Happy New Year! Mega Blog!

How time flies! Happy 2008!

For this Christmas and New Year, Mike came to visit -- and we had quite an adventure!

I picked Mike up at the airport on Friday (12/21) night -- and by picked up, I mean we took the bus to my neighborhood together -- and immediately took him out to dinner to meet some of my crazy friends. We went to a yakiniku (grilled meat) restaurant where you grill the meat right in the table!
We had a fun time despite Mike being slightly jet-lagged. :) The next morning we celebrated Christmas early. Mike brought me a suitcase filled with presents from my family! Yay! Here's a picture of one corner of my massive apartment - the main focus being the Christmas tree I found at the hyaku-en store (i.e. the dollar store).
And because I know you're all dying to see what the rest of my apartment looks like, here's my kitchen/bathroom. At the far end (behind me) is the kitchen sink and my single gas burner. The bathroom sink is in the bottom right corner -- why it is set up this way is beyond me. Next to my left arm (with the peace sign) is the door to the the shower/toilet area.
Which looks like this! On the left is the tub/shower/water heater and the pink polka-dotted shower curtain separates the shower from the toilet (which is to the right). Lovely cement floor, no?
For dinner that night we went to an Okinawa restaurant -- serves food from Okinawa, the tropical Japanese island!
I made a mistake while ordering our food. My Japanese proficiency is minimal at best and so we ordered by pointing to the pictures in the menu. I ordered what I thought was "pork leg" according to the waitress. However, the word for "leg" and "foot" is the same in Japanese. What I had actually ordered was pig's knuckles!! Gross!! Here they are...
Mike and I both tried one just to say we had. They weren't very good - really fatty. According to Mike's former exchange-student-host-sister who is from Okinawa, Japanese people think pig's knuckles are very good for your skin. Right.

A bit of funny Japanese culture: On Christmas everyone eats Kentucky Fried Chicken. Why? Because that's what Americans do, of course! In fact, some people even make reservations at their local KFC!! And to celebrate, every KFC dresses up their Colonel Sanders in a Santa costume! Hooray!
Anyway, the next day, we went to Kyoto to check out some temples and shrines. I don't know their names, but it was cool to wander around the huge park and see the different temples and shrines. For those who don't know, temples are Buddhist and shrines are Shinto. Typically, shrines have a large orange entrance, like this:
Temples aren't quite so flashy. After wandering around a bit, we met up with my friend Olivia and her husband Osamu for tea and snacks. We were on the 8th or 9th floor of a department store and had a great view of the city.
After tea, we went to Osaka to see the German Christmas Festival!
Of course! A German Christmas Festival in Japan makes perfect sense! They had sausages, hot cocoa, mulled wine, and.... a Japanese Santa!!
Japanese people crack me up :) Here's a little video of the experience:


Sorry it's sideways -- it wasn't sideways before I uploaded it to Blogger.com... oh well.

The next day we laid low, talked with family, and went to Kobe for dinner and karaoke. We ate dinner at an izakaya (no pig's knuckles). Here we are with the plastic food out front:
It's really very convenient because you can decide whether it's what you want to eat without looking at the menu!

The next day was Christmas! Merry Christmas! Here we are just before leaving to...

THAILAND!

We decided to take a trip to Thailand for our vacation. We flew in to Bangkok that night, and when we got there we met up with a couple of my friends who were already in Bangkok on their vacation.

The next day we took a boat tour up the river and visited the temple of Wat Po, or the Resting Buddha.
It's huge! And very very gold!
All around the Wat Po are lots of little temples and huge spires made out of tiles. They were so pretty! (Mike's in the bottom left corner for size comparison.)
Bangkok is very tiring. We both were completely culture-shocked. Everywhere you go there are people trying to sell you something or haggle some money out of you. You have to be pretty vigilant and not get scammed. So, for our second day, we decided to take it easy and took the Skytrain (like a monorail) to the classier part of town and found several giant malls.
We wandered around, went back to a couple shops we liked the day before and had a traditional thai massage.
It's a lot of bending and stretching, but felt sooooo nice after a hectic day in the city.

For dinner we dressed up and had Thai vegetarian pizza!
The next day we traveled south-east to the beach city of Pattaya.
This is definitely more our vibe than Bangkok. There are still people trying to sell you junk, but they aren't nearly as aggressive and there's always the beach...
The next day we spent on the beach...And we went para-sailing! Here's me:
And Mike:
So much fun! Like most things in Thailand, at first it seemed a bit sketchy and jerry-rigged, but the guys knew what they were doing and had the system of hooking people in and out of the harness in seconds down pat!
While in Pattaya, Mike decided it was time to shave off the goatee...but not without having some fun with it first! Here are my favorites: