Wintery weekend

It's cold. It's really flippin cold! We even had a very thin blanket of snow over Yanai this morning when I woke up. In spite of the winter weather, I've had a really nice, fun weekend. Yesterday afternoon, I went with Ellen to search for the Hooded Crane, up in the mountains of Kumage. We spotted a small group of the cranes, but unfortunately they were too far away to get a cool picture of 'cranes in snow'. It was still fun to have a nice drive through the snowy countryside, and I decided to pose next to the 'display crane' in the absence of a photo of the actual cranes in the fields.



After our crane hunt, we headed for the wonderful San Zoku for a fabulous late lunch. 2 sanzoku chickens, 1 gyoza, and 1 rice later (that was just mine!) we set off back to mine. Oh...we did have time to pose in the Christmas displays though! San Zoku was looking at it festive tackiest yesterday!!! It was great!


In the evening I went round to Kat's for drinks with her, Hannah and Keith. It was great to properly catch up with them, chat about all of our upcoming trips (Keith and Hannah to Australia, Kat to England, me to Thailand), and gossip about anyone and anything. This photo was taken during the time that were trying to down a shot of lumpy Baileys!!


We had some drinks and yummy taco rice at Gotcha later, and then did a spot of christmas karaoke, at the newly re-opened Sound Street.....its well nice! By the time we walked across to Sound Street, the snow was starting to fall, and a very drunken Lee started the first small-scale snowball attack (which later led to him having a bleeding lip...not quite sure what happened there!). I didn't stay too long at karaoke, but just long enough to belt out some Christmas classics (Bandaid, Mariah, John Lennon etc). To my dismay there was a 2 -3 hour wait for a taxi when I was ready to leave, and so I braved the icy streets, and carefully walked home.


I am now sitting under my kotatsu, keeping warm, and watching TV. I should be cleaning, and getting stuff ready for Thailand, but hey...it's sunday.....it's supposed to be a lazy day!!