happy merry christmas!

Happy Merry Christmas and a happy new year! I'm in Tokyo at the moment
since I decided I wanted to feel somewhat productive with using my
time off work. I've got two weeks off from school but decided to only
spend a week in Tokyo since we planned on making an attempt to have a
semi-traditional Christmas dinner in Gifu. Didn't really feel like
Christmas though since I was supposed to work that day, all the stores
were open, and they had already taken their Christmas decorations down
in preparation for New Year's.

Anyway, me and a friend left for Tokyo on the 27th, and are planning
to stay till the 5th. So far we've been to Nikko and seen the three
wise monkeys (see, hear and speak no evil monkeys) and in Tokyo,
visited Sega's indoor theme park Joypolis and got on the
mildly-whelming (not over or underwhelming, just whelming) Prison
Break ride. I guess i may have appreciated it more had I actually seen
the show, and understood everything that was said as well. Ah well.

Unfortunately, this trip required a necessary visit to the Apple Store
in Ginza. I only enjoy visiting there when I don't need to go, not
when I have to buy a charger for my iPod after forgetting to pack it
for this trip. I actually managed to forget everything at home that I
bought specifically for this trip. Urgh.

yatta! christmas!

It was pretty stressful, and at one point, I thought it was going to be a complete disaster, but it turned out all right in the end. Kinda like what you'd expect from your standard clichéd chick flick, I guess. Minus the passionate embrace and the couple you know are gonna get together in the end.

But I digress (again) - My first Christmas party without family went alright without too many dramas! Woo! I didn't realise how much I take family (i.e. mum) for granted considering there's so much planning to do to make such a huge meal. Granted, I kinda did Christmas dinner in Australia before, but that involved an oven, and hot weather that defrosted everything, and the involvement of less flammable ingredients....

So, considering the size of my fridge and my oven/microwave/toaster combo appliance, it took heaps of micro-organising - we ordered the ham and cheesecake and chicken online from Nagoya, and it just managed to fit into our fridge. Then, since my "oven" is kinda small, we weren't too sure how long to cook stuff, so we played it safe and decided to buy a pre-cooked ham that just required defrosting. Which would have been good, had we taken the ham out to defrost long enough. Lesson learned - hams take longer than 2 days to defrost. And by baking it in an "oven" for around about 2 hours and letting it rest for a couple hours before eating it should make it less icy.

2nd lesson learnt - probably not best to try and toast almonds in an industrial-strength fish grill. Toast burns if you leave it in the grill for longer than a minute, and almonds after a few results in a fairly huge flame. At least I know now that you can put water on gas-based fires.



So yeah, after all the food-related dramas, it turned out to be a pretty good meal, and to top it all off, we decided on doing some carolling while fulfilling our Japanese quotient of the day.



Turns out, carolling is WAY more fun when it's done in a room with just you friends, a few drinks, and some Nelly, Justin Timberlake and Sean Kingston... and of course, the obligatory Rihanna song.

how to make delicious tea in a flash

oshiri kajiri mushi...

So, it's been two full weekends since my last blog, and What do I have to show for it?

• A scarf, and two pairs of gloves - I realised after riding my bike to school one wet, sub 5˚ morning that I really needed to buy more winter weather accessories. And, never seeing the snow much in Melbourne, decided I needed to make my first ever purchase of a scarf. The only one I had beforehand was a Footscray Bulldogs scarf, which was rarely used because:
  a) It's never really scarf-worthy weather in Melbourne,
  b) Surprisingly, I never really felt an urge to show everyone which AFL team I barracked for, or even let people know that I actually, at one point in time, did follow the AFL, albeit superficially and purely because I liked dogs and the colours red and blue when I actually did follow the AFL, and
  c) I'm not a bogan.
  I also ended up with two pairs of gloves - not because I felt the need to have options to coordinate with what I wore each day, but since I didn't expect to find any gloves I liked and bought a cheap arse pair that I thought I were okay. That was, until I found a cooler, more expensive pair of leather gloves in another store 10 minutes later.
  
• A Paper Doll - "Meh, I've done origami before, a paper doll can't be that hard!"
  One deflated ego, and two hours later, resulted in this: Turns out paper doll, not as origamiy as I thought. And, I found out that I have issues differentiating an inch from a centimetre, which doesn't make the art of making paper dolls any easier.
• A Japanese song stuck in my head. After Karaoke last week (yes, I went again, and please don't judge me - I got tricked into doing all these things! stupid Japan!) Our usual trip was a little different this time since we went with a Japanese guy who didn't speak that much English. Not wanting him to feel out of the loop, I tried to sing a Japanese song, and turns out, I don't know that many. The only ones I do know happen to be both kid's songs - one from 2000, and the other one, a huge hit at the moment... So much so that it's now even got it's own dance. You know how when you don't know all the words to a song, only the few words you know play through your head, which eventually drives you insane? Well, it seems to happen a lot in Japan, since I can't understand most of the words, and this song just feels like I should know more to the song, but what I know is pretty much it.... "Oshiri kajiri mushi...." dammit!
  
• A butt groove on my kotatsu chair. Due to a lack of central heating in Japan and my paranoia about using a kerosene heater, my saviour is my trusty ol' kotatsu. It's like a coffee table, with a blanket underneath the top table bit that drapes over the edges and underneath the table top and blanket is a mini heater, so as you sit underneath the table, your feet stay warm, and the heat stays in thanks to the blankets. Mmm.... toasty... I so am not looking forward to my next electricity bill.
  
• Resentment towards TV networks. If it weren't for the Writer's Strikes, I wouldn't have sat through a season-long Heroes marathon. It only would have been an 10 episode marathan of Heroes instead. Now not only am I more yay-Heroes, but I'm annoyed that this next episode that's only meant to tie up the current storyline is now serving as the season finale. Booo.