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!