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Advent and Christmas

December 16th, 2005 | 6 Comments | Posted in Uncategorized

So it is advent and has been for almost 3 full weeks now which means Christmas is creeping closer with every moment I spend typing this.

This brings mixed feelings, I’m slightly down because I won’t get to spend it with my brother, mum and dad in NI for the first time in my life. But at the same time, Christmas in our house has changed a lot in the past four or 5 years. It’s not the unbridled funfest that it once was. Don’t get me wrong, it’s also nice that my understanding and appreciation of the season is no longer all about getting off school, eating turkey and greedily gurning that my brother has more/bigger/more exciting presents than I do (whether he does or not).

But the current Christmas season brings more pressures. I am to spend it with the Elliot family, this brings the nervous feeling of being an intruder into a seemingly finely honed yearly set of traditions. It also brings the concern and difficulty of how to buy, when to buy and what to buy as presents for everyone (there are going to be at least 10 other people there) But it also brings home the pleasure it is to spend this time of year with people and reminds me of all the people who are spending these holidays away from friends and family and don’t have such a group to attach to. International students (both here and in the UK), people who work abroad, people who just don’t have a family for whatever reasons; poverty, death, abandonment etc.

Another interesting thing this Christmas is that it brings with it a workload. Now I am used to being busy before Christmas as my school and university did me the nice favour of burdening the holiday with the stress of the subsequent examinations. But this year it is all based around Christmas itself. We have many, many events coming up beginning tonight and continuing until the 27th (I think). This leads to a lot of work to be done (not all by me I might add, suprisingly little by me in some cases…more due to inability than inactivity though, before Dad quotes his “lazy, good for nothing…” line)

And now you are probably reading this thinking how awfully depressed I am or something. I’m not really. I just have a pretty miserable cold today and everything always looks more depressing through the haze of freshly sneezed snot and germs.

And the pictures are slowly being fixed and re-resized to be put back online.

Snow in the buff

December 7th, 2005 | 2 Comments | Posted in Uncategorized

This past week or two has seen the first real snowfall in Ajigasawa. We had maybe 10-20 centimetres of snow and its still around outside. But this is only the beginning! It makes me feel kind of depressed though. See the amount of snow we got is about the max snowfall we would get at home, and now it is melting away, it feels like that is it, that is all we are getting. But the Elliots say different and have shown me photos to prove it. I must say it is hard to believe what they say, but its coming! Snow as high as me (even higher)!

So yeah, one of the things that is recommended to be done on a trip to Japan is to have an onsen in an rotemburo in the snow. So when it was snowing we went to the onsen in Ajigasawa. Now I realise I haven’t mentioned the onsen before, so I will take a moment now to explain it.

Japan is, as some may know, sitting over a hotbed of tectonic activity, earthquakes are an everyday thing, volcanoes dot the landscape and big lizard like monsters rampage through downtown tokyo every other fortnight (ok, so the last one isn’t true). But this tectonic activity leads to a multitude of hot springs and so on all over the place. So the Japanese, enterprising bunch that they are, drill down into these hot water aquifers and pump up the water into nice hot baths for the public to use (usually for a small fee). This is called an onsen (the actual bath is called an o-furo and if its outside its called an rotemburo, literally “dew of heaven” bath, thanks ruth!).

So yeah, you go in and there are seperate men’s and women’s bathrooms. The reason for this is because you aren’t allowed to wear any clothes, not even swimwear. This takes a little getting used to…

So anyways, one of the things to do in Japan in the winter is to go and sit in one of these hot spring baths with the snow falling around looking all pretty and stuff (the snow I mean, I’m not that narcissistic).

Anyways, it was nice! But no photos, for obvious reasons…