December 25, 2005

It's Christmas morning! Peace be with you.

I'm tired cause I was up so late.

I met Yoko at her station at 1 and we waited for 2 more of her friends, Kanako and Kashi. We walked back to her place and were greeted in her room with quite the spread. It looked like she had been cooking for months. She assured us it was only for a couple of hours, but it looked way more impressive than just a couple of hours. We loaded up some music (unfortunately they started with Shania, Kevin Tam would have been happy), opened the wine, and started eating. We had temaki sushi which are hand rolls so you put in a bunch of rice on a piece of seaweed and then a bunch of goodness like crab and salmon and cucumber and whatever else you want and then you roll it up in a cone shape and munch it down. She made sweet potato croquet which are little balls of mashed potato or "pumpkin" (and by "pumpkin" I mean squash, they use the word pumpkin as a general term for all squash) and then lightly floured and deep fried. Freaking good. We also had potato salad and what was the other thing. Oh, chicken and I'm still missing something else. Anyway, the food was all really good and we had a really pleasant time talking. Her brother came home and joined us with a bottle of sake.

After eating way too much food, we headed off to Tokyo to see if we could see a giant light display. We got off the train along with a thousand other people to join the several hundred thousand people who were lining the streets waiting to make there way under the light display. The three of us decided to sneak through the streets to avoid the lines. We got a brief look and decided that it wasn't worth the couple hour wait, so we headed home.