Waiting for Christmas

I am waiting for Christmas.  To be fair, I am always waiting for Christmas.  I have spent most of my life waiting for Christmases, most of the time to great success.  Strangely enough, I would say that my most memorable Christmases also happen to be the ones that felt the least Christmasy of all.  There was swimming in an outdoor pool in Kuala Lumpur when I was 10.  Then there was Christmas mass in Thailand where I passed out down a couple of cement steps at age 18.  And then Christmas in Cuzco, Peru with the Nativity Market and small children with big fireworks at age 20.  Then there was the Big Buddha of Kamakura and a Tokyo dance-off last year, age 22.  As magical and memorable as all of those experiences were, I was waiting for Christmas, and it never came.

So this year I am waiting for a Christmas two years coming.  Add the fact that I will be family-less for the first Christmas of my entire life, and you can bet I am doing everything in my power to make sure it gets here as promised.

1. Christmas music?  Check.  I have replaced every single Sean Paul, techno, and ABBA song on my iPhone with 4.11 GB of Christmas music.  For your information, that is 2.6 DAYS of Christmas music.  Yep, definitely "check".
2. Baked goods?  Check.  I bought a real oven(!!!) and have been baking enough to feed a congregation and keep my apartment at a reasonable temperature.  (SmittenKitchen's Banana Bread and James Beard's Amazing Persimmon Bread are my two recent faves, the fact that I can top off my hot chocolate with the leftover bourbon notwithstanding.)
3. Christmas tree?  .....ummm, check?  My Charlie Brown Christmas Tree is standing proudly (as proudly as a Charlie Brown Christmas Tree can stand) in the center of my table giving my apartment a true Indie Christmas charm.
4. Christmas cheer?  Oh yeah, in spades.  I have always had more Christmas cheer than the average person, and this year I am sharing the wealth, whether they want it or not.  Aside from showing up to school every morning smiling at the Hanson Christmas song in my headphones, I made Christmas cards with the special ed class today, am making Christmas cookies with my English club tomorrow, am going to help run a high school Christmas party on Thursday, and will go up to Wajima this weekend to help Katy's HS English Club prepare a traditional Thanksgiving/Christmas dinner.  And that is just this week.  Next week is more cookies, two elementary school Christmas parties, caroling for charity, and an orphanage Christmas party.  I love it.
5. Christmas presents?  Check check check.  Katy, Karen, Creighton, and I went to Takayama, Gifu last Saturday for an afternoon of Christmas shopping for presents that are once again legal for me to mail to the United States.  Woooo!

Though I have yet to make a red and green paper chain, I would say that this year I am doing a fantastic job of waiting for Christmas.

And I even had the good sense to buy myself an early Christmas present with which to document all of this waiting.  ;)  That's right.  I, having lived camera-less since August, have finally gone out and gotten myself a camera.  And what a camera it is.  Oh boy.  It is a Canon G12, and by far the most beautiful piece of technology I have ever owned.   I am looking forward to some serious bonding time during my upcoming Tokyo vacation.  More on my grand plans for said vacay at a later date.  In the mean time, some documented Christmas cheer: photos from our Takayama excursion, with a brief stop at a charming cafe outside of Shirakawa-go.

 pretty mountains and trinkets from the charming cafe, including a pair of Maggie's socks - functional and organic

After a brief pause, we were off to Takayama again to enjoy (repeatedly) sampling the soy-sauced, grilled mochi kebabs, wander up and down a street of lovely traditional shop after lovely traditional shop, try my camera out on the scenery (wouldja look at that cloud definition?!), and generally have a lovely time.

After a hard day of shopping, we needed a little ramen to replenish our Christmas cheer before a little frolicking on Main Street.  The third photo is, apparently, three interpretations of the misheard instruction, "Pretend you're French." 

All in all it was a perfectly lovely day followed by a perfectly lovely evening full of snacks of every shape and size including a rather questionable looking paté, the requisite Christmas viewing of "Love Actually", just a little bourbon-laced hot chocolate, and Christmas cheer, in spades.

 

In which we had a Christmas day dance-off...

...and won, clearly.

After our pilgrimage to the Great Buddha of Kamakura, we returned to downtown Tokyo to spend the night at a friend's apartment and get ready for an early morning trip to Tsukiji Market.  We had heard that if you can bear to wake up before the crack of dawn and make your way unobtrusively through piles of fish slime and whizzing buzz saws waiting for freshly auctioned creatures of the deep, you can watch them auction off hundreds of thousands of dollars of premium grade tuna.  Whether or not four white people, three of whom tower at 6+ feet, can be unobtrusive in Japan was beside the point.  We were getting ready for an adventure.

Of course, Joe and I realized that waking up before 5:00 a.m. was not a sensible option, and that a much more reasonable choice would be to simply stay awake until 5:00 a.m.  And what better place to stay awake in Tokyo than at ageHa, a massive club on the waterfront?

Our mother wholeheartedly concurred with the logic of this plan.

And so, our looks completed by a pair of fly kicks (Joe) and fake eyelashes (myself... perhaps not an experiment to be repeated) we set off.  Though the DJs were only okay, the poolside dance floor proved to be the perfect setting for an impromptu dance-off with a couple of Japanese hipsters.  Five years in Eastern Europe combined with countless off-the-chain-basement-raves (Joe) and more than a few kitchen-dance-parties-of-one (yours truly) to make us the clear winners.  We politely bowed, clutched hands, and smiled our goodbyes to our new friends before we returned to the main floor where hundreds of Japanese people faced the DJ and bobbed ever so slightly side-to-side as the beat pounded from every direction.

You see, Japanese people don't dance.  Well, perhaps that is too broad a statement... at all of the live performances that I have been to, the audience appeared to have all gotten together pre-show and decided that they would, under no circumstances, deviate from the side-to-side bob.  As with many things in Japan, the gaijin did not get the memo and can be easily spotted as their fellow concert goers politely bob away leaving a "safe zone" around the dancing deviant.

We eventually tired of all this space-clearing and realized that 5:00 a.m. comes faster than one might expect.  We returned home in the nick of time and promptly set off for Tsukiji Market where we encountered more styrofoam cartons of UFOs (Unidentifiable Fish Organs) that I could have ever imagined.  We did manage to sneak (re: gaijin smash) our way to the super-secret backroom where, only 6 days later a tuna would be sold for $175,000.

Eventually, we were shooed back to the main area.  Rumor has it that the bulk of the tuna auctions now happen completely behind closed doors.

Check out videos of the tuna auctions here.  They're not mine, but we were in there dodging men with hooked poles and "turret trucks" (ターレットトラック) - which look more like pod-racers full of tuna - with the rest of them.

Some photos of the carnage...

inspecting the fish and havin' a cigarette... not an uncommon sight

back to the main market area, watch the fingers now...

He could fillet a fish in less time than it took me to write this sentence.

Any guesses?  My money is on ovaries.  Ramble: I have, in fact, eaten fish ovaries.  Truth be told, they're not bad.

slabs of tuna, probably about a meter long

tea time