone. Yep, vanished, erased, little bits of 1s and 0s etched onto a disk that shall never spin again.

I managed to recover some of the pictures from the recycle bin on my laptop and I have some low-quality versions that I posted on the web of others, but for the most part, they're gone. I am especially disappointed about the pictures from Osaka, as I didn't ever save those to my desktop so there was nothing to recover on them.

Let this be a lesson to us all - save now, save often. And back it up, yo!

A wedding, bowling, Thanksgiving, and football

It's been a busy weekend.

Friday we had off for the "Labor Thanksgiving" holiday. More akin to labor day in the US than Thanksgiving, for the most part I spent it hanging around my apartment, studying, and cleaning a bit. It's actually been a while since I've had a free day like that, it was nice (^-^)

Yesterday (Saturday), I headed up to T-town to drop in on the wedding of one of my taiko group members. I wasn't technically a guest of the wedding, I was just there to see the drumming performance put on by some of the group for the reception. They gave me very specific instructions NOT to dress fancy, seeing as they would all be in their takio clothes. I felt a little funny not getting dressed up for a wedding, but since they told me to be casual, I did. I opted for a nice sweater and some jeans; and immediately regretted it when I got to the wedding >.<

Everyone looked so great! Of course they were all very gracious and actually quite thrilled that a foreigner was there, but I couldn't help but wish I had worn different pants. I tried my best to blend in with the wallpaper when I was in the banquet room (or heck, in the hallway outside), but being the only person in there with blond hair I managed to attract quite a lot of attention without doing anything at all. Ah well, c'est la vie.

The bride looked great. In fact, something I didn't know about Japanese weddings, they change clothes at least three times. 3 times! Can you imagine? And the kimono alone costs a small fortune to rent. I got to see all three outfits my friend wore, a beatiful green kimono, a stunning white western wedding gown, and a pretty black party dress. Her new husband had to change three times as well, from traditional Japanese wedding clothes to a white tux and then a black tux. It was amazing.

Since we weren't regular guests we actually got a little bit of the behind-the-scenes and got to spend some time with them where they were changing and whatnot. I probably got to chat with her more than most of the guests, ha ha
The taiko was pretty good too ^_^

After the taiko performance was finished we said our goodbyes and I headed off to meet some of the teachers from MJH for bowling as part of this Takayama teacher's-union type thing. It was technically for teacher's who were under 30 I think, and I had fun pointing out to 3 of the 4 guys who came from Miya that they were all over 30, ha ha

Japanese bowling shoes. Don't they remind you of the velcro shoes from the 80's? And they're purple too! ^-^



After bowling I ran around Takayama trying to find ingredients and utensils for making pie. You may be asking yourself, "self? why would she want to make a pie? I mean apart from the obvious reason that pie is delicious and everyone loves pie." It's a reasonable question.

The answer is that today, the ALT's of Takayama (and some local friends) had Thanksgiving dinner. At my apartment!

It was pot-luck, and we ended up with tons of yummy dishes. Including stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, creamed corn, tofu, two scrumptious noodle dishes, bread, cheese, and fruit

We even dressed up my humble, yet beloved, kotatsu for the occasion in a turkey-day table cloth

We then proceeded to stuff ourselves silly, just like at home. In fact, I don't think I've been this full since I came to Japan...

Kyle made a new friend...

And then, after the third round (for some), we broke out the dessert...

Including my pie! (^-^)/ And I am really quite proud of it. I made it from scratch. There is no such thing as pre-made crust here. I made the crust, rolled it out, peeled and sliced the apples, made the filling, even made a pretty lattice top

And on top of all that, I baked it without an oven. That's right people, I cooked that pie in my microwave. Then I stuck it in the toaster oven to brown and actually toasted the top a little more than I would have liked but it still tasted good. I was worried the bottom wouldn't have cooked fully but it turned out great.

Angela also made a scrumptious apple dessert from scratch and another ALT sent along some chocolate desserts so we ended up with a fantastic sweet finish to dinner.


After we finished eating, it was such a beautiful day today that we just HAD to go outside.




We decided to head down by the river to play a little touch football, since we didn't have the luxury to watch the college games on tv. We new folk from CO are apparently a bit more sporty than the old group of ALTs as we were, along with a couple of others, the ones most pushing to get outside to toss the ball around. I guess the spontaneous football game just didn't happen here very often over the last couple of years. To me, it just felt like what always ends up happening at this kind of gathering...

Anyway, I went down to the river with the 4 guys to toss the ball around before the rest of the girls showed up. Isaac, Kraig, you would have been proud to see how well I threw that ball. Perfect spirals, good power. Heck, I threw it better than half of the guys there, and definetly better than all of the other girls. Not to brag or anything... but I was awesome. ha ha

Once everyone showed up we played some touch football and of course, the team I was on won. It was actually akin to the CU/ Nebraska game, we beat the pants off the other team.



I'm actually in the second picture there. Can you find me? Ha ha ha. Where's Jen? I'll give you a hint in the next one I'm chasing the ball before it bounces into the river, but my head got cut off O_o


After football we headed back inside, ready for round two of dinner....

Tacos! mmmmm.

And then we watched episodes of The Simpsons. It was such a fantastically American day - Thanksgiving dinner, football, and The Simpsons. I can't imagine a better way to spend a holiday away from home ^_^