Happy Year of the Horse

Happy New Year, everybody! I hope you all enjoyed the holidays. I had a nice relaxing holiday season. December 23 is the Emperor's Birthday, so I took off work on the 24th and made a 5-day weekend out of it.  

I started the weekend going to see the lights at Midtown again. They were very pretty. The colorful tower in the background of this picture is Tokyo Tower, which also had a "2020" on it, in honor of Tokyo winning its bid to be the site of the 2020 Olympics. Combined with the fact that Japanese cuisine was just declared a UNESCO intangible world heritage, people in Japan are pretty happy right now. 

On that Saturday, I started cooking. I made two types of cookies, some peppermint fudge, pecan pie, apple sauce, cranberry sauce, cornbread stuffing, sweet potato casserole, and turkey. When combined with the salad that some friends brought, it was just about enough food for me and the five people I had over for dinner! So that was very nice.

One of the buildings on the Imperial Palace Grounds

For New Years, I took another two days of leave - making another 5-day weekend - so that I could see what I missed while I was the Embassy duty officer last year. January 2nd was the Emperor's New Year's Greeting, one of two days in the year when the public can enter the Imperial Palace Grounds and see the Emperor. The Emperor, his wife, and members of the Imperial Family make five appearances throughout the day, when the Emperor gives his New Year's Greeting.

It was a beautiful day, and I was able to see the Imperial Palace and catch a glimpse of the Imperial Family when they appeared - not to mention the tons of people waving Japanese flags - so it was fun.

After the Greeting, some friends and I went to Ginza for something to eat, where I saw these fun posters under the train tracks.

On Martin Luther King Jr's Day, a few colleagues from work and I went skiing in Niigata. There's a really nice deal where you can get a shinkansen ticket and a one-day ski pass for only about $84. I've never been downhill skiing (only cross-country), but I figured that if I was ever to try, Japan would be a good place. So I rented the ski equipment (including a children's helmet, since that was the only size small enough for my head), and the guys each kindly spent a portion of their day trying to teach me to ski. At first, the silly people thought I should just head down the bunny hill, and they could just give me tips. HAHAHA. I very quickly lost control. They very quickly gave up yelling "V!" and switched to yelling "FALL!". Meanwhile, I spent some time trying to figure out how best to fall and decided upon flat on my face. (I later chose different approaches to falling, but this was a first effort, after all.) After I assessed body parts and they worried that I wasn't moving and maybe they'd broken me already, we decided that a better teaching method might be to show me how to make turns so that I could go slowly back and forth down the mountain.

Part of the bunny hill - I swear, it's steeper than it looks! 

At first, I could not figure out how to turn right. But eventually I was able to make a turn without involving a snow drift, and I could slowly, slowly work my way back and forth across the bunny hill. I even made it down a couple times without falling at all! I may have looked like a little old lady working my way slowly down the hill while 5-year old children zipped by me - and really, that's the age to start death-defying sports like this, not when you're approaching 40 - but I did it! 

Of course, after lunch, the snowboarders were out and busy falling down my bunny hill. My first run after lunch, I had to turn a little earlier than I would have liked in order to avoid a group of fallen snowboarders, which meant that I started going faster and feeling like I was going to lose control. So I carefully thought about how I could turn again, but then I'd be going even faster, and there wasn't a big fluffy snow bank on the other side, but there was a big fluffy snow bank on this side, so I just skied straight into the snow bank. It was a big snow bank. I was so far down in that snow, I had to take my skis off to get out. But it was soft!

So after a couple hours of learning to ski in the morning, lunch and then another hour or so in the afternoon, and about the time I ran over a snowboarder (or more precisely, the back of his snowboard) while yelling "SUMIMASEN!" ["sorry"], I agreed that it was time to take a break and get some hot chocolate. 

After skiing, we made a quick stop at an onsen, and then went to a little Japanese restaurant that had the sumo tournament playing on a small tv, the family cat wandering about, and lots of small food dishes and local sake. It was a very fun day! I'm hoping to try it again around President's Day. 

On a closing note, below is a funny sign that I saw in the train station when leaving to head back to Tokyo. I suspect they meant to say "Until Next Time" or "Come Again" or some similar sort of well-wishing. But this made me laugh.