Well Christmas has been and gone, although it didn't really feel like it!!!! Apart from the Christmas carols blaring from shops and a few people dressed as Santa trying to entice you into restaurants everything went on pretty much as normal! We had to work Christmas Day, but didn't have many lessons scheduled, and I managed to do the "What do you want from Father Christmas?" lesson twice!!!!
We have been out with friends a couple of times and on Boxing Day attempted quite successfully to cook Christmas dinner with our limited kitchen resources! We also had some Japanese Christmas cake - I don't know where they got this one from, but the Japanese traditionally eat sponge cake with cream and strawberries on it at Christmas - the only reason I can think of is that it encourages people to buy expensive strawberries during winter! It was delicious though!
Today we went to pick up our alien cards, so now we are official registered little green men from Mars (or you'd think so from some of the looks we get!)
We also explored the local area a bit more, and discovered that the post office we had previously been taking two trains to reach is actually less than 15 minutes walk from our house!!!
Preparations are in earnest for the New Year celebrations, which is a huge event here, even if Christmas is virtually non-existant as a holiday! Shops have stocked up with woven decorations hung with oranges and dried rice which are then hung above your front door (we have even seen one person with a decoration hanging from his car radiator!)
Another New Year's goodie in all the shops is "mochi" - doughy balls made of sweet, sticky ground rice. Sometimes the balls of mochi have fillings such as bean paste (urgh!) or strawberries (mmm....!) and they are offered at temples and eaten as part of the New Year festivities. Yesterday we saw some men grinding the cooked rice with water in a huge stone bowl using giant wooden mallets!!!
Tomorrow we are hoping to go to Nara, so will let you know all about it!
Nicola.
