LOTS of snow:
And a snowman!
But more of that later.
So, it was Christmas and stuff. Even here in Japan! Our winter break started on Christmas Day, so we started celebrating after work on Christmas Eve, of course! We celebrated with a 'traditonal' Japanese 'Christmas dinner' of fried chicken, and Christmas cake.
Although, the chicken was from Family Mart, not KFC, which is where REAL Japanese Christmas dinners come from. But Family Mart chicken is more delicious. The Christmas cake was actually really nice, too. I thought it was iced, but it's actually slathered in real cream, and filled with real cream, and strawberries. I thoroughly endorse it.
On Christmas morning, we got up early and got on a train! And another train! And then another, AND ANOTHER! Six hours on trains! Best Christmas EVAR! (/irony)
But it was in a good cause because we ended up in Hakuba, Nagano. And there was a lot of snow.
We spent three days up there snowboarding. This is not terribly compatible with taking photos, so here's just one bad pic of me and my hired snowboarding gear. (My board had lightning on it. Awesome!)
Yeah, that's right. I learned to snowboard in three days. Boo-yah!
Goodness me, we were sore after that, though. So we went and had a soak in a local onsen on our last day. It was like magic. About 90% of the soreness disappeared. We wished we'd gone at the end of every day!
In other news, recently, we bought stufff for having nabe, because it is delicious. It's just a big ol' pot of soup you boil up on the table, and you put stuff (like cabbage or mushrooms or wontons or meat or whatever you like) in it and haul it out when it's cooked and eat it. And then you whack noodles in the left over soup. It is officially on my top ten best things ever list. Here's me and the inaugural nabe:
Mmmmmmm.... Definitely introducing this to our back-in-Melbourne lifestyle.
