We really thought we’d be traveling back to California for this Christmas, so it was a big disappointment when our tickets were cancelled due to the omicron covid variant. Having our tickets canceled just a week before the flight left us with few options but to wait and try again in 2022.
So with a sudden glut of free time – almost three weeks – we had to figure out what to do with ourselves. I grew a beard for the first time in 20-30 years. We visited USJ to buy some presents for Charlie and Maya. We even did a serious purge of our bookshelves and cleaned out some junk. But mostly, and as you might have expected, the holiday revolved around food.
We ate well! We drove to the coast to buy 3 kg of oysters from the source, had great sushi from a new local sushi shop delivered on Christmas. We cooked big steaks from Costco, Greek pan chicken, grilled king crab on Christmas and then ate snow crab nabe and zosui on New Year’s. We drank three great bottles of sparkling wine from the Franciacorta region of Italy. We stocked our freezer with homemade dumplings and (for the first time) homemade tamales.
The eating wasn’t only at home. We ate okonomiyaki and yakitori at local restaurants, beautiful kimpa at Wagaya in Nishi Eigashima (and then four kinds of homemade kimchi from a shop on the walk back), and a triple restaurant hop in Ekizo Sannomiya (Taiwanese, Western Chinese, and kinda-French),
In between I got hooked on a cute little shooting game called Enter the Gungeon, and even played a hunting game just to relax and walk around in the forest. We did some real walking almost every day, mostly at the beach and back and forth to the market to choose which vegetables looked good for dinner.
We also spent time talking to my family around Christmas, partying with the neighbors a week before Christmas, we visited Kuniko’s parents after New Years, and held an enchilada-centered new year party for Kuniko’s college friends (and their significant others).
Mostly we spent a lot of time with each other. Usually we don’t have much time together – there is not a lot of overlap time with our different schedules. This felt like a three week preview of retirement, even though it is still a long ways off. It felt comfortable being together and we didn’t drive each other crazy – we were happy to just cuddle up on the sofa and read, watch movies, or think about what we might want to cook next.
Now it is officially 2022 and we are starting up our work routines once again. We’ve got a while before our next long holiday, and it appears that omicron has started to take hold in Japan so our travel/dining options may be restricted soon. Thanks to a lot of practice, I think we’re getting pretty good at staying home.
