Greetings, loved ones. I have neglected my blogging duty this week. Monday was a holiday, and Tuesday and Wednesday were busy days at school. Sorry! So there’s lots to catch up on…..
First, the weekend started off amazingly. Ian, Melissa, and I were looking for cheap tickets to Australia for winter break last week, and the lowest we could find were about $1,100. 
Not exactly cheap. (However, whenever you consider the fact that flying from Nashville to Sydney, Australia is right at $3,000/ticket, it does indeed seem like quite the discount!) Melissa and I were having a good rivalry of who could find the cheapest ticket. I found one for $1,139, and then she found a $1,128 ticket. I found a $1,118 ticket, and then she found a $1,116 ticket. Grrrr….friendly competition! 
Friday morning she emailed me and found the cheapest ticket yet. It was something like $1,105. I HAD to use my competitive spirit and BEAT her! A simple search on Kayak, Travelocity, and Vayama resulted in the best price….$785.29. I couldn’t believe it! I double checked the times, dates, and cities flying to and from just to make sure. The only downside was that we wouldn’t get back until January 7th (a Monday) and would have to take another vacation day for that. I immediately emailed it to Melissa and Ian, asking them to look at it and make sure that I was seeing things correctly. Melissa replied back with a simple email: “BOOK. NOW.” Between Ian, Melissa, and I, we emailed each other back and forth about thirty times that morning confirming that each of us could get off the additional day and that everything would work out. The first thing I did when I got home on Friday afternoon was to whip out my American Express and charge three plane tickets to it. HURRAY! WE’RE GOING TO AUSTRALIA!
The only downside is that Ian has to work on December 24th, so we can’t leave until the 25th. However, it actually works out better that way because the flights are much cheaper. We’ll just spend Christmas a little differently this year…..on a plane! 
(Next year, though, I PROMISE we’ll be home for Christmas!) Our flights take us through Shanghai. Woot! While I doubt we’ll leave the airport, I guess I could technically say that I’ve been to China. We have an overnight layover there on the way back, and we thought about spending the night out on the town, but Chinese visas for American citizens are a pain in the butt to get. Not only would we have to jump through a couple of hoops, but travel visas for China are EXPENSIVE. For every other nationality it’s $40. For Americans it’s $140. I don’t know why, but I do know that none of us want to pay that amount so that we can spend just one night out on the town.
After my happy, happy, joy, joy time of buying tickets, I decided to use that happy energy for a walk. I laced up my shoes, grabbed my headphones, and went outside. I felt a drop or two of rain and contemplated if I actually should go or not. After deciding yes, I rounded the corner of my house only to see a giant black cloud rolling into town and decided to simply turn around and give up. I plucked a few weeds from my tomato garden (I have many more little green tomatoes ripening!! 
) before the pouring rain drove me in. I actually thanked my lucky stars that I wasn’t an idiot and gone for the walk because I would have been SOAKED. It was a HUGE thunderstorm preceding the typhoon with thunder and lightning. The thunder was so loud and fierce that it shook some of the windows. Crazy!!
On Sunday we went to Kumamoto City for the Drunken Horse Festival with Margo, Melissa, Mary, Yuusuke, Hiro, and Ikumi. Originally this festival was a celebration of some Japanese victory over Korea. The people in the parade would get the horses drunk, march them through the streets, and then slaughter them at the shrine. Things are a little more tame this day and age. The horses are no longer drunk nor do they die at the end. Instead….the whole parade is an excellent excuse for parade-goers to get completely wasted. Everyone in the parade is completely drunk and continues to drink throughout the day. In fact there are three sections of each group that parades by:
1) the horse, decorated with ropes, robes, ribbons, and other things
2) the group—people who have volunteered their day to dance and be excited about being in the parade
3) the drink cart—literally a cart full mostly of booze and an assortment of tea to refresh the people marching in the parade
The horses were really big and sometimes unruly. Despite each horse having several men trying to control them, several times they bucked, and a couple of the times the horses would get dangerously close to the crowd while acting up. Everyone would rush backwards to avoid getting too close. It was a little scary a couple of times. I actually heard that every year at least one person is killed in this festival (from alcohol poisoning or unruly horses, I honestly don’t know!)
The parade marchers were a lot of fun. Since we were foreigners, they actually paid us more attention than the rest of the parade goers. Of course, all of the Japanese goers were very passive and inactive……whereas us crazy foreigners were dancing and clapping, so really it’s no wonder that we drew a crowd! Everyone was wanting to come over to us, give us high-fives and teach the foreigners the words and dance moves to their chants. It rained off and on during the festival, and when it started raining, we’d pop open our umbrellas until it slowed to a drizzle and eventually quit.
We decided around 8PM that we’d had enough festival time and went to meet up with a few of Ikumi’s friends, Nan and Sho. We made new friends, hurray! They both were really nice and spoke English flawlessly. Ian bonded with them almost instantly after learning that both of them were into photography. Each of them whipped out their cameras and began to compare, saying what each one wanted and what the next component of their cameras would be. *sigh* Boys!
Driving back that night wasn’t a lot of fun. The typhoon was passing through, but fortunately it wasn’t a direct hit, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The weather wasn’t really bad until we hit Yatsushiro. From there it was a little crazy. From Yatsushiro to our exit at Hitoyoshi, there are a little over twenty tunnels to go through. Some are longer than others. It was weird going in and out of them because we would go in one and it’d be pouring rain. We’d come out on the other side, and the rain would be a drizzle but the wind would whip the car around. We’d go in another and come out, and the weather wasn’t too bad. We’d go in another and come out, and it would be back to pouring. We just never knew what was waiting for us coming out of the tunnel! The fact that the IC (expressway) is elevated off of the group really wasn’t helping. I feel like it was MUCH windier up higher than it was on the ground. We thought that when we got to Hitoyoshi, the majority of our weather problems would be finished. However, the road home was covered with leaves, twigs, and other debris. I had to take the corners slower because we never knew what was on the other side. I rounded one corner, and thank God that there was room to pull around it because a giant bamboo shoot was lying in the middle of the road! 
When we finally got home safe and sound, our weather problems still didn’t stop. I had left open our hall and kitchen windows. Nothing got wet, but the hall window screen had blown open, (exposing our house for any and all critters to come in ) and even though wind doesn’t generally blow in through our kitchen, (it’s on the opposite side of the house) a couple of things were knocked over in there. All night long the wind howled. Ian and I joked and said that we were going to sleep in ready-to-run clothes. As in….just IN CASE the wind blew down our house, we’d be ready to run. I woke up a few times hearing the windows rattling from the wind, but by morning, all was calm and back to normal.
I’m going to stop here, but continue to read because I’ve got plenty to tell!
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