Nothing says Christmas like skype and kangaroo!

Santa did NOT come visit us this year. Perhaps it’s because he couldn’t find our house. Perhaps it’s because we’ve somehow been naughty. Perhaps it’s because we don’t have a chimney and forgot to leave our milk and cookies. However, I firmly blame Ian. I went to bed around midnight on Christmas Eve, and little Ian didn’t crawl into bed until around 2AM. I’m sure Santa saw that Ian was still awake, and he passed right by our house. Actually, Ian and I didn’t get each other anything for Christmas. We said that it’s a little difficult to shop for one another over here, so we mutually decided on no presents this year. We did mutually splurge on something, though, and considered it a gift to one another. We bought a fondue pot. The Japanese fondue pots are nothing like our fondue pot at home. It’s a simple tiny ceramic bowl hovering above a candle. We’ve have fondue at our friend’s house, though, and it still tastes excellent!

My family is somewhat fractured this Christmas. Normally, Christmas is the holiday that everyone comes home for. My older sisters usually go to their in-laws’ houses for Thanksgiving, so Christmas is at the Wurth house. However, this year Christina and Amanda spent Thanksgiving at home and Christmas with the in-laws. I’m over here, so that meant that the only family left was my younger brother, Aaron, and my parents at home. This is the first year ever it was going to be this way, and my mom was really upset about it. She said she didn’t want to stay in Paducah, so my parents escaped to Florida for Christmas. Therefore, instead of one skype call in which I talk to everyone, I called each individual family member. I set my alarm on Christmas morning for 9AM to make SURE that I was awake to call Grandmother. My brother, Aaron, and I arranged to skype right after Christmas dinner at my aunt’s house. He used his iphone and told Grandmother that someone wanted to talk to her. When he passed the phone to her, and she saw my face, the look on her face was the best. She was too excited. She couldn’t hear very well and was afraid that we were going to use all of Aaron’s “minutes,” so she didn’t stay on the line for very long. However, I got to talk to Aunt Pat, Uncle Gerald, Kelly, and Lisa (cousins) for a bit, and I haven’t talked to them since I left in July. Aaron and I talked even longer. He JUST got skype so that we could surprise Grandmother with a Christmas skype, so I don’t really talk to him that often, and it was great to catch up. We had a long list of people to skype, so once we finished that call, we continued on to Ian’s dad, aunt, and grandfather, my sisters, and a couple of friends.

Christmas day didn’t really seem like Christmas at all. It just seemed like another day. We sat around the house all day staying snuggled up. We can always tell that it’s colder than crap outside when we can hear the wind whistling around the side of the house. Whenever we pulled back the curtains, we realized that it was SNOWING!! Don’t get too excited. It was certainly nothing to brag about. It was barely even snowing and certainly didn’t stick. I wanted to take a picture of our Christmas snow, but two things happened to hinder this: a) I didn’t think that the snow would even register in the photo, and b) it was really freaking cold. I didn’t want to stand outside.

Christmas dinner was a special affair. Ian ordered kangaroo (yes, like the Australian animal) online a few weeks ago just to try it. We agreed to wait for Christmas to eat it. Why not? David and Mary were the only other ALTs in the area that hadn’t gone anywhere, so we invited them over for Christmas dinner. In addition to the kangaroo steaks, we had biscuits, veggies, and mashed potatoes. Several people have asked me what kangaroo tastes like. It’s like a really lean and tasty steak. We’ll definitely have it again! The only downside is that it was an extremely bloody meat. There was blood on the sink, cutting board, knife, and floor. It really looked like Ian had murdered someone in our kitchen.

Mary’s boyfriend, Hiro, brought us an omiyage box of treats and a Christmas cake. Mary told us that they were at the store before they came over, and he asked her if we had a Christmas cake. She said probably not since we’re American and despite the Japanese theory that Americans eat Christmas cake, we don’t. It was really sweet of him to think of us and get it! The cake was beautiful, too! The Japanese always are incredibly meticulous when it comes to food. If you see a picture of an item in a menu, that item is going to look as beautiful and mouth watering in real life as it does in the picture. The cake had sugar stars, a Santa, and a Christmas tree in addition to the chocolate bars. After we had our fill of dinner and dessert, we moved onto games. Mary had brought her play station, so the three boys played that while Mary and I gabbed and gossiped. It was just like Christmas at home!

Monday:

I had a nice alarm clock on Monday morning. Ian forgot to turn off his computer, so I woke up to someone calling on skype. I stumbled over to the computer and saw that it was one of our closest friends, Brittany Fiscus. She is the one that actually inspired me to join the JET Program, and she visited us in October before she left Japan on her two month world travel home. Brittany just got home late last week, and I tried to call her once or twice on skype, but she didn’t answer, so I was just going to allow her to call us. I was sure that she was busy reconnecting with family and friends, so I didn’t want to butt in. So as the computer was ringing, I definitely wanted to answer it! She could tell that I was groggy, and she immediately apologized. I glanced down at the clock and realized that my alarm would have gone off in five minutes anyway, so it was no big deal. We skyped for a little while as I got ready for work, and it was so good to talk to her! She knows EXACTLY what I’m going through over here.

I had to go to work the day after Christmas. Ugh! To make matters worse, there were no students at school, but the teachers still had to come. Therefore, I had to look busy when I had nothing to do. It’s weird because when I first got to school, time was crawling. I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it through the day! (I console myself by knowing that I’m getting paid a lot to basically do nothing. ) I started my day blogging, then reading, then facebooking, and one thing led to another. Before I knew it, time was actually getting away from me! I spent the afternoon skype chatting people, which took up A LOT of time. At one point, I had four different conversations open on skype and facebook. It felt like high school again when IM’ing was popular. Switching back and forth between windows and watching the icon light up when people messaged gave me the same feeling as back in the day.

Tuesday:

Wow. I haven’t actually written about the present in a while. It seems like I’m constantly playing catch-up, so this is weird. There’s not much to mention today. It’s been another boring day at work. This morning was difficult to get out of bed. It must have been very cold last night because I woke up a couple of times with not enough blankets to keep me warm. I thought about riding my bike to the BOE but quickly decided against it.

I spent the morning at the BOE since I didn’t have my nursery schools this morning. Yesterday in the mail, we got a suspicious looking bill. We weren’t sure what it was for, but the yen amount was for about 8,000. That’s nearly $100! We didn’t know what it could be for and were hoping that we didn’t have to pay it. I took it to Sawada this morning and asked her about it. As soon as I gave it to her, she looked at it like what-the-heck-is-this and asked other co-workers questions about it. She finally said that it was TV chargers, and it could be paid at the convenience store. I was frustrated to pay that much for something that I don’t even use. I stood by her desk waiting for her to give the bill back to me. When she didn’t, I asked if I pay her for it. She said no…at the convenience store. I asked if I needed the bill back to pay for it, and then she gave me good news. We didn’t have to pay for it! The BOE would! Since it was a name change from from my predecessor to me, it wasn’t my responsibility to pay. Yay! I could tell that there was this “crap! We forgot about that and now have to pay for that!” attitude amongst my co-workers.

I’m anxiously awaiting Thursday. I have one more day to work this week, and then Thursday night we will catch a night bus to Osaka! Despite the fact that our neighboring state of Miyazaki is about ten minutes down the road from us, I haven’t left Kumamoto since August, so it will be great to get out of the area and go to a larger city where we’ll blend in a little better.