Thankfully I remembered this past week that I needed to get new passport pages added as except for 2 remaining spaces, I have completely filled my passport! Granted a few complete pages have been taken up by visas. I got it for my maiden voyage to Australia in 2003 and now 4 years later I have requested more pages, which is pretty cool. This was a relatively easy process and super quick as well. I sent my passport to the US Embassy last week Tuesday and by Thursday it was returned to me with a 12 new pages added. All for free! That was pretty surprising. We'll be traveling to Hong Kong, Maccau and perhaps over the boarder to China again this Christmas, Thailand in February and on to the Bahamas in April, so those new pages will be put to use in no time.

Both Nick and I survived the test which was held yesterday, although I barely did. We won't find out the results until February, but personally for me I'm not expecting too much. I did it, it was an experience and I at least know that I would've definitely had no problem passing the lowest level as previously planned.

On a positive note, I think I did quite well on the Kanji section. Nick should pass no problem although I was relieved when he said that listening part was quite difficult. I think my days of studying Japanese are over now, but now I have to find something else to occupy my time at work when I'm not in class teaching.

This test was pretty anal compared to other standardized tests I have taken before. The whole process was extremely tedious and they even had red and yellow cards. Yes just like soccer, a yellow was a warning and a red, sayonara your kicked out! The test only had 3 sections which combined together for about 2 hours, but it took from 9:45-3:30 to finish the entire test. We had breaks in between each sections, but what took the most time was how they had to check everything before we started. They had to individually hand out test sheets, questions, check our IDs and make sure they matched the photo they were given. This was done at the beginning and end of each section, I couldn't believe it! Then of course they did the warning in Japanese each time. Yellow card for eating, talking, etc.... Red card if your phone goes off, caught cheating, coughing??...I really didn't catch all of the rules as that Japanese was NOT part of the test :) One guy got kicked out of the listening section, red card-ed when his watch beeped on the hour! Thankfully, I wasn't wearing my Timex watch or that would've been me!

I'm glad I took it, a good experience, but I think I'll be moving back to Spanish, it's a whole lot easier language to learn that's for sure!

While shopping at a local store in Japan, we came across these boxers by HANES! You would've thought Hanes could've gotten this one right. They seem to love things Michigan here!

It seems as though Christmas is growing each year here in Japan. I started writing this post at the end of November and even then, the lights were up all around Tokyo, Christmas Trees and decorations at the big department stores and Christmas Music can be heard in most of the Japanese stores as well. It's good though as it helps to put us in the holiday spirit and makes it feel a little more like Christmas back home.

We even put up our Christmas Tree and lights extra early this year so that we could celebrate with Nick's parents when they were here. It was great as we did a little Christmas and opened presents with them early on the 15th of November. That's gotta be one of the earliest celebrations of Christmas. This year since we'll be in Hong Kong for Christmas, we are planning on packing up our little tree and taking it with us along with decorations to put up in the apartment we rented with our friends. We'll probably just leave it there as we won't be spending another Christmas here in Japan.

We went to Kyoto last week during Thanksgiving (unfortunately no turkey in Kyoto) with Nick's parents who were in Japan for two weeks. This year I passed on the getting made up like a geisha, but did have a chance to see many girls dressed up. Last year Nick and I went to Kyoto during the Kouyou season (which is Japanese for the turning of the leaves and it was beautiful). So, we promised that we would do the same this year! It's seemed a little colder down in Kyoto as well as the rest of Japan compared with last winter as the leaves are already starting to fall off the trees and there is good amount of snow in the mountains. While in Kyoto we ventured to the different temples and shrines, including the Golden Pavillion (which is definitely the best), Kiyomizudera, the Silver Temple (which actually isn't silver at all) and a really neat one with 1,000 Tori Gates. These gates can be seen in the pictures. There was a hike up a hill that took about 40 minutes to get up, all lined with these redish-orange gates and amazing site to see. We just missed a huge market at one of the temples when we arrived, which was too bad as they had a lot of home made crafts, foods, etc. We commented as they were packing up, that no one uses rubbermaid totes or boxes to pack their stuff up, it's still very traditional with big sheets wrapped around all their goods. There's a picture of it in the slide show. Most nights we stuffed ourselves silly with different Japanese foods. Kyoto's a really nice place and has so many sights to see. Mostly temples, shrines and castles, but we again still didn't get a chance to see all of them...there's just too many. We got to see a just married couple getting a ride around town in a rickshaw as seen in the photos. The best part of Kyoto is how it is a modern city, but they have kept the traditional old areas.

Can't believe it's almost the middle of November!

We are busy busy busy...mostly studying right now for the Japanese Proficiency Test on December 2nd. Nick's parents have arrived and will be here for the next 2 weeks. We'll be heading to Kyoto next week with them, which I'm really looking forward to.

Yesterday I celebrated my 1-year anniversary at the school I teach at. As I just said 'I' celebrated and only I. I can't believe I've stuck it out for an entire year, longest job I've ever had. Thankfully these days are now being filled up with studying Japanese every single period I don't teach, which this past week has been amounting to around 5 hours! Plus the train ride to and from work, although I usually end up falling asleep.

Nick and I are both taking this Japanese Proficiency test which has 4 levels. 1 being the hardest and 4 being the easiest. I have been studying on and off for LEVEL 4 since March last year and was getting pretty confident that I would have no problem passing. Then I found out....

Well Nick singed us up for the tests and he is taking Level 3 (he will have no problem passing, he should be doing 2 but hasn't had time to study), but accidentally on my registration form he put me down for taking level 3 as well! Just found out last week that not only did he do this, but absolutely no changes can be made. I was extremely disappointed as I was really looking forward to kicking butt on the Level 4 and saying sayonara to Japanese (just don't think I'll be studying it much more after Japan...Spanish will be much more useful in the future). But now, while I was completely sure of passing, the magic 8 balls points to undoubtedly so :(

I have decided to take it, but that means I have been studying like crazy and will give it my best. I have 15 days to learn about 200 new kanji ( in addition to remembering the 100 I already know) and learning heaps more vocab...like 800 more words! Yikes. Never mind I am trying to get Nick and my friend Tara is help catch me up to speed on the grammar and verb usage. I've decided this isn't much fun, but gonna put in the time and hope for the best.

I guess in the end, I 'll have to look at it positively either way as I have learned a lot of Japanese while here and heck, I'll be taking the SAME test as Nick who has studied Japanese way longer than I ever have!

Ganbarimasho!

We went to Tokyo Disney Sea last week with Clive and Angel; Chris, Adrianna and their little Sophia. Starting Sophia early to Chris and Adrianna's addition (Disney!) she got to go on a few rides, but always seemed a little more interested in making mom feed her :)

Tokyo Disney Sea is adjacent to Tokyo Disneyland which is in between our house and Tokyo. Last year I ventured with my friend Cristina to Disneyland where all the original rides are, but this time headed to the other park. It was a great day filled where we experience a little bit of Europe on a gondola ride, New York and the Tower of Terror, the wild west and Indiana Jones, Ali Baba (It's a small ride like 'It's a small world') and the Middle East, etc. Every night they do a big water and fireworks show which was quite spectacular considering they do it every night!

We ordered it on Amazon Japan and two days later it was on our doorstep! Our small camera that we used to take around with us has been slowly dying so we decided to splurge, yes before Christmas and get ourselves a new one...an extremely practical one!

This camera is the Olympus 790SW and is Shockproof (you can drop it), Waterproof ( you can bring it 10ft under the water!), Freezeproof (-10 degrees Celsius), Sandproof...you name this is one heck of a camera. While we still have our big Fuji camera that we lug around for the great shots, we'll now have one to take some great photos while out on the ski slopes, in the ocean, out on our bikes! Pretty exciting, just gotta learn how to use all the fun features now!

This year I was at an Elementary school teaching English for Halloween which was fun for all the kids as they laughed at me dressed up as a witch. Halloween is growing in Japan, but definitely nothing like the US. It was fun for the kids to get dressed up in costumes and I got a bunch of candy and chocolate to hand out to the little trick or treaters. I was there the day before and got a good measure of who wanted candy and who wanted chocolate. So I went to Costco and got a huge bad of Dum Dum suckers and then a couple bags of chocolates as it looked like it would be half and half. Well Halloween came around and when the kids came to trick or treat, they all wanted candy (dum dums), no one wanted the chocolate. Something was seriously wrong with these kids! Needless to say, I ran out of the suckers as I didn't bring enough, oh well...one day they will appreciate chocolate more ( the much more expensive of the two) :)

Nick and I pulled off the Sushi Costumes this year! Nick going as a delicous Tomago (egg) sushi and I as an Ebi (shrimp) sushi. And again we managed to buy our costumes all at the 100 yen store as well as win Clive and Angel's little costume contest! We originally bought these clear suit bags and were going to stuff ourselves silly with polyester that we got from the store, but Nick's allergies started to act up and decided that a pillow for the sushi was going to be much easier and avoid some sneezing!

At the party sushi (us), a Baker and his 'Bun in the Oven', Kids and their teddy bear, a Magic 8 Ball, Fall, a doctor, a devil, an 80's rocked out in Halloween style and "Julie" could all be seen roaming throughout the nite.

Check out the slideshow below and remember to look at FLICKR for all of our photos (although we still haven't gotten around to uploading them all)

On a very clear day, like a day after a typhoon has washed and blown all the clouds and pollution away, we can see Mt Fuji from across the bay. Here is a pic at sunset.


On the same day, we ventured into Shinjuku, the "center" of Tokyo. There is a free viewing platform and we took the following photo of Fuji again.


And other random city photos

This is not an isolated incident as I have seen around 10 separate, mainly old housewives, people doing this. So Japan recycles, Japan recycles aluminium cans. They put the cans out once a week and every morning before pick up, the old housewives squat beside the recycling bin and proceed to take off the bottle tops AND pull off the ring tab, the aluminium ring tab off the aluminium can... Do they just have nothing to do or are they so uptight that must take that frickin ring tab off??

...and that's my unravel of the Japanese society for today.