おせち料理

Monday night I went to a friend's house to have Osechi-ryouri. Osechi-ryouri is like traditional Japanese New Year's foods. When I was invited I didn't think it would be anything big but her family pulled out the best dishes and everything for us. I'll post pictures when I get them emailed to me. It was quite the experience. First we had some sort of warm sweet liqour thing to start off the meal. Then the opened the boxes. (To see a picture of what it sort of looked like go here.) Inside were all sorts of interesting Japanese foods. A lot of the food served is for the reason of having a good year. For example you are supposed to eat black beans because the word bean "mame" sounds like the word for hard work "majime". Yes, Japanese have horrible puns as well. The one that gets the most groans is the kelp. Kelp in Japanese is "konbu", and happiness in Japanese is "yorokobu". So the awful pun here is "Yorokonbu". There were red and white egg sort of thingies that you eat for good luck because of the red and white colours. And of course all sorts of little fishes. The mother kept on bringing out more and more food as we were eating. The father kept on pouring more and more drinks. He had bought some sort of nihon-shu (saké) especially for New Years that had little gold flakes in it. (Sort of like goldschlagger). He was a funny guy, he had traveled to the US when he was 20 or so and had all sorts of questions for me.

After the dinner we began to play some Japanese card games. And I taught them how to play Texas Hold'em since the father was interested in what kind of poker is popular in America. After everything they gave us each a bag of oranges and various おみやげ (omiyage-souvenir/present). Nice people.

I was going to go to see the emperor's address to the people earlier that day but I of course didn't wake up to my alarm. That's the 2nd chance I missed to see the palace from the inside. 2nd and last. Oh well. Maybe I'll end up in Japan again on December 23rd or January 2nd.