Yesterday was the emperor's birthday and also a national holiday. Jennifer left for Thailand at about 5:30 in the morning. Since it was a national holiday, one of the resident gaijin opened up his tiny restaurant for a brunch. THis guy's a fabulous cook, it was total Bobo quisine, there were scones, crepes waffles, chocolate sauce and some home baked bread. To top the bread you could have the chef's own rum raisin butter or his charcoal roasted hand-ground peanut butter or his home made preserves. Later on there was some fresh coffee and some bagels, made and steamed in his very kitchen. It was good food regardless, but made all the better by the fact that the people in the restaurant were having interesting conversations in ENGLISH. It was quite nice. I ended up running errands with Lara and Shane and then stopping by the house of Nick and Al, two gay JETs from England. They're putting on a super duper christmas party to which many JETs are going. I was tentatively scheduled to go as well, but opted not to since i prefer to teach english to reluctant, giggly, highschool girls than eat a well prepared meal with good company and booze.

After the brief stopover at the chez Nick and Al I came back home to mount up my telemark skis. It took about 3 hours to get everything set up and by this time it was pretty dark and pretty late, like 11:00. I had been screwing around with these skis for so long that i needed to get out and use them. I decided that i'd try to learn how to telemark ski on the embankment near the bridge overpass about a kilometer from here. I loaded up the skis in my backpack along with the poles and boots and headed out into the foggy night. I was pretty glad that it was so foggy because it made it a little less strange to be a lonely foreigner, trudging up and down the embankment with a big pair of skis. It must have been a strange sight.

It's probably good that i have a girlfriend or i'd be doing shit like this all the time, skiing on an embankment at 1:00 in the morning or some thing. It will be an interesting 3 weeks.