Today is a national holiday in Japan – worker’s thanksgiving day. The idea behind the holiday is to thank everybody for working so hard, but according to many of my students they end up working anyway. Case in point – Kuniko had to work today doing club activities with her students.
This long weekend has been an eventful one. On Saturday I met Kuniko for lunch in Kobe at Alain Chapel, the upscale restaurant perched at the top of Portopia Hotel. Since Kuniko has some connections with the owner of the hotel so he had flowers waiting for us. The chef came out and introduced himself and gave some personal recommendations from the menu and promised to do a good job cooking our meal. Everything was delicious, and Kuniko and I spent a pleasant afternoon sipping champagne and sampling delicious French foods. My favorite dish ended up being dessert – a sweet Mont Blanc cake with a thinly fried purple sweet potato slice covering a portion of homemade sour cassis sherbert.
Afterwards Kuniko and I spent the day Christmas shopping in Sannomiya, and we got hungry enough to end up at our favorite yakiniku restaurant in Motomachi. It was a day full of eating and enjoying – just what we both needed and a nice way to celebrate our third anniversary.
Sunday we spent an hour or so with our architect and looked at the finalized plans for our new house. Everything is coming together well, and there were just a few areas where we caught some things that the architect had missed. At the end of the session we were very satisfied with the plan, and the next step is to talk more about the loan and then start digging.
Finally this morning I saw the preliminary results from grad school, and I passed my final class. The teacher in that class sure took his time getting the results posted, but it looks like I’m on target for graduation. The results are finalized in four days, and my diploma should be in the mail soon after that. It’ll be nice once everything is official, and here’s hoping it will help me land a better job come April.
That’s about it for now – this week I’m going to finish up at Kobe University, and after that I should have an evening-only schedule for a little while. The job search continues – more news as soon as I get it!
