Happy New Year!
We may be a day or two late, but *Twinkle*, Pepe the Penguin and I have just finished printing out our New Year cards. Like a lot of younger people these days we don't usually send physical cards out, preferring email, Twitter and Facebook.
Still, the custom here is that if you DO receive a New Year card from someone you didn't send one to, you send them one in return, even if that does mean it arrives late.
Our homemade year-of-the-tiger-themed card has the traditional greetings: 「あけましておめでとう」(congratulations on the opening of the New Year!"), 「ことしもよろしく」(we hope for your favour again in the coming year) and our names. We've left a space for a personal message to the recipient in the middle - please imagine your name there :-)
I think Pepe, our pet penguin, looks pretty cute in a tiger hat.
It's been a very relaxing New Year for us. We've been with *Twinkle*s family just north of Tokyo. Eating, drinking, watching TV. It's also a good opportunity for us to *borrow* our nieces and nephew to get an idea of what it's like to have cute kids, which we plan to do in a couple of years :-)
Of course as soon as they start crying we just hand them back to their parents (tee hee).
Spending time here also gave me a chance to reflect on the past ten years since the millennium, and on New Year's Eve I wrote my ten year review (
tamegoeswild.com/words/2010/01/ten-years-of-life-in-2000-... )
My life has changed so much since 2000. I'm amazed by how it's turned out so well. Back then I was living with my first 'proper' girlfriend in a house that we'd bought on the south coast of England. Since then I've lived in Switzerland for a couple of years, 'discovered' Japan, came here to visit a few times, racked up 18,000 pounds of debt trying to fix a broken relationship with my first Japanese girlfriend, went bankrupt, did a 4 year course in Japanese Studies (including 1 year at Tokyo's Rikkyo University), met *Twinkle* in the UK, graduated, married *Twinkle*, returned to Japan, got a job, got out of that job just in time (as it's going down) and joined White Rabbit Press.
Of course there was a lot more to it than that, only a fraction of which I was able to fit into the 2000 word version linked to above.
How about you? What are the most important things that have happened in your life over the past ten years?
Anyway, Better get on. Need to address these New Year Cards.
All the best to everyone for 2010! Have a GREAT year!
...And remember , if you have a dream to come live in Japan (or anywhere else for that matter), the only thing stopping you is yourself!
Joseph
