December

Yet another belated blog post. Way, way belated. No excuses, I'm plain lazy.

There were several memorable events in December. First, our Japanese group held a bonenkai. But without much drinking. Which is not really a bonenkai, but whatever. Only one guy got pissed. He was red and talkative, and normally he is neither, so you just knew something was off. It was fun - only pity that one of the girls got sick that very day, so the group wasn't complete.

We went to an izakaya, where the Canadian got us a good price for a rather large dinner set. "Good price" doesn't mean it was cheap, just that it was cheaper than it would have been otherwise. But it was quite nice. I especially liked the zosui after nabe... That was just delicious. And mushroom tenpura was also very good.

Several days later, the missing girl, the other Malaysian, the Chinese girl and me went to see Sea Paradise in Yokohama. (Hmm, I could have just written "me and the class girls". Oh well.) It's a big Disneylandish place, the centerpiece of which is a huge aquarium located in a pyramid. No, not making it up. Pyramid. It's made from glass, though, not stone. And there's all kinds of marine critters swimming around in its five storeys. And on top, there's a huge pool where dolphins and seals and a walrus and a penguin and an announcer of indeterminate species perform in a show.

There's also several amusementparkish rides, and a rollercoaster. We bought a day pass to the whole island, so if we wanted to go take the rollercoaster five times, we could, with no extra charge. Since the rollercoaster was anything but cheap, we thought we had a good deal going. However, as we came to the gate, six seconds before we would have boarded for the first time, the attendant shut down the ride. The wind was picking up, and they were closing down the rollercoaster for safety reasons. So we didn't get to ride it at all. Not even once, since the wind stayed strong the rest of the day. So that part really blows.

Otherwise, it was really cool. One of the best things was the lunch. When we became hungry, the first thing we spotted was a yakiniku place. I hadn't had yakiniku yet, and thought it would be nice to try it, but we saw the price and it was... rather more than I usually paid my meals. Like, quadruple. However, as we walked around, we saw that pretty much everything was more expensive than usual - the tourist complex effect. Then we decided it's better to eat the expensive stuff in expensive places than to eat cheap food in expensive places, and went for yakiniku anyway.

This proved to be an excellent, and in the end really inexpensive, decision. We got a tabehodai. Which means, eat as much as you can in 90 minutes. Well, we did. Thoroughly. If you haven't googled it yet, when you go for nikuyaki, you get raw meat, already flavoured with spices and sauces, and you grill it yourself on the little griddle built into every table. There's vegetables too, but the main point is meat. The four of us ate maybe 10-15 plates of various species of meat. Stuffed ourselves silly. And that's not all! For the soup is included as well, as is rice, salad bar, and - desert! And by "desert", I mean a really really tasty treat: almond tofu. Or almond jelly, if you prefer. Yum-m-my! All for 2000 yen. It might be four times the price of my regular cafeteria lunch, but it's also the most meat I've eaten since coming to Japan.

Last notable event was the New Year. There was about 15 of us foreign students, and we went to hatsu mode - or first prayer of the year. It's the traditional way to spend New Year's Eve in Japan. We went to Zojoji, the main temple of Pure Land Sect of Buddhism, where we just missed the opportunity to stand in a 3000-person line to recive the paper on which we would have inscribed our wishes, attached to a balloon and sent into the sky at the stroke of midnight. Instead, we visited the Eiff... err, Tokyo Tower, which is just next to the temple. It was very crowded, so I decided, with another guy, not to go up at that time, and go grab some food instead, since both of us missed our dinner.

When the time came to enter the temple, it was... indescribable. In a feeble attempt, I'll only say that the crowd was in a fifteen-meter wide and hundreds of meters long "queue", and when we finally went in, there was a war inside. Half of the people were fighting to approach to throw in their coins and make their prayers, the other half, having finished what they came to do, were fighting to escape to the door. It was a war, I tell you. War!

Afterwards, I went home. Most of the people went on to Meiji shrine, and then to see the first sunrise of 2009. But I was cold and my feet hurt, so I passed.

The last of the notable events, I had dental surgery today. Huzzah!