New Year's Eve

Hi Everyone! Akemashite Omedetou (Happy New Year)! Sorry I haven't been updating much - I'm hoping to finally get internet access at home sometime in the next few days and I plan to put up a bunch of pictures then, so I've been waiting for that.

New Year's in Japan is a very important holiday, and, it turns out, a quiet, family time, which we discovered when we tried going out on the 31st. I went to Okayama, where I had my training in November, because most people I know here in Fukuyama went out of town. I met a teacher from Canada who arrived here recently and we had dinner with a few other people at the apartment of an ex-Marine who has lived in Japan for 13 years and now writes textbooks. He also does the voice of one of the characters in one of our textbooks, so it was very exciting to meet him. After dinner we went to an Australian-themed bar for the countdown to midnight, and a teacher from Stratford Upon Avon had written out Auld Lang Syne a bunch of times so we could sing at midnight. They play the tune here when stores are closing, so everyone knows it. After midnight we went dancing until maybe 4 or 5 in the morning and finally went to bed.

Part of the Japanese tradition for New Year's is to go to a shrine on the 1st, but I didn't end up doing that. They also have lots of traditional New Year's dishes called Osechi, and my coworker, Marina, and I did make one of those yesterday. It was made with sweet potato and chestnut. For more information on traditions of Japanese New Year's, you can look at my host mother's blog linked on the left (okasan's blog) and see pictures of the huge crowds that turn out for the post-New Year's bargain sales. They definitely do look similar to the after-Thanksgiving sales in the U.S. I think it's best to avoid setting foot in a store for the first few days of January if at all possible.

Thanks for reading! And thanks for the comments!