Swings and roundabouts

This week was one of old comforts and old friends and while it didn't result in photos of us with men in giraffe costumes, it was a good chance to recharge the ol' batteries. This was involuntary to some extent; Lisa was struck down with a lurgy on Saturday which kept us home for most of the weekend. You would think it would be difficult to spend much money almost without leaving the house, but somehow I still managed to go from having $1000 in my wallet on Friday to less than half that today. If you work out how, please let me know.

Absolutely none of this

Thursday night we had our first catchup for 2011 with Mel, who spent most of the time catching us up on the gossip and all the outrageous things that had happened at school. She seems to be missing my calming, agony aunt-ish presence there, judging by her tales of woe over coffee and then dinner. She did get quite visibly upset over the 10 yen charge for a doggy bag though, so I'm taking her reactions with a grain of salt. She's just come back from a New Year trip to Thailand, a week-long jaunt to Hokkaido for the Snow Festival and fresh plans for a holiday in Vietnam; this got Lisa and I thinking about our travel plans - Europe perhaps - although given the rate I burn through money at home, I hate to think the kind of damage I could do in Berlin.

Friday night we met up with Mel and Adam again along with the staff from Kobe High School in what was supposed to be a low-key dinner. The Principal got involved however, which instantly turned it into an "enkai" (work party). The difference is generally in the price, the number of drinks and the formality of the thing; fortunately the Principal decided to skip his speech completely and start getting wired into the beer. Dinner was nabe (hot pot) - one normal and one tomato, which tasted a bit like minestrone soup. Tomatoes must have been on special; they had a strange but not unpleasant tomato chuhai (Japanese whiskey mixer) to go with it. Adam recently made haggis from scratch and apparently has a spare one in his freezer - between that and the Christmas pudding and custard we brought from home, I think we have everything we need to send off Winter in style.

Over the rest of the weekend we baked a cake, bought groceries and killed lots of Nazis in French territory; I also bought some shoes. You probably don't want to hear about any of these things. We're making plans to head out to a bath house on Sunday, so there will be things next time, I promise. The giraffe costumes are in the mail.