It's a New Year

We just wrapped up the holidays here and are settling back in to our normal everyday lives. After sorting through and labeling the hundreds of pictures we took since late December, I've made these two photo albums. The first is our Christmas experience in Rumoi, which includes making mochi (basically pounding steamed rice into goo), cookie decorating with my chat club and the English club in Rumoi HS, and a gift exchange with Jim and Dave. It was really fun, but both of us felt a little homesick, having to open presents on skype with our families.

The next slideshow is of our Tokyo and Kyoto adventure. This really made us feel like we were in Japan. So many beautiful, crazy, weird, and hilarious things! This is a long slideshow, and the captions explain a little, but here were our highlights:

• lots of women in kimono
• beautiful temples and shrines, all of which have been burned down at least once in their lifetime
• eery bamboo forests
• scary statues of gods that we're sure moved when we looked away
• the biggest buddha I will probably ever see in the biggest wooden building (50 meters high) I will probably ever stand in
• sushi on a conveyor belt
• quiet cobblestone streets with little bridges to doorways of tea houses where geisha might be entertaining
• ridiculously-detailed roofs
• a whose whole second and third story are covered in gold plating
• hilarious signs everywhere
• several people pushing dogs in strollers
• transvestite being photographed by a homeless man with a disposable camera
• a rare sighting of Mount Fuji