Christmas!

SMS and I had a great first Christmas together!   I woke up early like a little kid- I was excited to open my presents!  We made coffee and exchanged gifts.  SMS was super-thoughtful.  I got Jerusalem (the cook book), special ear plugs (to hear voices while protecting my ears from the otologic drill!) and some clothes.  I got him some clothes from Outdoor Research, some shoes that don't really fit (whah), a photography book and a chocolate orange.  Mom and Dad "surprised" me with an awesome convection oven that I used today!  I made a clementine cake from Smitten Kitchen (gluten-free) with a chocolate ganache adapted from my new cookbook!  During the course of this, I tripped the kitchen circuit AND transformer since I was trying to extract 3 times the electric limit while running the convection oven and George Foreman with the waffle maker plates at the same time.  While this was a little ridiculous, I did impress SMS by rattling off the formula that Watts = Voltage x Amps.  How do I remember these things?!?!  And why don't I apply them?

Rock Climbing and Hiking at Mt. Joyama, Numazu

As the sign says, rock climbing to the right, hiking to the left (yeah, yeah, the pictures are reversed!).  Christmas Eve was an outdoorsy day!  Chris, SMS and I drove about 2 hours and change to get to Mt. Joyama, a great south-facing rock climbing wall with multi-pitch routes in addition to single pitch.  Although we drove, Ohito Station is the closest station with about a 20 minute walk to the trailhead.    

Mt. Joyama is part of a chain of several small mountains.  The translation is that they are "volcanic neck mountains," created by solidified magma in the central vent of the volcano.  The outer layers of the volcano erode away leaving only the solid core as a small mountain.  I think a better translation would be a volcanic plug mountain, just like the "Nine Sisters of San Luis Obispo County" that Morro Rock is a part of.  The descriptions of how each of the hills/mountains formed is pretty similar.  The other two mountains that are part of the hiking trail are Mt. Katsuragiyama and Mt Hottanjoyama.  The mountains are outside Izunokuni City.

Rock Climbing at Takatori-yama (Hawk Peak)

Sandstone buddha 10 minutes from the wall

Yesterday, SMS and I went rock-climbing.  He had signed up for a beginner trip to a local rock climbing spot near Ikego.  SMS is definitely not a beginner but he thought it would be a nice way to meet some local climbers.

Trees, not in the best lighting but you get the idea.
There were trees.

It was a gorgeous day and a beautiful spot.  I met up with them shortly after lunch.  I had spent the morning waiting for our new dining room table.  Our new table is from IDC and looks great.  It matches our step-tonsen and is the perfect size for the room.  Both of us really like it!

Furniture shopping in Yokohama

SMS and I had our first successful road trip!  We went up to Yokohama to go furniture shopping! We headed out with a destination in mind- IDC in the Minatomirai LEAF building.  There are six floors of furniture and we were looking for a dining room table.  Well, maybe not that fancy but we needed a table for our main room and I waited for him to get here before picking one out.

We ended up with a really nice, fairly inexpensive table.  While I would love a reclaimed wood table in the future, we were shopping for our Japanese apartment which is on the small side.  We figured that our next places would likely be bigger so we'll buy a more permanent piece of furniture at that point.

The table is being delivered today, which is awesome since it would be nice to sit down and eat all the fantastic meals SMS is preparing!  Last night was an awesome dinner of mackerel, rice, cauliflower, salad and miso soup.  Yum!

SMS is here!

SMS is here! Hooray!  I have missed him so much and even though I'm super proud of him in wanting to complete his MBA program, he is highly miss-able so I'm glad he's here for 6 weeks.

Near the New Sanno

He arrived on Thursday the 12th.  I made a bright green, Christmas-themed poster board sign so that he'd be sure to see me.  Ha, ha.  I just think signs are a nice way to make people feel welcome.  I haven't always thought this since I was really embarrassed to hold the sign for Katrin our au pair when I was 7 so I held it by my legs.  That was super helpful since it hid the sign completely.  But that was a long time ago and now I'm fully on board with "embarrassing" myself by holding up ridiculous signs.  I bet everyone was super jeals except for the people who had drivers holding boring signs.  The signs may be boring but they translate to, "Peace out suckers, I'm off to my limo!"

ANY-way, SMS arrived and we were so happy!  We took the KEISEI Skyliner to Nippori.  There we transferred to the Yamanote line, which is sort of the railroad beltway around Tokyo. We got off at Nishi-Nippori and then took the Chiyoda subway line to Nogizaka.  We were staying at Hardy Barracks for the first night.  We went out exit 5, hooked a left then crossed at the first intersection.  There was a large cemetery on our right and a park on our left.  Then we saw the barbed wire fence and the U.S. Army sign and knew we had arrived.

New Love!

Don't worry!  SMS is #1 in my heart in the person category but in the thing category, I have a new favorite.  This new object of my affection displaces my magic Christmas tree, so obviously you can tell I have really high and classy standards.

Out with the old...

Magic Christmas Tree: I will have a .gif timelapse soon!

In with the new...

Christmas will come early this year...

When SMS gets here!  3 more days!  This Sunday was our one year anniversary of meeting each other at December Nights.  SMS actually went and met up with his sister and her husband.  It sounds like he had a great time even though he missed me.

I'm excited to create a December Nights-ish experience here in Japan.  There are a lot of Christmas villages around based on German tradition (?).  At least that's what I read.  But there are two I'm looking forward to seeing- Yokohama Brick Warehouse and Tokyo Tower.  When SMS arrives, we're going to stay up in Tokyo for a few days so we'll totally get into the holiday spirit!

This past weekend, I cleaned the apartment.  I'm excited to get everything settled because then I can also post an apartment update to the blog.  Exciting!  I also ended up doing something every night so it was a pretty good weekend.

Motomachi Arch

On Friday, I went to Yokohama with one of the ortho surgeons to buy a mask for the holiday party, which was weirdly themed as a Masquerade Ball.  Ok.  Santa meets Phantom of the Opera, I guess.  We went to Don Quixote which is the weirdest general store I've seen.  It has EVERYTHING.  Besides my mask, I bought a magic Christmas tree which is growing in my office and a surprise present for Mom.  I could have bought a lot more but since half of my apartment cleaning consists of throwing crap away, I refrained from adding more to the pile of the eventual dumpster-bound bounty.