T'was the season...

Or perhaps it still is the season, seeing as we technically have 12 days left after the 25th.

Christmas came and went again this year. I actually had a proper Western-style Christmas dinner with turkey and mince pies in what had been 2 years, including smidgens of American culture of pumpkin pie. A big group of us gaijins got together and had this big dinner on the night of Christmas Eve. It was a lovely day, and it actually felt like Christmas a little bit. Still didn't beat the Christmas feeling I'd get back home, though.

On the Japanese cultural side of things, New Year is coming, along with the Bounenkai season. I have that tonight my two co-workers in my favourite city in Hokkaido; Sapporo. An all-you-can-eat shabu shabu (i.e. MEAT) for just under 2000yen. Heavenly.

This past month has been a ridiculously busy time for me. I had two orientations, or "business trips" as I like to call them - one in Chiba for 3 days for my actual job, and one in Shiga near Kyoto for 5 days for the Interpreting and Translation course I am currently taking. Both were of course, intellectually satisfying (though interpreting for 5 days straight really wore me out), but all the more better was meeting a lot of wonderful people, visiting Disneyland in Chiba, touring Kyoto and clubbing in Osaka. I loved Kansai so much, in fact, that I've planned a second visit in the middle of January, as I felt that I didn't have enough time to look round Osaka, and also because the clubbing scene there was fantastic, and Sapporo just doesn't do it enough justice. What can I say, I love to drink dance ♥

The real "Afternoon Tea"

My mother came and went. She's still in Japan, but she's staying with my grandparents in Tokyo, where all the other bazillion of my Japanese relatives live. We had a wonderful four days together, going on a delicious Hokkaido gourmet tour of Sapporo and Otaru cities. Due to that, today was supposed to be a "salad day" for me, but I've already failed by munching on a chocolate pie thing from Hakodate. Damn Japan and its omiyage (souvenir) culture.

I held an "Afternoon Tea" cooking class last Saturday. My International Exchange Section holds International Cooking classes during the year for non-Japanese people living in the city to introduce locals dishes from their home countries. As it was our first time, I held a British-themed class by giving presentations on U.K. through trusty Powerpoint slides, then teaching them to make super easy scones via frying pans and enjoying "cream tea" (ovens are not readily available here). We handed out questionnaires for the participants to fill in after we had finished, and it was quite amusing to read about the images of the U.K. that filled up their little Japanese minds. Overall the comments of the class were positive, but some said things along the lines of "It was a shame that we used tea bags", and "I had hoped to learn more on the details of brewing tea". I don't mean to crush their bigged up images of Britain, but I don't think I know of any English person who actually goes to the trouble of brewing tea through tea leaves in a tea pot. I can imagine the dear Japanese old ladies' (a large majority who took part in the class were women in their 40s onwards) looks of horror if they do have the chance to visit England - in place of their admired after, dainty Victorian ladies in corsets sipping Earl Grey from their delicately decorated china cups fat, they would see dirty builder men with their jeans sagging around their arse, holding giant mugs with the PG tips teabag tag dangling at the side.

Talking Chinese Butterflies

It has been an extremely busy week for me this week. Well, busy for what my job normally consists of, anyway. (Interesting fact: considering I'm an English degree student I just learnt that the word "anywho" doesn't exist.) More so in the evenings however. I've found that there is a lot of out of work hours with this CIR job. I can use those hours to take the time off on other days, nonetheless.

On Tuesday, I went on my first "business trip". It made me feel rather special.
We went to Sapporo, what I like to call the "capital of Hokkaido prefecture". Our trip was on invitation of a Chinese film festival, where they are going to be showing a number of Chinese films this week in the cinema(s?) of Sapporo. They approached our city asking if we would sponsor them, which we did, and in return we got an advertisement of our town in their brochure and the invitation to their Opening ceremony, a free viewing of one of their films and attendance to their Reception party. All in all, it was basically trying to stabilise the perhaps unsteady bridge of friendship between Japan and China.

So there we sat. My Head of section and I, in our specially labelled cinema seats about 4 or 5 rows from the front, me cocking my head at the 3 or 4 important representatives from China giving their speeches in their native tongue, then nodding in understanding and admiration at the Chinese interpreter who translated in Japanese afterwards. It did appear that he had notes of their speech beforehand, but he did perfectly well at interpreting the improvised dialogue that popped up here and there. Contemplating I may be considering a future in a similar career path, I realise that I still have a long way to go.

A new Blog Blog?

I believe this would be my third attempt at creating and maintaining a Blog. Or perhaps my 5th or 6th, if you counted my angsty adolescence - hood diaries online or my teen fangirl rambles on LiveJournal.

I'm hoping this will be a longer project, seeing as Blogger seems to have updated itself rather fantastically with all its fancy widgets and gadgets. As it is now more customisable, I no longer have to go through the headache of coding my own Blog like I did back here, or update easily from my snazzy Japanese mobile phone but get fed up re-writing all the Japanese garble for each and every Blog entry. I've also missed not typing out an actual entry, rather than just "EATING CAKE, NOW, OMG" in the Twitter format I did for my previous Blog.
I'm actually scared that I've become quite illiterate. Considering the course I studied at University was 'English language and Literature', I ironically have a very low bank of vocabulary, and as I tend to revert to repeating the same words and phrases constantly, Thesaurus.com has become my best friend. I'm hoping that by beginning to write more, as pointless as these Blog entries may be, I can regain my English language-literature student pride. And I should read more. My god, I really should read. I can't remember the last time I finished a book.