I’m nearly packed, and Today I’m off flying to Hokkaido until new years’ eve, then I have no idea what’s happening - whether I’ll stay in Sapporo for NYE (don’t have a place to stay though) or start heading back to the mainland and training/hitchhiking my way back to Nagano/Nagoya.

The last few nights have been fun
For dinner on Christmas Day we were planning to go to the British pub The Elephant’s Nest, but as no one had booked it, we ended up going to the Outback Steakhouse, where I had a 500g hunk of steak, a small pumpkin soup, vegies, two servings of coleslaw and a roll of bread. Afterwards came karaoke

Merry Christmas everyone! Today I start work at 10am at seto… 5 hours sleep last night - we were having some crazy fun last night - Steve’s mates are over - some fireworks at Tsurumai park - wii / 4 player mario kart fun - drinking

Nova wants me to make up my mind as soon as possible whether to extend my contract. I’m starting to think I possibly might (but I’ll definitely come back to Australia).

One of my photos in the Gaijin-eye photo competition has made it to the finals! Look out for it in the January Japanzine! (Japanzine’s a free magazine distributed all around Japan)

Plans around new years are starting to unfold. On Xmas eve I might having a Xmas dinner at the Elephants Nest (English pub). Xmas day I’ll be working all the way out at Seto. My last day at work in 2006 is the 27th when I finish at 9pm. From the 28th I’ll be meeting up with Mak in Hokkaido, then be back for New Year’s somewhere in Nagoya. On the second of Jan I’ll be heading with a few Nova instructors to Nagano for more snowboarding for a couple-a days. My first day of 2007 work starts on the 7th.

Got crackin and cleaned my room, bought and built a cabinet shelf thing to be more organised instead of having stuff over the floor.

We’ve been having massive fun with the Nintendo Wii I manage to buy on Saturday morning (all 400,000 in Japan were sold out by noon). On Saturday night we went out to the 10 Dollar bar to say farewell to Ange. I had two pints and ate the hottest pizza (russian roulette) and had to have ice cubes in my mouth for the next two hours.

Been watching the cricket - what a finish indeed!
I’m still trying to get a good online photo system working and having some success. The photo viewing system on the Wii is really awesome - pity the vcr is ntsc and not pal otherwise I’d record and send vhs tapes over of it…

We have xmas decorations up. No idea what I’m doing for Xmas yet or even before that. After new years I’ll hopefully be heading to Nagano for snowboarding…

Happy 60th Birthday Mum!