OrpheusGrey

Having spent Christmas in Thailand, we saved present opening for our return to Okayama in January. J and I opened one gift from each other before we left, and opened the rest (plus the ones my parents sent us a few days after we got home). Their presents made it feel more like Christmas than it had, but our celebration of the holiday certainly lacked the the spirit of having your family with you. It was still a good Christmas, and you can see that our little tree looked pretty decent with some presents underneath it.

We've been hibernating a lot this month, because of the cold. We got about 3 hours of heavy snow flurries the first weekend of the month. With 20mph winds it felt like a blizzard, but the sun erased all traces of snowfall in about 45 seconds. Sadly, there was not enough accumulation for us to make a snow-daruma.

We did some more sightseeing in Kurashiki this month. Though nothing to really write home about.

J organized a celebration of my birthday with some of our JET friends, which included some of my favorite things; beer, grilled meat (yakiniku), karaoke, friends, and more karaoke. It was great!

We celebrated her birthday the following weekend with some dancing at the only halfway-decent dance club in Okayama-shi. It was fun until the hipster Japanese kids who refuse to dance but love to smoke showed up and hotboxed us out. We were getting sick of the early 90's hardcore rap anyway. Not a bad place for Okayama though.

At the end of the month I finally caved to the incessant requests from one of my coworkers to join an Okayama Toastmasters Club event. The recent addition of two Sri Lankan members prompted the club to hold a curry party. Of course, it was down to the newbies to prepare their native curry dish. It was quite tasty, though incredibly spicy. But it went great with umesho, a fermented plum wine that we mixed with club soda. I am told it's a girly drink. Oh well...

Also, my high school rented a Momo-chi costume for some sort of event. I happened across it in the front entry when returning from lunch with some coworkers one day. You can see what that led to.