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Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! I'm a bit late for Christmas but I was traveling all last week. Since Jonathan and I were going to be traveling on Christmas we opened gifts on Sunday, a few days early.

The night before we ate dinner together and watched Home Alone. I made gratin and stuffing for dinner. We also had cranberry sauce which I had found in a grocery store near Hamamatsu Station a few days before. So exciting!


The next morning we got breakfast from McDonald's and then opened gifts from each other and my parents.




Yes, that's a Rilakkuma toilet paper holder, haha. One of the gifts Jonathan gave me was toilet paper and then it made sense lol. 

But that wasn't the main gift. He also gave me a giant Rilakkuma! IT'S SO CUTE!!!!!!


It had actually been in my apartment all week! The previous weekend when I was in Nagoya he biked over to my apartment and hid Rilakkuma up in the ceiling of my bathroom which I've always been too scared to look in. It turns out it's not scary at all.

Here are a bunch of random pictures from September and October. I've been meaning to do a random post for each month, but I'm kind of behind. I've been busy studying for the JLPT which I took today. Anyways... I will also soon have a post for November.

Mmmm! That's some omurice that I made. Well, it's not much of an omelet I guess because I scrambled up the egg and mixed it into the rice, but it was still delicious. Here's the recipe: Omurice



I made delicious cookies in my toaster oven. It worked really well! These cookies look burnt, but they were just very chocolatey. :) Here's the recipe: Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies



We didn't have school lunch one day so I had to take a bento. I made spicy korean tofu. It works really well in a bento because it is good both warm and cold. Here's the recipe: Spicy Korean Tofu


Sometimes I buy Ray, a Japanese fashion magazine. One month there was a small cookbook insert and it has some really good recipes. Well, I've only made one, but several of the others look good as well. This was gratin and it's very easy and I can change it a lot by adding various vegetables. Yum! It's great because I can make a lot of it and just heat it up in the toaster oven when I want. It tastes just as good leftover.


Yes, that is really chocolate flavored gum. I actually kind of liked this. Sometimes at first it had a weird taste, but sometimes I didn't notice it, so maybe it was just something else I ate before it. It reminded me a bit of the chocolate soda I had last time I was in Japan. I hope they bring that back sometime! I loved it!


Mmmm... Mister Donut. :)


I got this apple ring at some place in Ichino mall. Sooooo good! The outside of it kind of reminded me of baklava. The inside had pieces of apple. 


These maron (chestunt) chocolates were tasty. I think I ate these after the BSB concert.


Chocolate strawberry cake chocolates... :)


I didn't buy these. I wanted to try them, but I just didn't want to spend money on something I figured I would just eat a few of. They're Pepsi flavored Cheetos. Ewwwww.


The green apple Fanta was delicious.  And I love the old style packaging!



I saw this and thought it sounded weird. But at the same time it seemed like it had the potential to be good. It wasn't. I didn't completely hate it, but I got more and more tired of it as I drank it and ended up not finishing it. The vinegar taste wasn't that strong, but it was definitely there.


Jonathan bought this tea (he doesn't like tea, but he didn't realize it was tea when he bought it).  Pineapple is often shorted to just "pine" in Japan, which sounds a bit unappetizing. I tried some and it wasn't great. I really liked the pear tea that I got though. Plus, it had Rilakkuma packaging!


And yeah... my drink choice was influenced by the super kawaii packaing. It was delicious though!


I found some really cute stuff at Pickup!


I bought some pansy seeds and planted them in a pot on my balcony. They're growing now, but the flowers haven't bloomed yet. 


As Jonathan and I biked back from the festival we attended, we saw this creepy place. I have no idea what it used to be.


I received some omiyage from a teacher at school. They were peanuts from Disney Sea with cute packaging. 



This is the brand of fabric softener that I use (the Juliette scent smells sooo good!) but I didn't need any when I saw these. I am almost out now though so I hope that they still have the Disney packaging. I wish Marie was on the Juliette bottle though!


It is Maru!!!!!!!!!!!!!


SAILOR MOON MERCHANDISE!!!!!!!! I bought one and got Sailor Jupiter, my least favorite so I had to try again. I then got Luna and Artemis. I hadn't even noticed that the cats were one of the toys! I still wanted a Sailor that I liked so I got a third one and got Sailor Venus! Yay! I'm glad I got them then because the next time I went to Ito Yokado they were gone. Also, there was a sign for them at Yodobashi Camera in Akihabara, but there was a sign over it saying they were sold out. I guess they were popular!


I saw this bus in a parking lot and just had to take a picture! Shippei is cute! :) Town mascots are a big deal in Japan. Shippei even has a song. I learned the dance to the song when I went to one of my kindergartens. Haha. Then another day I heard the kindergarten near my apartment practicing the dance. They played this song over and over and over...

Last weekend I celebrated Halloween. Well, sort of. In the past few weeks I've picked up some Halloween stuff from 100 yen stores, including the stuff in the picture above which came from Daiso.


Halloween is two words? I was hoping to find something with "Merry Halloween" written on it, but no luck (I saw a few things that said that last time in Japan).  


I don't think I've ever seen so many warnings for just stickers. They really don't want you to lick them or put them on your skin... are they poisonous? 


I also got this stuff at Daiso on a different day. I got a bunch of random candy (it was 3 or 4 for 100 yen).


This axe was a totally random purchase, but it's so funny. I don't think I've ever seen such a happy, girly, sparkly, fuzzy, ridiculous axe.


I bought some imported Halloween themed Haribo gummies at Minipla at LaLaport. The bag was Halloween themed. I don't like Charlie Brown a whole lot, but I appreciated the Halloween theme.



I bought these snacks at the grocery store. The chips are pumpkin gratin flavored and the things on the left are little chocolate and strawberry filled cookies. The cookies are good and I haven't tried the chips yet. Maybe I'll eat them tomorrow, which is actually Halloween.


The lollipops I bought at Daiso were super cute! I gave the cream soda (melon soda with vanilla ice cream) flavored one to Jonathan (I put together treat bags for us, haha) and I kept the milk flavored one. Yes, milk flavored. I bought it because of the adorable packaging, but I ended up liking the flavor too. It just had a sweet creamy flavor, but it was tasty. Oh, and the lollipops are Mickey shaped! I will have to try some of the other flavors.


The cookies had such cute packaging! Disney seemed to be a popular thing for Halloween.


That's the stuff I put in the treat bags. Yum!


I bought that cute lantern at Seria, but all the rest of my decorations were from Daiso. 

Every Friday Jonathan and I eat junk food and watch Psych. It's our weekly tradition. It really wasn't any different this time except for the decorations and my "costume."


I forced Jonathan to put on this headband and hold this stuff. See how he felt about that?


Yeah, so there's my costume. It's probably the best Halloween costume I've ever put together! Way better than the one I made last year, right?


Okay, maybe not. But it was way less time consuming and was much less expensive than my Princess Peach costume. Though I loved working on that dress. I missed that this year. I love costumes and making stuff, so I love Halloween. It's my second favorite holiday, after Christmas.





We had KFC to eat. I wasn't even sure what this was when I ordered it, but it looked interesting. It was really delicious! Despite not being boneless and being dark meat, it was still really good. It was sweet and yummy. I still don't know what the flavor was though, haha.


The next day we got lunch at 7-Eleven before doing some shopping. I don't like milk tea (I like putting milk in some tea, but I don't like the bottled kind), but the packaging was so cute! :) I love how popular Marie from the Aristocats is here. 


I bought this pumpkin pudding candy and was surprised by a gummy center when I bit in (I thought it was just pumpkin flavored white chocolate) haha. It also had the sauce stuff that's on Japanese pudding (which is like flan). It wasn't bad, but it was a bit surprising, lol.

We ate our lunch at the park near the river. There weren't many people at the park because it had rained a lot the night before and the ground was still pretty wet. I took the opportunity to ride the nasu! Japanese eggplant! So exciting! Haha!


I wanted to take a picture of Jonathan on the nasu but he got scared and got off before I could take a picture. He claims that he was afraid that he would break it. Yeah, right. He just couldn't handle the intense excitement of the thrilling eggplant!


We walked along the river for a few minutes and saw these really really bright berries. They were brighter in real life. They were really pretty! 

Then we headed to Seiyu which is owned by Walmart. I took a picture of some beautiful graffiti in the cosmetics section.


The puzzle selection is definitely better than in the US!



Want to eat some aloe vera? Haha.

I bought some pineapple banana jelly, curry, and hangers. We went to a different Seiyu the previous week (a smaller one that mostly just had groceries) and bought Great Value parmesan cheese, cranberry juice, and honey roasted peanuts. It wasn't cheap. Imported Great Value food... haha.

Overall, Seiyu did have some good stuff, but the store was kind of depressing in a K-Mart sort of way. There weren't very many people there especially considering that it was a weekend. Though I will probably go back when I run out of parmesan cheese because it was a good deal.

Oh and they sold Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, but only the white chocolate kind. WHY????? It was like they were teasing me. So cruel! I like white chocolate, but it just doesn't go with peanut butter like regular chocolate does.

Then we went to Nandemo Kaimasu, a used store near Jonathan's apartment. I found a really cute Rilakkuma stuffed animal for only 400 yen! They had a really huge one holding a donut that said "Mister Donut" and it was amazing, but it was 15000 yen. I'll just get stick with the 400 yen one...


I added the axe to make this post more Halloweeny since I have kind of gotten away from that theme in the second half of this post.

That evening Jonathan and I walked to an area where he sometimes runs and has seen many stray cats. An old couple goes there every evening too and feeds them. The cats were a bit shy with us (one was super friendly though!) but we saw some of them run up to the woman. They definitely recognized her! It was really cute!

I only had my phone so this picture isn't very good, but it kind of shows one of the cats. We saw at least four black cats. So that was kind of Halloweenish. So cute, too!


Then we made taco salad for dinner. Yum! The grocery store near Jonathan's apartment doesn't have plain tortilla chips so we used some chips called Don Tacos which are basically Doritos. The flavor we got tasted a bit like Sweet Chili Doritos, which are my favorite Doritos.Yum!


The next day the weather was super super nice. It was so sunny but not hot. I took advantage of the nice weather and did some laundry. The weather was so nice that I even enjoyed doing my laundry. Weird, but I really did. Plus, "traditional laundry in Japan are so soft as to calm down our minds." Ummmm, ok.



I went running that afternoon and ran 7 kilometers. I had run 7 kilometers on Wednesday, too (first time I had ever run that far). I felt like I could run for a while longer but it was getting dark. When I signed up for the 10k I wasn't planning on running the whole thing, but I think I'll be able to! It's less than a month away now!