Another Year Over, and a New One just begun

The holiday so far has been really nice; on Christmas Eve our friend and buddy Shimpei had arranged a Christmas party at his place, so in the end we had Japanese hot-pot (nabe) for our Christmas dinner of 2011. Besides Christmas and a couple of days at the school library I spent most of the last week of 2011 in Kobe with Yuma and his family.

Christmas party @ Shimpei's place

 On the 29th it was time for my 23rd birthday. It was quite a birthday out of the ordinary, because I spent the morning hours watching a show featuring myself on TV Osaka..! For those of you who have read my blog you might also have seen that I was one of the lucky girls elected to work as a shrine maiden in the Toka Ebisu-festival i Osaka 9-11th of January, and so the 29th was the day they had decided to air the TV-part of the election process. Hahaha, it was kind of embarrassing to watch it. I was so nervous I messed up parts of my self-appeal, and one could almost see me shaking. Anyway, I might post the video here on my blog if it ends up on youtube in the future.
Besides the whole TV-thing I had a pretty relaxed birthday, all in good company!

Birthday present and cake!

Pinkish chocolate cake

 On the 31st of December Yuma and me went back to Kyoto to celebrate the New Years Eve with some of our friends there. We met up at Kamogawa, and went to one of our favorite bars in town: the British Pub called the Hub. What can I say.. it was pretty crowded, especially when the countdown started!

The Hub - Kyoto's British pub

A lot of people spent their last hours of 2011 in this pub..

Kampai!

A rather blurry picture showing all the people joining in the New Year countdown..

After having spent some hours here we decided it was time to move on to a new location. The only problem was that recently a lot of the clubs in town has been shut down, so there is not really a lot of places to go. Therefore we were quite happy when we discovered that the Zaza Pub actually has quite a big dance floor on the second floor! And it does not even cost anything to enter, as it would had at the clubs. Party, party all night:).

And so another year has gone by... Let's hope that the new year will be even better than the last one! So far I have to say that the new year has been pretty good, I better keep it up! From tomorrow I will however be spending most of my days in the library again, I've got a lot of assignments that needs to be done before I can have my spring holiday in February.

Happy New Year to all of you!

今年も宜しくね☆！

About Anette
Anette came to Japan as an exchange student in 2010, met the love of her life and got stuck. From her base in Tokyo she writes about her experiences as a full-time worker in Tokyo and about her travels in Japan and abroad. She's a free-spirited adventurer who enjoys both the great outdoors and her urban lifestyle.