Well, the end of another funny (peculiar) week was once again the pinnacle. It started well- on Monday night having dinner with Nao chan at Pinnochio Okonomiyaki restaurant, then staying off work on Tuesday with a heavy cold (a day in pyjamas), busy elementary days on Monday and Wednesday and then a lovely national holiday on Thursday- lovely in the sense that I got to sleep in then went to a crazy freakshow cafe (as if the hotel in 'The Shining' opens a weirdo cafe above a carpet shop in a rundown shopping mall) in Takahashi with Adam, Rachel and Vicki. It also had London prices- £1.75 for a cup of tea!! Although there was definitely 350yen's worth of flavour as the tea had clearly been stewing for about 3 weeks.
Friday was busy baking day as we had our big Thanksgiving do in the Ushimado (translation= cow window) international villa on Saturday. So, after a quiet return to junior high (where I spent much of the day preparing mail and packages to send abroad) I set about going bake-crazy. Thanks to the internet I merged 3 recipes to make a rather successful lemon meringue pie (very sweet pastry, very sour lemon filling thanks to adding three times the suggested amount of lemon juice and lots of lovely sticky meringue) and a chocolate and orange marble cake. Having finished at midnight I left the packing for the next morning, and I finally set off on a motoring odyssey through Okayama at 12pm.
The expressway is a marvellous thing and thanks to high speeds and quiet roads I was in the city in an hour, but it took over an hour to cross through the city and then almost a further hour to meet the others at Oku train. We finally made it up the mountain to get to the Villa at maybe 3:45 although we almost headed straight back down when my Daihatsu Move stalled on top of the ramp outside and decided that it didn't want to stop moving even with the handbrake on and started rolling backwards...
Pretty soon everyone was there and some were cooking, some were exploring, but after a while everyone had their hands in and veggies were being cut and seasoning sprinkled and by 8pm we'd whipped up a storm and were sitting down to a Thanksgiving dinner of pumpkin, carrots, roasted vegetables, cabbage, mashed and boiled potatoes, green beans (with butter! And garlic!) and other things. We started dinner by saying what we were thankful for, and then said what we were thankful for in Japan specifically. I thanked God for non-freaky first years and Japanese hair straightening. Desert took many forms- my cake and pie, Rachel's pumpkin pie (mmm), Bob's chocolate mousse (more mmm), Alex's fruit roll-cake and Danielle's Japanese pears. I was worried that I may have had to vomit from over-eating but fortunately it didn't happen. This time...
After dinner we decided to be spiritual and watched a video of the story of Jesus which was American, dubbed into Japanese and to make it even more special, had a man doing sign language in the left hand corner. We were quite keen to learn the sign language for "immaculate conception", "virgin birth" and "massacre of the innocents" but the sign language wasn't as clear as we though it would be. I think we were hoping for mime-like sign...
But we made up for this when, soon after the video tape died (right when it was getting good too) we decided to play charades. But as happens, the tone was soon lowered (for once not by me) and poor Danielle struggled to tastefully mime "anime porn" and "paedophile". Paedophiles aside it was a great way to end the day. The night came to a finish at 2:30, only because we had to be out of the villa at 10am on Sunday.
So we woke on Sunday at 8:30 and after a swift breakfast of leftovers, cake and pudding we were out and on our way and Bob and I were heading to the city. While I had initially had no intention of staying and shopping I realised this was folly, so Bob and I headed out to Toys'R'Us where he bought Christmas presents and I bought "essential" items like "Home Alone" 1 & 2 on DVD.
After a late lunch, our taking in the city view from the top of the Cred building, shopping at Loft and photography by the castle we headed off, had dinner at Bob's while looking at our photos and then given that it was getting too cold and I was wearing only a t-shirt I decided to head home. Which led to today and a chance to prepare for and teach 2 classes at school and help an elementary school teacher with Christmas songs to teach the kids. They'll be singing a Spanish and English song- "Feliz Navidad" and being such an expert at Spanish (I can say taco, burrito and chimichanga) I attempted to teach correct pronunciation. You can only imagine...
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Chris! You lucky bastard! TWO thanksgiving dinners!
Wow. This is why I organized my own. Because I was not invited to one last year, and again this year, I was not invited to one either (like this one). You lucky people.
Who do you have to know in this ken/country to get an invitation to something.
Hopefully mine will rival that, though preparations are still underway as we speak. It will be difficult to get a lot of veggies, so I'm working on something good for that that's cheap. There will be plenty of mashed potatos, and all the turkeys have arrived!
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