snow snow

This morning I woke up to snow covering everything, which was super exciting! After being told repeatedly that it rarely snows in Chiba and even if it does it usually happens in February, two snowfalls in January seems pretty lucky to me! Even though today was sunny and by the afternoon everything was gone, haha.

Anyway, a quick update on what I've been up to recently! Last weekend I went to Hakuba in Nagano Prefecture as part of the annual YETI ski trip with lots of fellow JETs, which was super super fun - more details here!

On Wednesday I went out for another after-work get-together with the ladies who work in the mayor's office (which includes my section), which was fun and tasty as usual! Then on Thursday I spent my first day of work at the economic planning section, which was basically just translating all day so it wasn't too different from normal, haha. They bought me lunch as a welcome gesture though, which was really nice of them!

Thursday night was my second kimono lesson, where we actually put on the kimonos entirely by ourselves (as opposed to the trial lesson where they basically did it for us). As expected, it's super complicated and remembering all the steps is definitely not easy, though apparently by the time the course ends I should be able to do it easily (let's hope).

The picture from the front looked super awkward, so here's a view from the back!

Then this weekend I spent Friday night and all of Saturday at the Chiba Film Festival, which I enjoyed a lot (you can read about it in more detail here!), and then Sunday at Disney Sea! I haven't been to an amusement park since I went to Tokyo Disneyland when I was abroad two years ago (also in the winter, as it happens), so this was super super fun!

It was a Sunday in January so it wasn't super crowded (still plenty of people though), but the fast passes for the newest ride, Toy Story Mania, ran out literally 20 minutes after they opened (before we had even gotten all the way in the park)! Also we kept checking the times for the standby line throughout the day and it never went below 120 minutes and at the most it was either 200 or 300 minutes (can't remember which exactly, haha). Which is long enough to watch an entire extended version of a Lord of the Rings movie, which is ridiculous! I wonder if it was worth it for everybody who waited. The longest we waited for anything was an hour for Tower of Terror, which was definitely the most fun ride all day (though my friend was pretty terrified). Anyway, it was a long but fun day, and maybe I'll be back again sometime (it is only 25 minutes away from me by train)! :D

We're the (unintentionally) matching red jackets in the back corner!