Happy Happy new year!

My first blog post of 2010! Yay for insignificance!

So 'happy new years!' in Japanese is akemasite omedetou gozaimasu. Just use the same vowel sounds as Spanish and you can get pretty close without knowing any other Japanese. I thought it would be handy to know this phrase in preparation for the new year, but, well, not really.

Japanese people do xmas and new years a little bit backwards, or should I say the total opposite from Americans. We get together with family, eat tons of good food (wish I could have some :/) and give out presents. Then on new years eve we party like it's 1969, 1999, or 2009 yay, and we see our friends and have fun.

Japanese people don't exactly party on xmas, but it's traditionally a time for couples to go out together, grab a drink and spend a good evening together. And new years is the family time.

So I actually didn't see any Japanese people on new years eve, and thus never even said the phrase so a Japanese person...fail.

But I did learn that happy new years is feliz anyo nueva in Spanish!! hooray! You may be wondering why am I spouting out Spanish in Japan, well it's because I went to a fiesta for new years! wee!!

By 5:00 on new years eve I still had no plans. Hadn't really figured anything out, and time was winding down. I made a couple of calls and one of my friends said that he was meeting up with an American buddy of his, and he invited me to come along. So we showed up at said friend's place around 8, and we hung out there for around an hour and a half, and then we set out for this party that he knew about.

We got to a little restaurant that had been rented out for the evening, and converted into a small party room. There were only a few people there, but they streamed in as it got closer to 11, and by 11:15 the tiny room was jam packed with people from all around the world. For the most part everyone at the party was Spanish speaking, or of European descent. People from Spain, Finland, Columbus, Poland, and Libya. If we were in Tokyo, or maybe Kyoto I would have not been so surprised, but it was really amazing to see so many people from different backgrounds in Sapporo Japan. Turns out the only Americans that were there were me and the 2 guys that had brought me.

12:00 rolls around and everyone was singing, laughing, and dancing the night around. I shared a couple versus of feliz navidad with a guy from Panama, that was pretty funny. A Brazilian (brazziolion, how much is that again) was lighting fireworks in the street from his hand....which was rather dangerous, but he was able to not blow his arm off. darn.

Overall it was a pretty fun night. I am not going to lie and say that I didn't miss any of my friends/family/everyone and everything in America, but it was nice to meet some new people from different corners of the world, and share the joy of ringing in the new year.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that the Buckeyes won? WOOHOO!! Finally we weren't beaten by some crap SEC hicks, or crappers from the PAC. I actually got to watch the 3rd quarter via skype and my dad pointing the camera at the tv. Believe it or not the picture was actually pretty good.

Finally, if someone were to ask me what I miss about America the most right now, I would honestly have to say food. Typical American yes I know, but the 5-10 meals that I have cooked for myself the last 3 odd months have begun to lose their taste a bit. I find myself thinking in my head "Gee brain what do you want to eat tonight? The same thing we eat every night pinky, eggs, bacon, and toast!"

However, cooking allows me time to sit back and think. And I've been thinking a lot about how much homework I have. I have 4 final papers, 4 final presentations, and 4 finals. That's really not so bad, but this last week has been absolute murder. Never before in my existence have I had to do work at this time of year. Normally in between xmas and new years, I vegetate like a mushroom, or go skiing, or do anything...besides homework. So it's been really tough to motivate myself recently, but I found out why!!

Yes...I have finally found the answer. People of non-Asian descent are genetically lazier than people of Asian descent. You see, some odd 3-4 thousand years ago (maybe a little more recent I have no idea...) a couple of guys were sitting around a campfire looking at pictures they drew. A couple of the guys had created this cool new system where if you put pictures of stuff together, it means things! Like let's draw a cliff, with a rock in front of it, and that will be the picture for rock! SWEEETTTT!!

Some of the other guys at the campfire weren't so impressed though, they were too busy checking themselves out in the mirror or something, so they didn't really pay attention. When the other guys tried to teach them the language of writing, they said 'screw this' and they decided to use symbols that represented sounds, not ideas, to write with. So today, we have 26 letters, and the Japanese language has....5k Kanji...including this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biang_biang_noodles

That kanji has 57 strokes, and you have to do all that work just to write NOODLE....


And therefore, we have found my ancestry, and why I am lazy...sometimes.