i can cook, i think?

Several days after Christmas, I made myself hamburger steaks with red wine sauce. Yum.

secret santa~

Since the JOY students (for the most part) weren't going home, we had a Secret Santa trade off and potluck party :D I had Cindy, and I got her a nice dragonfly broach. Becky had me, and she gave me a copy of Koe wo Kikasete by Big Bang. It had a special little keychain and it was Taeyang!




Afterward, we eventually ended up at Kim's room in Gumyoji, where we danced, sang, and had full until Christmas.

christmas, oh how wonderful you are

WINGS Party:



Afterward, Christoffer, Ellis, and I went to TGIFriday's to get some real food. It was delicious American food and portioning <3

asakusa and the year end party (where I understood very little)

This was the field trip for the Japanese Society and Culture course, and it was mainly headed to Asakusa and the surrounding areas. Here, we went to the Tokyo-Edo Museum (which was kind of a drag).










From there, I split off with the group. They were going to eat chanko-nabe, the hot pot that sumo wrestlers eat. They had to pay for their meal. Instead, I went off to meet my Mitsui V-Net partner for his Japan Society of Professional Engineers' Year End Party, where I understood very little of what was going on (engineering lingo is completely over my head in Japanese). However, the small Italian restaurant we were eating at was amazing, and the choice of food was very well timed. I had to leave early though (to meet my classmates; I shouldn't have left).



Note: I did eat everything on that plate. I'm not going to be that picky in front of a room full of strangers. However, the woman next to me shoveled more cucumbers on my plate, at which point I sort of gagged and just shoveled it all inside. Gross!




I took a boat tour to try to catch up to the class... but it was kind of useless. Tokyo basically unloaded a ton of rain on us... so the class kind of disbanded. Well, sorta. We went to Tokyo Dome City, which is sort of a nice little amusement park. We did a haunted horror house there, and man.

Kim, Andreas, and I screamed like little girls. I love the psychological horror that the Japanese are so fond of. It actually gets to you. Apparently, since we went in first, the rest of the guys thought it was very hokey that they would play screams. However, once they realized that it was us actually screaming, they quickly got very scared. Sri and Susumu screamed like little girls :D Tomoka had to be dragged out, because she was so frightened :[ Juyeon and Cindy were deathly afraid and exhausted emotionally afterward. It was pretty awesome and it was only about 10 minutes long, let alone the horror house at Fujikyu... that's 40 minutes of terror.