New Year's Eve

Happy New Year! I would love to write a thought provoking blog about my plans for the New Year, but I have not really taken the time to think about it. One of our goals as a family was to get to Japan for a period of time. Well, we made it. Now it is time to see what the next step is, but we will probably not think about that until summer of this year. For now, we will enjoy where God has us in Tokyo.

A friend from our Friday play group hosted a New Year's Eve kid-friendly open house from 3-7 yesterday. So, we enjoyed hanging out with adult friends and also watching the kids run wild. They all seemed to have a good time and in general got along so that was fun to watch. We came home, put Miyako to bed, and then made soba noodles. It is tradition here in Japan to have soba noodles on New Year's Eve, so Kan fixed some for us. Then, we watched some Friends episodes. We are on Season 9! Around 11:45 we turned on the Japanese TV to see what kind of countdown they have here in Tokyo. It was not much to be quite honest. We did get to see some of the different temples around Japan which was pretty cool. But then we saw "Johnny's Countdown" and could not stop laughing. It was so ridiculous - in a very bad way. I think they started counting at 5 and it really was not very good at all. :) The boats on the bay did give off large sounds at midnight which we heard and Tokyo tower had Happy 2011 on it and was blinking, which was pretty fun, but after the countdown I looked at Kan and said, "so, more Friends?" and we watched another episode before I fell asleep on the couch.

Today has been fairly lazy. Miyako is taking a long nap and I am catching up on the blog...while we watch Friends. We are going to eat some more traditional Japanese dishes for tonight that was sent to us by Kan's mom in Kyoto. The highlight of my day was watching the ball drop in NYC via Sling box. Seriously, thank God for giving the creators of Sling a brain because the Sling box is a life saver for us. It was so fun to watch the countdown in the US, and to be honest, I even teared up a bit. It is not that I wanted to be in Times Square with the millions of people, but it just was a reminder of home. We have spent the past several New Year's Eves with our special friends the Alvarez family. It was a bit weird not to be with them this year, but we are thankful for our memories with them. Again, I am just glad God has given us means to keep connected to home in ways I never thought we could. The city here is deserted. There is nobody walking around and it is very quiet...almost eerie. But it is nice to have some down time and enjoy the quietness of such a normally busy city.