Santa Hattery

I went to College Res for a Christmas Eve party with what I can only call "Yanavy and her crew". I don't have Yanavy's pictures, but I got these pictures from Jes, and I think I look funny in a Santa hat, so here you go.

On top of that, she got a random guy dressed up as Santa motoring around town on a scooter. The shot's pretty dark, but with enough jerking around, I was able to brighten it up and only make the noise twenty times worse. Anyway, Santa on a scooter.

And no, that's not me on the scooter.

Anyway, Merry Christmas! I hope you ate as many sweets as I did. ... Unless you're trying to avoid gaining ten pounds in one day.

Winter Break!

Today is Monday here. It was my last day of classes before winter break starts. Why they put the first day of break on a Tuesday and the last on a Thursday, I can only wonder. On top of that, my Basic Japanese class had a section test today. I was considering skipping and just taking it when break ends, but I figured I'd rather suck it up and take a low score than worrying the whole break whether I had studied enough.

On top of the section test, we had an essay that was supposed to be a page. That's not really bad, but I thought I only had about 1/3 of a page written. As it turned out, my essay came out to one and a half pages when I wrote it out by hand and added a conclusion. Here's my essay in a nutshell:
- I wonder how クリームパン (cream bread) came to be...
- History
- History
- Some extra history
- Something about あんパン
- Mention ジャンパン
- I love クリームパン!

But that's over with and winter break is starting. Yay!

Christmas Eve Class

(The picture is one I took a few weeks ago. It was my second attempt at HDR and you can see it didn't work so well. It's not my camera, but I just can't seem to get HDR to work right for me...)

I think I've mentioned this before, but Christmas here is treated about the same as Valentine's Day in the US. In other words, it's a holiday for spending time with your 恋人 koibito ("lover"), and you can expect them to be rather upset if you have to work instead, or if you want to go out with friends instead of with her. I think this expectation is one-way, and girls can do whatever they want.

I found out yesterday that we have a make-up class scheduled for Christmas Eve. In case you needed more proof that Christmas is a cheese holiday in Japan, there you go. On the bright side, that teacher invited Yanavy and I to a dinner at his place on Sunday.

On the down side, there's a $10 secret Santa thing. I'm no good at finding presents and I have two secret Santa things to do!