An update in English, the first one in a while. Wow. But this is only a very brief summary of the events of the last two or three weeks as I don’t really have that much time at the moment for another extensive blog post.

So, what did we do here in Kurashige-Gollub land in the last couple of weeks? First of all and most recent, we had a nabe party last weekend on Saturday with two families from our neighbourhood. It was only adults so we were 6 people and we had some good fun. I even learned a new expression ハウスする, which translates to “to house” and means to go home and call it a day. Yep, one of our guests fell asleep during the party and his wife was using that term to ask him if they wanted to go home and go to sleep. The next door neighbours stayed longest, like until 1 or 2am, and we drank and talked a lot. At one point I apparently started serving Sake in big glasses, which is usually served in small sake-cups or small glasses. Yes, I was quite drunk at the end of the night, so the next day was a relaxed “sleep in long” day. Unfortunately (or not ) I totally forgot to take pictures.

We went to a matsuri (festival) in the neighbour town on that Sunday after the nabe party and had some fun there, although we came quite late (around 2:30pm) and everybody was closing and already cleaning up. But the good thing about that was that a lot of the vendors offered their stuff for a discount. So I got some yummies for half the usual price and a bottle of shochu for 3/4 of the usual price. Sweet deal. I also learned how to grill senbei (rice cracker), which was quite a hot experience (will see if I can get some fotos from my wife’s iPhone later).

The week before we all, kids included, went for a little photo shooting in a foto studio. Quite a nice experience, although they had no shoes in my size and the biggest size they had was just a bit too small and therefore a bit painful to wear, but because it was only for 45 mins or so it was not that big of a deal.

My wife and I also went for a little restaurant search around Shinjuku for our little “Welcome 2012 & We are married” party sometime in January (probably 28th) next year. We even found a German Bierzelt-like restaurant, but it is a bit too pricey for our liking, so we went with an English pub instead. I mean, we still plan on doing a “wedding party”-like event in Germany so we don’t really need to do the party at a German place here.

Other than that I was pretty busy with my job search and had several job interviews, of which one finally turned into a success earlier this week. Unfortunately this means that I won’t be able to join my wife and watch with her the kids’ marathon at school on this Friday, because I will be working in the office. That marathon is quite a big deal here for the elementary school kids, so it’s a bit sad that I can’t watch it live.

That’s it for now. Enjoy your day!