Thanksgiving Dinner

Yesterday we had a fairly big Thanksgiving dinner planned for which almost everyone was going to make something and then serve to our host families. Since my cooking skills are limited to sandwiches and pop-tarts and since I'm always busy and/or tired I managed to avoid making anything and just helped out with other people's stuff occasionally.



Things seemed to be going passably well for some of the afternoon, but you could tell the state of things was declining by counting the number of "does this smell burnt to you?"'s per minute. And indeed, almost everything got burnt at least once. But in spite of that we had a pretty wide selection of not bad tasting things: deviled eggs, chicken and beans, beef stew, stuffing, broccoli and cheese casserole, banana banana bread (double banana intentional), and some other desserts. Everyone who made something introduced their dish in Japanese, most interestingly being the deviled eggs introduced literally as "the devil's eggs". In addition to the devil's eggs, there was hot chocolate from the heavens and that casserole that seemed to have gotten singed in a war between the two.

Afterwards we cleaned up for quite a long time and had quite a lot of leftovers. Seriously, those clean up and set up times totally weren't worth it in my opinion. Even if I was capable of making delicious food I think I'd rather just get something cheap and easy. Guess I'm not really a food person; I still just eat because I have to.



In other news, I finally got to hang out more with the neighbor kid from my host mom's cram school on Wednesday. As expected, we played a buttload of video games including Smash Bros. Melee, New Super Mario Bros. Wii (totally forgot that had a super fun coin battle mode), Pokemon, and Call of Duty: Black Ops. All the gaming tired me out pretty quickly though (and I was feeling a little unwell) so I ended up going home early instead of going with them to a sushi place for supper. Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures there though. Sorry.

Maruyama

I went with my host mom to Maruyama today which is known for a ski jump used in the 1972 Olympics, Hokkaido Jingu (Shrine), and a zoo. First we went to the ski jump and rode the lift up to check out the view from the top.

I'm pretty sure if I went off that I'd die.

While I was there I got a taste of America in the form of an ice cream float, though unfortunately there's no Root Beer here. There is, however, Melon Soda, which tastes a lot like Cream Soda, which I don't like.

It was sunny when we left the house but by the time we were heading back down the lift it was raining so we hurried into the sports museum that was there. They had typical winter sports stuff on display and more interestingly, interactive games/simulations for ski jumps, ice hockey, speed skating, and bobsled.

After that we went to a pretty fancy French restaurant and had some pretty fancy and very delicious food.



After that it had finally stopped raining for the most part so we walked over to Hokkaido Jingu and took some pictures of the pretty trees and shrine interior. It was a pretty standard shrine which had a place to wash your hands and mouth with purifying water before entering (which we didn't do), a place to buy charms for various good luck (in work, health, love, childbirth, exams, +1 resistance against fire, increases special attack vs skeletons, etc.), a place to insert 100 yen to get a fortune on a piece of paper and a corresponding place to tie up your bad fortunes. Also a place for writing your wishes/prayers on a piece of wood and hanging those up and a place for tossing a coin, clapping, and saying a prayer as well. There were quite a lot of things that cost more money that you would think but I guess they probably help pay for the upkeep of the place.



And yeah, that was about it. Here's the album.
Edit: No, I didn't go to the zoo. It was too rainy or something.