Happy New Year!!

Well, it's 2010 now. Crazy, I do believe.

I'm on winter break still, it ends this Thursday, the 6th.
Although it is incredibly short by UMD's standards, my break has been jampacked with all sorts of fun and goodness.

I went to Sendai with the Vander Haaks to stay in one of the cabins of Takayama. It's a gorgeous place, as you can see in the hordes of pictures I took that I will post right here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2026122&id=1230390045&l=99ba5adc9c

But before we went to Takayama, we stopped in Mashiko, a pottery town. They had tons of shops, selling all sorts of unique and beautiful plates, cups, utensils, etc. I didn't think I was that into pottery before but when I was there, I wanted everything.

Takayama with its beaches and mountains and clear blue skies - it was great. Despite this, I spent most of my time inside because we brought a Nintendo 64 with us and...well, I love Nintendo 64. So many good memories and so many good games. But don't worry, I got to appreciate the great outdoors too.

For Christmas, we decided we needed to have a rave. We also decided we needed some boom to our party. Emily asked the people at The Daiso (100 yen store) where we could find fireworks. They said that they had some. One employee asked her fellow employee to cover her register as she ran to the back room. Two more employees got involved and finally, they brought out some stuff. They told us it was summer fireworks and whether it was okay. We said yes, apologized for their efforts, they apologized for the wait, we all smiled and we got our fireworks.

It was the smallest (and the only) rave I've been to but it was so much fun. I like that I have friends who are as silly, if not sillier, as me. We rocked out to my impromptu playlist of Lady Gaga, Hellogoodbye, Yelle, Miley Cyrus and Cascada, and other stuff.

The rest of the time in Takayama was more chill. Watching Christmas movies (and Beauty and the Beast), playing Mario Party and regretting we started it and that we had to finish it, drawing in my notebook....oh, and "starting" a Glee club. Basically, we just sang songs of the Glee soundtrack to the best of our ability. I think "Lean on Me" was our best number.

Oh. I did the naked thing (how my mom calls going to the public bath). The place we went to was called a sento and they had different kinds of baths - a scented bath (the day we were there it was yuzu - citron fruit in English), a cold bath (for cooling off in), a bath with jets, a bath with SUPER jets, a bath outside so you can feel warm and cool at the same time, and just a regular bath. Oh, they have a sauna too. And once you decide in your mind to get over the nakedness, its really not bad at all. No one cares, so you shouldn't either :D I can't do the bath for very long though. The water is very hot - in a good way, but I get hot very fast and can only do heat for so long.

What actually made me decide to just go for it as because I figured it would be interesting to write about, and for others to read, for my blog. Hahaha, a silly motivation tool, but it worked. So, I hope you enjoyed it.

We returned to Tokyo and it was general relaxation, hanging out, and lazying about for the next few days until New Years Eve. Emily and I met with her friend Laura and her fiance Otto. We went to Ikebukuro for Starbucks and wasted a few hours there. After Starbucks, we went to Book-Off to waste some more time and then we did purikura! One of the best inventions that Japan has made better. We ate dinner at Matsuya and then headed over to Asakusa.

We were plenty early though. We did some walking around, taking pictures of the Senso temple, seeing what people were selling...and then we made our way to another Starbucks and spent some time there as it was cold outside and we had a lot of waiting to do. We did some shopping at a 100 yen store too. We came back to the temple around 11:00 and just walked around more. We got tired of walking though and started dancing. I started "do-do-do" -ing the Mario song. This guy started "do-do-do" -ing back at me...he seemed sort of angry/annoyed. Whoops. He was drunk though. We had a couple of guys that wanted to take pictures of us - not really sure why...the fact that they were inebriated helped though. And I guess we were the most charming foreigners there (haha).

There was a gong that began to ring as the new year came in. People cheered, hugged and kissed their lovers/spouses, we did a little dance. We didn't try to go into the temple, so we just headed home. Unfortunately, even though the Yamanote train line was still running, the Seibu Ikebukuro line that Emily and I needed to get home stopped running at 12:35 (we got there at about 1:00) and wasn't going to start running again until 5:00. Laura and Otto got off at Shinjuku, so they were a-okay.

Emily and I - not so much. She called her mom and her mom was nice enough to come pick us up. Sadly (for all of us), she got lost. About 2 hours later, we were picked up and taken home.

New Year's Day was more lazy business. We watched the movie 9, had tabletop barbecue for dinner and watched the new Star Trek movie. A great end to another visit. I went back to Eda after that as I had work in the morning.

Now, just waiting for school to start.