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After all our traveling we got back home on the evening of the 30th. The next day was New Year's Eve but we didn't do anything special. New Year's Eve is a family holiday in Japan so there's really nothing to do unless you're visiting family. Neither one of us really cared about the holiday so we just relaxed at our apartments instead. I spent the evening in my apartment watching Kohaku Uta Gassen and either working on making videos for my blog or making a puzzle. I really can't remember for sure.

Kohaku Uta Gassen is a popular New Year's Eve music program. It's an interesting mix of pop and traditional music. Two teams, the red team (female) and the white team (male), perform songs and at the end a winner is declared. This year, the white team won. I think I enjoyed the female performances more though. But a lot of them were very similar... too many big girl groups. AKB48, NMB48, and SKE48 all performed. I really don't see a difference at all in those groups. 

I didn't go back to school until the 8th so I had quite a bit of free time. I spent time working on my blog, making my new Disney puzzle, and cooking a bit.

I made Bibimbap (a Korean dish) one night. It was rice topped with tofu, mushrooms, bean sprouts, carrot, boiled egg, and cucumbers. I mixed gochujang in, too. Yum! I got the recipe here.


One night I was wanting Colonel Crispy, the chicken strips from KFC here. But I was at Jonathan's for dinner and there's no KFC around there so we got konbini food. So I was excited to see Colonel Crispy flavored potato chips! Hahaha! They ended up being really good (and really did taste like Colonel Crispy) and I bought another bag later.

We had a three day weekend the 11th through the 13th. On Saturday we went to another Aeon mall in Hamamatsu that we hadn't visited before. We took a train and then walked to the mall, which was quite a long walk. I took a picture of these pretty flowers along the way. I'm still surprised by flowers in winter here.


The mall had a lot of the same stores as Ichino, the closer Aeon mall, and seemed a bit older, but it was still a really good mall. We ate dinner at an Indian restaurant which was really good. Also, the Kaldi store there had a bit more stuff than the other two I've been to I think.

Then the next night we went bowling at Round One. They had a deal where we could have unlimited games until 6 AM! We didn't stay that long, but we did bowl 11 games. It was so much fun! Oh, and I was one of the few girls there in pants. That's a weird thing about bowling in Japan. I would never go bowling in a skirt in America, but I have done it in Japan (just not that night).


That's a pudding cup I bought at the Max Valu grocery store near me. It was delicious! Chocolate pudding with a bunch of stuff on top and then more pudding on top of that!

The next weekend we ended up at Round One again. First we ate dinner at the mall though. We ate at Kobe Motomachi Doria. Jonathan had omurice (with mushrooms, I think) and I had eggplant doria. I wasn't sure what doria was exactly, but the picture looked delicious and I wanted to try it because doria is a food you can make in Rune Factory 2: A Fantasy Harvest Moon. Yes, I partially chose my food based on a video game.


I was really excited when our food came because both of our dishes came in bowls with fire underneath of them. The food is really hot so they give you another bowl to dish it out into. It was soooo delicious. It was rice with cheese and eggplant and tomato sauce. Amazing! The only problem was that it didn't quite fill me up enough. They had sets with salad and maybe soup or something so next time I would get a set. But we just went to Mister Donut afterwards for dessert.

At Round One we did Spo-cha. I'm not sure what Spo-cha means. I'm guessing the "spo" part is for "sports" but I'm not sure about "cha." Sports challenge? Anyways, it's a couple floors of a bunch of activities. We paid for three hours, but we should have done the unlimited deal which was only a few hundred yen more. I just wasn't really sure at the time how long we would want to stay or if it really was unlimited.


There's so much to do! We played table tennis, basketball, and darts and did archery and batting cages. The batting cage was kind of scary at first, but then it was really fun! The also have an arcade and it's unlimited too! For about 1800 yen for three hours (2100 for unlimited) it's a really good deal!


 The automatic table tennis game is fun. It shoots balls at you and you try to hit the lit-up squares.


Just like Katniss! Ok... not really. I only hit the target a couple times, haha.

The next week over 900 elementary kids in Hamamatsu got food poisoning from the school lunch. Jonathan doesn't teach at any elementary schools, but all school lunches were canceled in Hamamatsu for a while. He had to take lunch to school and he hates cooking so I offered to make his lunches.

If I used a recipe, I'll highlight it and you can click on it to see the recipe.


The first day he had rice with some furikake mixed in, some green vegetables that he picked out at the grocery store, pineapple, tamagoyaki, some mixed vegetables (cabbage, carrots, and mushrooms) that I cooked with olive oil, a little bit of sesame oil, and red pepper.


This bento had the same mixed vegetables, cucumbers, spicy Korean tofu, and rice. I used the extra sauce from the tofu on the rice. 


Cucumbers, pineapple, cherry tomatoes, salad, pineapple, rice with spicy korean sauce, and tamagoyaki. 

 

Jonathan wanted curry so I did that. This wouldn't be a good cold bento, but he was able to microwave it at school. I used a premade curry packet but added in some extra eggplant.

Looking at all of these bentos is making me hungry! It's lunch time here so I will eat when I'm done with this post.


McDonald's here is having a "Vintage American" theme right now. It's kind of weird, lol. The honey mustard chicken sandwich was really tasty. I just ate the fries plain but it came with cheese sauce (Jonathan ate it but I didn't think it was good) and bacon bits. 

One day we went to LaLaport. I didn't buy one, but these fighting cat Gachapon toys are so cute!



We played basketball at the arcade and I beat Jonathan and finally made it to the third round! You advance to each round by reaching a certain score. It's only 30 points to make it the the second, which is easy, but then you need 150 points to make it to the 3rd round which is much more of a challenge. I finally did it! You need 250 to make it to the 4th round. I wasn't too far off! 

Krispy Kreme opened at LaLaport fairly recently. I got a chocolate raspberry jelly donut. I'm not a huge raspberry fan, and I don't usually like jelly donuts, but this was just so pretty and fancy looking! It did still sound good to me, but I would have gone with something else probably. But this ended up being super delicious. The jelly was really good and everything was yummy. I would buy this one again, but it was a limited time one so I probably won't even get the chance.


January was such a fun month! It made me really glad that I'm spending another year in Japan. I can't imagine leaving in March!

This past weekend I went to a Backstreet Boys concert in Hamamatsu! I bought the tickets back in early July and knew about it for a while before then so I had been looking forward to it for a long time!

Earlier this year one of my roommates from college posted about going to a Backstreet Boys concert in her city in the US. I knew that when BSB toured they usually went to Japan so I checked online for tour dates. I got really excited when I saw one in Nagoya, a city less than two hours away from Iwata (an hour with shinkansen). It was on a weeknight, but it would work out. I figured that had to be the closest one but then I scrolled down and saw one in Shizuoka. Only about an hour away! Then I saw the details of that concert and saw that it was actually in Hamamatsu! It was Shizuoka prefecture, not Shizuoka city! I looked up where the concert would be held and saw that it was really close to my boyfriend's apartment! It just kept getting better and better! :)

I was super excited! I loved the Backstreet Boys when they were really popular but I never went to a concert. This was a really great chance to finally see them. All five members are back together and it's their 20th anniversary year. Despite their cheesiness, I still think they're great! I was so excited about the concert that even when I found out that tickets were 9,500 yen (almost $100!) I still HAD to go.

The concert was held at 5:00 on Saturday in Hamamatsu Arena. As we set out on our bikes Jonathan said, "Let's take the back streets." He didn't even mean to make a joke, but I was amused.

It was less than a half hour bike ride to the arena and Jonathan and I arrived a little after 4:00 when they had started letting people in.


Jonathan was also attending the concert (I paid for half of his ticket because I didn't want to go by myself) and we wondered how many guys would be there. It turned out there were quite a few guys. It looked like many other girls had also made their boyfriends and husbands go with them. I didn't see any younger people there and I was a bit surprised by that. I thought that some of the women would drag along their kids or something. But it turns out that all the Japanese concerts were only 18+. I have no idea why. The US concerts don't have any age restriction.

Seating was assigned so there wasn't a rush to get in so we took our time and I looked at the merchandise for sale. I had seen several people with towel scarf things and I bought one, too. I wanted a t-shirt with all the Japanese tour dates and cities on the back, but the t-shirts were 4,000 yen so I passed up on that. The towel was 1,500.

We then waited in a line for a few minutes which ended up being the wrong line, but there was plenty of time so it didn't matter. When we were let into the arena we were given fliers with all the tour dates on it. It's an awesome souvenir! I always love seeing American things with Japanese writing so this is just perfect.


Jonathan was so excited for the concert! Hahaha.


The arena was small so there weren't any bad seats. Actually, I think our seats were better than some of the more expensive ones. The ones in the lower area were more expensive, but the seating was flat so it may have been a bit harder to see. 

The concert was really good! They had a lot of energy and their voices were great live. They mostly did older songs and did a few songs from their new album. I enjoyed all of them. It was so much fun! I was really amused every time they spoke Japanese. They didn't speak much, mostly just greetings and "arigato" and counting, but the audience loved it. I was excited when they would yell "Hamamatsu!" Between some songs each member had a chance to speak. They spoke English so most people didn't understand too much. Brian had the best idea. He didn't say anything and just held up a bunch of cards with Japanese on them. It was cute. Haha.

At one point, I forget which song it was, they told us to get out our cell phones and use the lights on them. It took a while for people to understand that haha. Anyways... photography wasn't allowed, but I took the opportunity to sneakily take a picture. It didn't turn out well, but at least I have something. Other people had the same idea, but I saw one girl near us get caught.


I found a video from the concert on Youtube though! It's from when they did I Want it That Way. That was one of my favorite songs of the evening. It was a lot of fun because the crowd was really into it and knew the words and stuff.

I have no idea how someone was able to take video without getting caught and I hope it doesn't get taken off Youtube. Anyways... here's the video:



Here's another video that's not very good quality, but oh well!



It wasn't completely crazy like videos I've seen from their concerts back when they were really big, plus I've heard Japanese concerts are calmer, and the US ones probably are now too, but there were still plenty of people really into it. There was a girl near us who knew all the words to every song and even a lot of the dance moves. The girl in front of us had a sign for Kevin, but was told she couldn't have that. There was an older woman sitting next to me who was by herself. Before the concert started I saw her wave to someone down below so I guess she was with someone with a more expensive seat. So I thought she might just be with them and not really into the Backstreet Boys because she seemed a bit old. But she was just as into it as everyone else.

The concert lasted about an hour and a half so it ended around 6:30 or a little after that. I would have liked to get a better picture with this sign, but there were so many people trying to do the same thing. Here I am pointing to Hamamatsu! Sold out! 


I'm really glad that they came to Hamamatsu. It's really kind of random because it's not nearly as big as the other cities in their Japan tour. It was their first time performing in Hamamtsu so it's the perfect time for me to be living here!


They didn't do this song at the concert, but here's a video that BSB made in Japan. Maid cafes, karaoke, arcades... yay. :) It's making me excited to go to Tokyo next month for a three day weekend!

My summer vacation is over and my first day back to school was this past Monday. I wasn't looking forward to going back to school after having 46 days in a row off (counting weekends), but it wasn't too bad.

This post is out of order because I was excited to post about more exciting things that I did, but the day before climbing Fujisan (in early August), Jonathan and I visited the Shizuoka Prefectural Forest Park in Hamamatsu.

We wanted to either visit the park or ride bikes that day and we decided to go the park since we didn't want to tire ourselves out before climbing Mt. Fuji.

The road to the park was winding and narrow but very pretty!

We took a trail to go the suspension bridge.

 I forget the exact height, but the suspension bridge is pretty high up! It's neat! :)




After the bridge we continued the hike for a little bit and it was actually pretty steep in parts. It was more of a hike than we expected and I think a bike ride would have been less tiring, haha. There are more trails there that I would like to check out sometime. I want to go back in the fall when the weather is cooler.

This has nothing to do with the Forest Park, but last night we had a thunderstorm! Last time I was in Japan I only saw one thunderstorm and it lasted like two minutes. It wasn't much except for the lightning that struck very close to my apartment and knocked out the electricity for about ten seconds. I also saw lightning in the distance a couple of times but it never amounted to much. But the storm last night was very strong. I was woken up suddenly by really loud thunder. I don't know if it was raining much or very windy, but the lightning was crazy. The thunder was SOOOO loud and lightning stuck very close several times. The thunder was really shaking my apartment. It was so loud that I jumped several times. I was excited that there was a thunderstorm but it was actually a little scary.

This past week I saw lightning several nights. A few times when walking back to my car from Jonathan's apartment we saw lightning in the distance but didn't hear any thunder. One night it stormed a little bit later on and there was quite a bit of lightning but it wasn't super close. I thought it rarely stormed here, but I guess it's more common than I thought. It's still not usually as strong as the storms I see in Kentucky, but the one last night was pretty crazy!

Last Friday Jonathan and I too a bike ride in the late afternoon/evening. Before setting out I bought some snacks at a konbini. I got peach mango gummies, tea, and Cheeza crackers (So good! Better than Cheez-its!) The tea came with a Rilakkuma bottle cover! :)



We took a bridge from Hamamatsu to Iwata that we had never taken before. It was shaky! It had a pretty view of the wind turbines in the distance. I really like them for some reason.




The wind turbines are kind of creepy up close. Actually the whole area had a kind of creepy feel in a good way.


The bike path went along the ocean for a while and then went through the woods. Eventually we made it to the beach and ate our snacks.


Jonathan was not thrilled with my cute snacks. Luckily he had his own, but I made him take this picture, haha. Though he did eat some of my gummies and really liked them.


We didn't stay at the beach too long because it was getting dark and I didn't want to bike through the woods at night. On our way back we saw a tanuki on the path! I didn't get a picture, but I found this one somewhere online.

 

There's a sad, creepy, little lighthouse. It didn't look so bad from really really far away.

The next morning we had a minor earthquake. My apartment swayed and creaked and there was a bigger jolt at one point, but nothing huge. It lasted maybe about 20 seconds. In a few minutes I looked up the map online and saw that the epicenter was not far from here and that it had been a 5.1.  It was a 3 out of 7 on the JMA scale here (which is based on actual shaking and how it feels) and a 4 where Jonathan lives. He was at my apartment when it happened. On the way back to his apartment later that day he was saying maybe his picture frames or something had fallen over. I said I really doubted anything had fallen.


 When I went in his apartment I saw all his pictures still standing. Then I turned and saw the destruction. Captain Picard had fallen down! Hahaha.


Later we went back to the beach, but this time we drove. 


We made like a sand fort thingy, haha. We were both making our own at first and competing, but mine kept getting washed away by the waves so eventually I just helped him with his.



Yesterday I was on Skype with Jonathan and I heard the earthquake alarm on his phone going off and then my phone alarm started going off. I looked at it and saw that it said some other prefecture but I couldn't read which one. It didn't start shaking though and I figured that if it didn't start shaking soon it wasn't much. But then when that alarm went off the town's alarms started going off.

I looked at what people were saying on facebook and the phone message had said something about a magnitude 7 earthquake in Nara. It seemed weird though because even though Nara is kind of far away I think we would have felt at least something here. I kept checking the earthquake map online and eventually the information updated. It had been a magnitude 2.3 earthquake. So it turns out it was a false alarm. It was kind of weird.

 

I've been doing some cooking. I made some peanut butter noodles and they were really tasty! :)


Last week Jonathan and I did karaoke. It's only 400 yen per person per hour during weekdays so it's a really good deal. I sang a bunch of stuff including some Disney songs (Just Around the Riverbend from Pocahontas, haha), a couple Japanese songs, and the theme songs for Rayearth. One of them even had the opening video from the anime! It was so cool! :)


I've been studying kanji . I have a really cute Jewelpets notebook (I need to take a picture of that) and pretty pens and a My Melody plastic sheet thing (to put between the pages so when you write it doesn't mark through onto other pages) to make studying more fun! :) I'm now on a third grade elementary school kanji level.

 
Last week we also went to Lake Sanaru in Hamamatsu which is one of the dirtiest lakes in Japan. Even though the water is dirty, it's still a pretty area and there are some nice places to walk.






I took these pictures with my phone so you probably can't see this next picture very well, but I tried to take a picture of some crabs. There were so many crabs everywhere! They're really creepy and gross. All those dots down in the mud were crabs.


Here is a picture Jonathan took when he biked to the lake by himself. Ick!



 


More crabs! They move really slowly most of the time and then they all of a sudden run really quickly. Creepy.



I've been craving peanut butter cups recently, and I can't find them here, so I made my own the other night. They weren't quite as good as Reese's, but still really delicious!


On the first day of summer vacation I took the Japanese driving test. It's notorious for being really difficult. The police men who give the test are so picky! I've heard of people failing the test about 15 times. You can fail for really small things. Some of the things they want you to do are just really weird. You're not supposed to drive in the center of the lane. You're supposed to drive close to the line on the left side. In real life that's not a good idea because of bikers and pedestrians.

I didn't even get to finish the course the first day because the car went off the side of the road when I was going through a really small S-curve. The policeman's advice to me at the end of the test was that I needed to take driving lessons. They're so expensive though!

I took the test again the next week. I failed again because I turned too quickly and didn't check my mirrors enough (I checked them, but I guess it wasn't obvious enough). I was also told maybe some other stuff that I didn't understand.

Yesterday I took the test for the third time. I was sleepy because I have been going to bed late and sleeping in, annoyed because there was a lot of traffic on the way to the testing center, and it was raining a bit.

I felt like I did ok on the test (in the US I would have been very confident that I had passed) but I figured I had failed for really small stuff. But when the test was finished the police man asked if I had taken driving lessons in Japan. He looked a little surprised when I said no, so that seemed like a really good sign. Then he said, "One point" and told me that I needed to make tighter left turns and move further to the right before making right turns. I felt pretty good that that was the only thing he had to tell me.

The test is taken in groups. There had been about 8-10 people in my group. Once we had all taken the test we went back inside to the lobby and waited for the results. They told us that only one person had passed and then started handing back our papers. I had seen other people do well on the test so I didn't feel very confident then. But.... I passed! Yay! I was really excited. Before I was given my paper to go to the counter to pay for my license the police man asked me my address and I got the order a bit confused and he was really picky so I had to say my address a few times. It was weird.

To celebrate Jonathan and I went to McDonald's for lunch. Haha. I got a salsa chicken sandwich, fries, and a mango soda float. Yummy! They have new stuff every time I go there!



Later Jonathan and I are going biking. I haven't checked what it's like outside today, but I'm sure it's hot!