Sunday, November 22, 2009

Holiday Monday - four weeks and counting!

We were all a bit stunned to realize that four weeks from tomorrow we are going to be getting on a plane to Vancouver! This time has gone so quickly! We are excited about seeing everyone and going to DisneyWorld but we are a bit disappointed to be missing all the great stuff that will be happening here around New Years as it is one of the biggest celebration times here in Japan.

We've had a busy few days - lots of partying and playing. It's getting to be a Wednesday night trend at conversation class that I am given gifts of food. This week we were again given some yummy cheese made by a local farmer and I was given a bag with a large piece of meat in a paper bag. Natstumi asked if I'd ever eaten deer before and told me that this was a very fresh piece of deer meat. Ian was pretty stoked to cook it all up and it seemed a good opportunity to have someone over for dinner so I invited Hiro and Miss Miamaru (the Music and Art teacher). We had an awesome dinner of deer stew and home made biscuts. Ian even made an apple cake for dessert. We drank and visited and played games and had a great time!

On Friday night we were invited to Imai-san's house for a Nabe party. There was a big pot of soup that just kept getting added to. The big deal of it was the duck - which I'm guessing was put on especially for us. There was ground duck and duck slices. They were good - but the soup was wonderful and I'm sure whatever meat was in it would have been good. There was also a plate full of beautiful red strawberries which were reported to cost in the neighbourhood of $3 each! One of the Imai-san's (there are two brothers - one works in the Otaki office and one is the postmaster) had just returned from a trip to Bali and he opened a box of "Bali-chocolates" to share with us all and we made a good joke of it because they were Ferrero Rocher! We had a lovely visit and watched some movies of the other Imai-san's last trip to the Cowichan Valley in July of 2005. It was fun to see familiar sights mixed with the faces of some of the people we know here. The kids had quite an in-depth talk with iro-Hay and aoko-Nay (oh - did I mention that we taught Hiro pig latin on Thursday?!) and they told Hiro and Naoko all about their schools in Canada. They also learned a bit more about how things work here - for instance, if a teacher is sick and can't come to work then the other teachers just cover it as best they can. It's only in the case of an extended illness that there is any formal coverage done.

On Saturday Ian and I trudged through the snow to watch the kindergarten performance. We sat on the floor with all of the proud parents and thoroughly enjoyed it all. They sure do put on slick shows here - I can't imagine seeing anything of the same caliber from a daycare or preschool in Canada. The five year olds did a version of the Bremen Town Musicians and the four year olds did the Billy Goats Gruff. The show being over means that I now get to add the kindergarten back into my weekly routine.

I had hoped that we would be heading to Sapporo on Saturday afternoon to go to Costco with Hiro but the snowfall effectively nixed that plan, which meant that we had to head to Date for the supplies for our Sunday evening plans. About two weeks ago Yuki, the dietican at the Chugakko, had asked me about traditional Canadian Christmas dinners and I told her all about what we usually have. When I was trying to explain about it I came up with the bright idea to just have her over to cook a dinner with me. We had settled on this Sunday so by Saturday I was needing to gather the ingredients for our favourite holiday staples. It proved to be a bit more challenging than I would have thought but we made it work. We did manage to purchase a whole chicken (scrawny thing that it was) and we paid through the nose for it too! ($15 for a 1 kilo bird!) We never did find yams but I decided that sweet potatoes are close enough and the hunt for Campbells Creme of Mushroom soup never did prove fruitful so I had to make my own.
So Saturday evening was spent making pastry for the pies and making up a recipe for the mushroom soup.

On Sunday, Yuki came by about 1:20pm and we started cooking. I walked her through all the steps of pretty much everything and we managed to get everything cooked and baked - which was a feat considering the size of the oven here - it's like my microwave at home and is probably not supposed to have things stacked on top of eachother! Still, we managed to cook two pies, the stuffing, the chicken, the sweet potatoes, the mashed potatoes, the broccoli, the cheese sauce and the gravy all with one tiny oven and two burners! It was a feast! Joisan's teacher, Ms. Madokoro came to eat with us. Hiro was supposed to come too but she had a headache so she begged off. We had a wonderful Christmas dinner and we all ate too much! We played a few games and then called it a night.

Today has been a wonderful gift - another Japanese national holiday! We slept in and hung out and got to visit with my family on Skype while they were at Sunday dinner. I was totally excited to hear that my sister got her Bar Exam results - yay Aurora! We have yet to make the Skype thing work with Ian's mum and he's really hoping to do that soon. After all the hard work of laying around today I think it's off to get myself prepped and ready for the week now so more next time!

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