明けましておめでとう！(Akemashite Omedetou!)

Merry Christmas and a Happy New year everyone, hope you had a good one and sorry I havn't updated this in a while, I hope the withdrawal wasn't too terrible.

Hmm, where to start. Japanese Christmas? After all the build-up and hype in all the shops and stuff it actually turned out to be a bit of a let down, Nothing much happens, it's considered mostly a couple's thing, and oddly for Japan they don't even really take the opportunity to indulge in lots of food (or maybe that's how they make it different from every other day...). A bunch of us exchange students went out for lunch to this restaurant which does pretty decent (by which I mean recognisable) western food, so I had a distinctly festive spicy mushroom pasta for Christmas dinner...

Oh, and this may seem a little bit odd, but what with all the couples down in Harbourland (they put up loads of illuminations there. The Japanese like pretty illuminations) it seemed particularly noticeable that there really are a lot of Japanese people in Japan. And pretty much ONLY Japanese people. I know this is pretty obvious, and I find my self in situations every day where I'm the only non-Japanese person in sight, but what with the massive number of people and me the only foreigner it was just more in-your-face than usual.

New Year! Bloody hell that was cold. (largely my own fault, should have put on more clothes, had a nice new-year cold for the next few days). All in all, not my favourite New Year, went to a club in Kobe, as we all figured Osaka, which has a much better night life in all honest, would be even more crazy than it is on a normal day. Anyway, place was mostly filled with random (mostly rather fat for some reason) foreigners, and there was much drama with some of the other exchange students which sort of put a downer on things. We went to a shrine at 4am on the promise of hot Sake from the monks, which turned out not to be the case (though there was much food, this being Japan. (Anyone who tells you the main religions of Japan are Budhism and Shintoism has no idea what they're talking about.). We then went up Mount Maya to watch the first sunrise of 2010, where it was even colder. Not to mention cloudy :-(

Oh, I went to see Avatar as well, in 3D! (And fortunately not the Japanese dub. The first time we tried to go I got the times wrong and we turned up in time for that showing, though it was sold out so we went back a few days later and saw the Japanese Subtitled showing.). Without meaning to turn my blog into a film review, I did really enjoy it, even if the story was entirely predictable and rather overly messianic, very much recommended if you havn't already seen it. Oh, and when you do, and you see those tribal-font subtitles they give to the alien language, spare a thought for me trying to speed-read the Japanese versions. I ended up giving up reading the phonetics (ie, the names) and just reading the Kanji (ie, the bits with the meaning in them). So basically what I read was "[Blank] killed [Blank]!You bastard! [Blank] will never forgive you and I will avenge [Blank]", or something like that.

I had a great Gaijin (foreigner) moment the other day. After spending an hour speaking in Japanese to my (Japanese) friend in a coffee shop (incidentally I just found out there are KANJI for coffee-珈琲. It's a frikkin foreign word! There aren't supposed to be kanji for it!). Anyway, as we get up to leave, I notice the people sitting next to me are looking interestedly at my keyboard-scarf, so I show it to them and explain it to them (In Japanese), and then, after a brief chat with me, they turn to my friend and ask "What country is he from?"! Then to cap it off, after we both say "the UK", they start talking about how they've always wanted to go to Switzerland...

Also lately, in response to the much complained about Japanese language classes, I've been working through Chris' grammar textbooks, which have been really helpful, only now I feel a bit over-stuffed on sentence structures, so I think I need some more vocabulary to fill them in with. I feel fine with everyday stuff (and rather oddly some rather technical linguistic vocabulary), but I be able to hold some more advanced discussions...

Oh, and the 一生三宅 store-staff's stalking geared up a notch this month with both a hand-written note and a phone call at 2100 (the store closes at 2000!) to tell me about the new collection on sale from Friday... freaky...

Finally, bizarre Japanese preoccupation of the last month: Alpacas