Howdy folks!
Again, sorry for the delay. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and all that.
Things here have been pretty choice. Chie and I spent Christmas eve at home. Had a couple bottle of wine and watched Crocodile Dundee. On Christmas day we had some people round for dinner. Bit of potluck kind of deal with Caroline, Andy, Judy and our friend Joey from New Mexico. It was pretty chilled out and good times were had.

I had two and a half days at the Board of Education, complete with shredding. I took half a day off so that we could go to get our police certificates. It took ages and won't be sent to us for a little while, but it was good to get that scraped off the to-do list. In general though, we've just been working on visa stuff, preparing for going to NZ, watching movies, finished all of Outrageous Fortune and trying to get on with work. I've also been reading and studying. As we'll be coming back from New Zealand after the new term starts, we need to get all that prep stuff done before then.

We'll be flying out of Japan on the 3rd of January at 8:50 in the evening. Get to the Gold Cost at 6:55 in the morning, and then we'll be in Auckland at 2:50. We'll finally get into Wellington at 6:50, so it'll be a long ride. Should be pretty choice though.

As of late, we've also been hitting up onsens. We went to two yesterday, which were rad. One of them was in a fenced off area of a river. It was mighty cold getting out of it, so we went to another onsen afterwards.

This is the river one, called Kawayu. As it's a mixed, outside onsen, you can where togs. There were a couple of guys who weren't though.











The onsen were went to afterwards was called Wataze and was quite rad.



Other than that, we've been playing music with the band. Got the best part of 9 songs recorded for our CD. I think there's just three more to go, so it's good to see that progressing. Here's one of the songs:



Nothing else too exciting happening round here. We'll be doing New Years the Japanese way. Have heaps of food at Chie's family's house, go to a temple, stay up till 12, and then head off to another temple in the morning.

Anyways, that's that for me for now.
Hope all is well
Cheers
J