Christmas in Yamagata

Hi friend! Hope you're well. Today let's recap Christmas. ♥

December was a pretty rough month. The weather dipped dramatically and became unbearably cold. And only got worse. It's mid-March and the weather has just started to turn. School was busy, so the month flew by, but I didn't do a tremendous amount of fun things even though it was the festive season... which made me even more painfully aware that Christmas was fast approaching, and it was probably going to be a depressing time. Naturally, homesickness was stronger in December. Christmas is my favourite time of year, so I missed my family a lot, and was feeling pretty miserable about the prospect of spending it without them. Fortunately, Christmas turned out to be quite delightful.

I applied to take nenkyu (paid leave) from December 23rd. Christmas Day is not a public holiday in Japan, so many ALTs were hit with the knowledge that they would be expected to work on the 25th. I decided I was definitely not going to be doing that. Instead, I jumped on an overnight bus to Tokyo and switched there to a day bus that took me up to Yamagata Prefecture, the current home of Meg, my best gal pal from Melbourne, so we could celebrate our first White Christmas together. Yamagata is a few hours north of Tokyo, in a part of Japan where it is a considerable number of degrees colder and it absolutely dumps snow in winter.

Credit to wherever I stole this picture from.

After 17 hours of buses, I arrived in Yamagata City and was met by Megs and her friend, a Canadian ALT from her apartment complex. We always refer to him by his surname, Lacusta (lah-cuss-tah), which he will be called henceforth because I don't think I've ever called him by his first name and starting now would be weird. We all clambered into Megs' lavender tissue box car and made the journey back through the windy wintry mountains to their small city, Nagai. It was the night before Christmas Eve, so we tucked in under her kotatsu (a small, low table with a heater underneath, and thick blankets attached to trap the warmth), watched bad Christmas rom-coms on Netflix ("A Christmas Prince" and "Christmas Inheritance", if you were interested) and played hilarious drinking games. It was easily one of my favourite nights of 2017.

The overnight buses have stroller-like hoods you can pull down over your face, so nobody around you can see your ugly, drool-y snore-y sleeping face. Ingenious.

The morning of Christmas Eve was snowy and sleepy. After a sleep in, we bundled up and headed for breakfast at Bagel Poco, one of Nagai's extremely Very Important Places. It's basically a very quaint free-standing cafe that exclusively serves bagels. What's remarkable is that they bake a bunch of different bagels (a pretty astonishing variety, actually) each morning, and that's all they sell for the day. Once they've sold out, they close up. And they sell out fast. The pressure's on to get there at opening time so you can snag your favourite flavours before they're all gone. It was a very exciting affair.

Even the decorations are made from bagel dough.

We lolled about at Bagel Poco for a while, then pottered around Nagai for a bit. This included a visit to a kendama speciality store, which was great fun. Kendama is an old fashioned Japanese game, very traditional, which you've probably seen before. It consists of a wooden cup or spike with a string attached, and a wooden ball at the end of the string. The aim of the game is to hold the wooden cup/spike, flick or swing the string and try to land the ball in the cup/on the spike. Turns out Nagai is extremely famous for kendama, and is responsible for about 80 percent of global kendama production. Megs had some to give as gifts to our friends preparing for our friends Frey (also a surname thing) and Renee who were about to arrive from Melbourne, and I was pretty keen to pick one up as a Yamagata souvenir; mine is pink with a cute cherry blossom pattern. There were two dudes (I don't use the term lightly) hanging out and working(?) there, and they were hilariously eager to give us a pro-skills kendama demonstration. It was intense and pretty amazing. Generally a good time all round.

Kendama, courtesy of Google images.

Drinkable grape jelly.

Afterward, Megs and I made the trip out to meet our friends at the shinkansen station in Akayu. As we waited at the station we perused the souvenirs for sale in a small station shop, where we found an entire section dedicated to the Nagai Flower Line (train line) mascot, Motchii. Motchii is a rabbit - a real rabbit, who lives in a hutch - who is the increasingly popular stationmaster (you read correctly) of Miyauchi Station in Nanyo City. Unfortunately we didn't have time to go out and visit him, but we did buy some cute merchandise from the Akayu Station store!

Motchii. ♥

Frey and Renee arrived shortly after that, and after much joyous reuniting, we loaded up Meg's car with their suitcases and made the trek back to Nagai. It was our friends' first visit to Japan, so we made a pit stop at nearby Kumano Shrine, so they could experience some traditional Japanese culture. It was dark and snowy and magical, and we bought some fortune papers (we all got pretty decent luck, from memory) and wandered around to the back of the shrine, where there's an incredibly elaborate centuries-old carving that supposedly contains three tiny rabbits carefully hidden amongst the intricate details. It's said that if you can find all three, you'll be blessed with good fortune, but if you tell anyone else about the location of the rabbits, your (and also the fortune of the person you leaked to) fortune is annulled. I'd love to know if anyone has ever found all three rabbits and told someone else!

Paper fortunes, drawn at random.

Omamori (good luck charms) are usually sold at shrines and temples throughout Japan.

We dropped Frey and Renee at their hotel so they could check in, then relaxed for a bit in Megs' apartment until we got hungry. It was tricky finding somewhere that was open for dinner, but we found an izakaya (Japanese pub) and settled in for drinks, sizzling self-barbecued meats and other delicious fried things (looking at you, fried Camembert). It was a delightful time. 

Fried Camembert should not be allowed to exist.

Christmas Day started out very slowly. Megs had to go into work for half a day, so the rest of us relaxed until lunch time, then Lacusta drove us all up to a cute town where one of Megs' schools is. We met her in the foyer and she gave us a guided tour of her school, complete with us giving an awkward impromptu performance of Jingle Bells in front of a classroom of students, then we divided up into two cars and headed for Siattaca Trattoria, a beautiful little Italian restaurant that serves delicious meals using only locally sourced seasonal ingredients. They had an enormous Christmas tree in the middle of the restaurant, and Megs bumped into a bunch of colleagues from her schools, which was all very small-town and lovely. Christmas lunch was home made pastas doused in cheese (I had a pumpkin gnocchi) and it was strange and wonderful. 

Looks so peaceful, but don't be deceived. It was hazardously windy up at this small shrine, and branches literally fell out of the trees and almost hit us. We bailed pretty quickly. Still a cute spot though!

In the afternoon, us girls and Frey pottered up to the hill overlooking Shirataka Town, where there's a great onsen (hot spring spa) facility built into the side of the mountain. It has huge glass windows, so you can relax in the steaming water and look out over the view of the town. They're gender separated, so Megs, Renee and I lounged around in the hot spring for a while, chatting and bathing and generally having a wonderfully relaxing time. Then we met up with Frey again after to loll about some more and test out the massage chairs. I tried a strange and decidedly unpleasant drink from the vending machine, called "Bikkle"... it tasted like... fruity, watery yoghurty badness. Bikkle was bleh.

Bikkle faces, ver. 1

Bikkle faces, ver. 2

Christmas Day dinner was celebrated at Megs and Lacusta's favourite local izakaya. I'd had success popping in on the way home and making a reservation, and we invited a Japanese friend of theirs, Mami, to join us. She's a sweet girl in her early twenties, who wants to improve her English by practising with foreigners. We all crowded around some low tables and had a merry old time with lots of drinks, speciality dishes, and questionably translated English-Japanese conversations. My poor brain tried to help Mami keep up, but my skills were severely lacking, unfortunately. But we had a lovely - if unusual - Christmas Day dinner, followed up with a few hours of karaoke - a quintessential when-in-Japan experience. ⭐

Boxing Day was a very sleepy affair. We dragged ourselves to breakfast at Bagel Poco, because it was necessary that Frey and Renee also have the Bagel Poco experience, and also we wanted more bagels. Then we bummed around Megs' apartment, watching "The Muppets Christmas Carol" and eating Christmas cake. It's a big tradition in Japan to eat a strawberry sponge cake with white nama cream (heavy, thick whipped cream) on Christmas Day. Frey, Renee and I had gone out for a stroll the previous afternoon to a nearby patisserie, where we'd enjoyed reindeer mousse cakes and picked out a Christmas cake. We'd even had the delightful experience of briefly encountering a tanuki (raccoon dog) as it bounded across the snowy road. We were very legitimately excited by this.

The snow hype was real.

Majestic tanuki (raccoon dog) - not my picture. Special thanks again to Google images.

... their faces accidentally got smushed and required not-so-delicate reconstruction. We tried.

Japanese-style Christmas cake!

There weren't many places open for dinner on Boxing Day, but we found a ramen restaurant a short drive away and plonked down to enjoy some enormous bowls of steaming noodles and broth. From memory it was predominantly miso style ramen (broth from fermented bean paste) at this place. I'm more of a tonkotsu (pork bone) broth kinda gal, so it wasn't really my cup of tea, but we had a nice time, and I am never one to pass up hot ramen on a snowy day. It's one of my absolute favourite Japanese foods. ♥

After dinner we went back to Megs' apartment to lounge around some more. I went for a walk to a nearby convenience store to pick something up (can't remember what now, but it was important), but it ended up being ironically inconvenient because I dropped my coin purse in the snow right near the driveway to the apartment complex and had to traipse all the way back in a panic, trying to find it. I did find it, luckily, so then I went back to the convenience store and back again -- long story short I was gone for ages. But I did find a really cute little shrine to take some nice snowy night photos of.

The next day was our last day in Yamagata, before leaving for Tokyo. We spent it doing the most quintessentially Christmas thing - watching "Die Hard". After lolling about all day (it became a bit of a theme), we packed up our things and headed for the shinkansen, picking up a few souvenirs at the station - like some delicious cherry flavoured sake (Japanese rice wine; incredibly famous). Yamagata Prefecture is famous for its cherries, so all their edible souvenirs are cherry flavoured. 

Anyway, after saying goodbye to snowy Yamagata, it was off to Tokyo for some New Year's adventures, which you can read all about in the next post! More to come soon. x