Merry Christmas everyone

Well Christmas is over. It's hard to tell it was even here. Back home people say that we're always too early to put the Christmas decorations away after the holiday. Here however it's ridiculous. The ginormous Christmas tree that was sitting out in front of Parco for probably the past two months disappeared the day after Christmas and so did all the decorations inside the store. It's like it never happened. I worked on Christmas day for the first time in my life. And I worked on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day too. I wasn't too bitter towards my students though-that they could see. Certainly none of the teachers were happy with the students but I guess it's not their fault-it's not their holiday.

They don't seem to celebrate it in too big a way over here. I mean it's all over the stores but that's just for commercial reasons. I'm not even sure if it's a big gift buying occasion because most of the people I talked to didn't receive presents (of course they were the same idiots who came to school on Christmas Day.) Oh well! I had my own little Christmas tree, with my own little presents (thanks Emily and Laura!) so it wasn't too bad. Unfortunately I forgot to get a picture of the tree with the presents under it.

Christmas Eve, Fumiko came over and I made dinner (yes you read right-I made dinner.) Actually the rice was kind of a joint effort. I was making my signature dinner (which I named Chicken Carbonnara) and rather than be ghetto and just buy the precooked rice from the grocery store like I usually do, I thought it would be nicer to make homemade rice. The only problem with this was that I rarely cooked rice in Canada and every time I did I needed to read the directions that Mom had markered onto the jar-I also haven't cooked my own rice in the nine months I've been here (contrary to what you believe-rice is actually pretty expensive here.) Fumiko is Japanese of course, and I assumed that Japanese people were born with the innate ability to make rice. The truth of course is that probably nobody under the age of 40 knows how to cook rice without an actual rice cooker. The very idea of actually cooking rice in a pot is horrifying to them. Anyways to make a long story short, the rice turned out ok and it was a great Christmas Eve.

Christmas was also interesting as I had dinner with my private student. I went over after work and we had some kind of crab nabe. It's really hard to describe it-it's like meat that's been cooked in a soup right there on the table in front of you. Anyways it was my first time having crab and it was pretty good on the whole. I'll never understand the Japanese and their cameras though. At one point during the dinner, the woman I teach got up and started setting up a tripod! I thought that that was going a little far just to take a simple picture and then she took out a little video camera and started recording our dinner! Very strange. And then after dinner they put together a little cake. Then they insisted of taking pictures of it and us sitting behind it. And then they started taking pictures of the cake itself! Litterally standing over it and snapping pictures! All the time saying, "Chee-ZU!"