Merry Christmas!!!

First of all I would like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas!!! What have I done so far: Last October, Carol from Singapore (we met in Australia) came to Tokyo and will be studying in Rikkyo for a year. We promised each other that we should meet and I give her baked goods. hehe. We met at Roppongi and went to the Mori Art Museum which had an exhibit on Contemporary Artists, i.e. Manga artists. After which we treated ourselved to 茶そば (Green Tea Soba). I ordered the Ebi-fry one, which was (a) expensive, (b) had two large batter-fried shrimps. :) Very appropriate for a very cold autumn evening.

I also was invited to make Japanese Sweets in a class by the ladies I teach English to. We made two sweets, a baked sweet (which tasted like mooncake, except that the filling is a bean-egg filling) and a seasonal sweet (Kaki or persimmon). Looking at the real things, you'd think it was easy. But, actually doing it is another thing. As you can see, my baked sweet is overbaked..should have been "golden brown" and not "grizzly bear brown" while my persimmon, doesn't look like it at all. (I didn't put much food coloring as I was supposed to) oh well!

The next pictures come from the New Japanese theatre where I watched a Japanese play. The theatre specializes in straight plays, ballets and operas and inside the theatre there was a beautiful gallery of ballet costumes. One is from Aida and the next one is from Cinderalla. The play was interesting, though I didn't understand everything. It was a collaboration between China, South Korea and Japan. Pretty interesting though!

Winter = Nabe (鍋), so for my meals I've been eating a lot of nabe. First one is a Hiroshima-style porridge with oysters and the second one is a Thai-style Tom Yum nabe.

As for a new toy, I had Nowd buy the newly release EEE PC by Asus. (Thanks Nowd) Very cheap, very small. Pretty happy with it and am getting used to the Linux OS installed with it! :) The last picture will show you how neat and tiny it is. (to those who are familiar with my Dell Laptop)