Setsubun 2011

February 3rd is Setsubun in Japan. I've written about it in my old blog (you can re-read that here) so I won't give a long winded explanation today. We invited Simon and Clodagh, two other JETs who live near by to celebrate the occasion with us. We had a grand time and celebrated this crazy Japan holiday in style!

On the evening of the 2nd Bryn made us sushi from the fillings I had searched every Nishigaki between Amino and our house for. It looked really good, and the roll we tested that night tasted pretty good too.

(I have no idea why this picture is not rotated correctly...it is everywhere else on the computer except for this blog...just turn your computer!)

Simon and Clodagh came over the following evening, and that's when all the fun began. After chatting for a bit, we moved the coffee table out of the living room and put down some pillows we could seiza on. Then we divied out the sushi, decided which direction was roughly south-south east (the lucky direction for the year) and commenced eating.



It was pretty funny to sit in silence eating (we had put some soothing music on in the background!) and it was even funnier that the sushi had somewhat dried out over night! It was just fine in the end though and we all managed to finish.

The sushi was followed by soy beans, of which we each had to eat the number of our age plus one. We ended up eating loads of them though because they are just like popcorn and easy to snack on. We did save a few beans to throw out the window at the demons we were meant to be chasing away.


We ended the night with a rousing game of Skipbo! It was a lot of fun and we are looking forward to the next Skipbo night whenever that may be!

(Please excuse my elbow in this picture...the room is small and I was taking it at a very strange angle!!)

The snow has finally let up here and we have had some really beautiful weather the past couple of days...sunny and temperatures around 10 (or 50) which feels really nice after the freezing temps we've been having!! Today was really pretty so we invited Clodagh and Simon to come out to okonomiyaki for lunch. The weather is supposed to stay like this for a while, so we might even try to wash the car tomorrow (the snow has made an absolute mess of it!)


We're heading up to Yokohama and Tokyo in a couple of weeks so we should have some more interesting things to write about after that! Stay tuned and stay warm!