Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas Everyone! Can you tell that Christmas makes us happy? X-mas definitely agreed with X-man. :)

Twas the Night Before Christmas

After spending our morning and afternoon in Nara, we took a JR train to Uji to start our Christmas Eve celebrating. One of my English tutoring students owns a cafe/ryokan on the Uji River and she was having a special Christmas Eve party. The festivities included dinner, a delicious dessert, coffee and a rock concert.

The main band was comprised of three 8th graders. I was impressed by their musicality. I'm pretty sure that most of the Battle of the Bands hopefuls that I went to high school with couldn't play guitar or bass as well as these guys already do. And, most of the songs they played were all classic rock songs in English! The video clip shows them performing I Can't Explain by The Who. (Many thanks to Jimmy Peterson for identifying the song for me!)

The second band was two even younger (and more nervous) fellows who also did very well. But, later sets were solos performed by the main guitar/vocalist from the first band, or songs performed together with his 1st grade brother and their "Real Rock Star" Dad. What a talented family! You haven't celebrated Christmas Eve the right way until you've enjoyed a six year rocking out on the vocals to Sweet Home Chicago.

But, the most impressive part of the evening was that the bands made their stage banter bilingual for our benefit. I'm sure that I couldn't sing and improvise in Japanese when I was six or thirteen! In fact, I still can't. :) They also sang Silent Night and asked us to join in. Sugoi desu ne!

Many thanks to Hifumi for such a fun night! Much Christmas merriment was enjoyed by all!

Rudolph the Brown Nosed Nara Deer

Christmas Eve was a blast! We started the day heading for Nara, a city to the south of Kyoto which was the ancient capital of Japan for a few decades in the 700's.

In addition to its Imperial past, Nara is known for the tame deer that wander freely throughout the city. Eric, Kathy, Chris and I all enjoyed buying some deer cookies and feeding our greedy little friends. :) A few of the bigger deer would even jump or get up on their hind legs to beat the smaller deer to the cookies.

In contrast to the summer of 2005 (the last time I was in Nara) most of the male deer did not have any antlers. I suspect this was due to seasonal antler shedding and it was definitely for the best since the young bucks were especially persistent about devouring the cookies. They licked Kathy's leg, bit our coats and even tried to eat my pocket all in pursuit of the delicious (?) "shika senbei."

After playing with the deer, we visited Kasuga Shrine. This shrine was really neat because the forest paths leading up to it are lined with literally thousands of stone lanterns. Once inside the Shrine's grounds, we found a wisteria arbor (which must be gorgeous in the springtime) and even more lanterns! The lanterns in the shrine were mostly bronze, not stone, but were equally beautiful.

Then, we moved on to the highlight of Nara... Todaiji Temple. This Buddhist temple is known for its GIGANTIC bronze statue of Buddha. I mean it, the statue is huge. For example, on our entrance tickets it said "Virocana Buddha: Height of Body: 48.91 ft, Length of Head 17.75 ft, Length of Eye, 3.34 ft, and Length of Ear, 8.33 ft. I think someone is justifiably proud of their huge national treasure. :)

Relating to this, one of the supporting posts in the Great Buddha Hall has a hole that has been bored through the base which, in theory is the same size as one of the Buddha's nostrils. A long line of visitors (mostly children) were crawling through the hole for luck and enlightenment. I wonder what you get blessed with if you get stuck in the hole?

A Holly Jolly Christmas

We've been indulging in our holiday time off. That time off included lots of time off from blogging. So, I hope you'll join us in enjoying these recaps of the last two and a half weeks. Here's the first one!

On December 21st, I was joined in Kyoto by two of our best friends from our University years... Kathy and Eric. What happened next can only be described as 12 Days of Unadulterated Fun and Enjoyment of the Holiday/Sightseeing Spirit!

While our activities veered slightly from the Christmas Season norms, we still managed to be very busy and to feel very festive. While Chris was still at a conference in China, I showed our friends around Kyoto hitting lots of the major musts... Kyoto Station, Gion (the famous Geiko (Kyoto Geisha) district), and Kinkakuji Temple also called the Golden Pavilion.

In Gion, we were “accosted” by an infamous Kyoto denizen affectionately dubbed “Professor Dictionary.” This fellow purports to be a professor at Kyoto University who has spent time at Harvard, MIT and UCSD. He had a Japanese-English dictionary that needed editing and after some very strange small talk about New York's Wall Street, he foisted some pages (between N & O) upon us. It was an odd experience, but having read about him and his idiosyncrasies on the blogs of other ex-pats living in Kyoto, I was excited to have finally run into this odd duck.

We also traveled to Osaka on a rainy, crummy day to visit Osaka's Kaiyukan Aquarium and Tempozan Harbor Village. The aquarium is one of the world's largest and has some really neat tanks on display. One of our favorites was the 11,000+ gallon shark tank featuring a Whale shark and several other (smaller) sharks like hammerheads and black/white tipped reef sharks. Seriously amazing! The dolphins, otters, penguins and a scuba-diving Santa Claus were other highlights.

The weather did not deter us from a visit to the Namba District of Osaka (near Dotonbori Street) to introduce Kathy and Eric to the “world-renowned” Glico Man and his pals. Things were huge, neon and very tacky... just like we like them! You almost have to wear sunglasses 24/7 in Namba, it's that bright.

Stayed tuned for reports on Nara, a Rock Concert in Uji, Christmas Day and more...

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, everyone! Here is a video of Christmas carolers in Kyoto from last night. For the record, Renee, Eric, Kathy and I were all sober... but we may have been the only ones.

Some of the ex-pats in the group added colorful lyrics of their own. Nothing too bad, but you've been warned. :)