Happy New Year!

Happy New Year and Best Wishes for 2008! We hope you all had an excellent holiday season!

As most of you know by now, Scott and I decided to come back to Canada to celebrate the holidays and what a time we had surprising our families! We booked our plane tickets way back in November and had a hard time keeping our arrangements a secret from our relatives. When we departed for Osaka back in September, we were unsure when we would see our families and friends again, so it was a nice treat to come home and see everyone (minus the good old Canadian winters we somehow don't seem to miss).

Believe it or not, being on a crammed plane and listening to babies shriek for 16 hours had its advantages. What, you might ask? Well, as we stepped off the plane, we were welcomed back to Osaka with lovely 12-degree weather—no snow, no ice!

Unfortunately, our first day of work was January 5, about 30 hours after we arrived back in Osaka—and naturally, it was a rough day for both of us. Since then, our circadian rhythms are slowly becoming accustomed to the time change again (a whole 14 hours) although we have been up a few times during the wee hours of the morning. My theory to battle the jet lag on the flight back to Osaka was to stay awake the entire flight—and I somehow did it (I'll give the crying babies credit for that one). Although we've been snoozing off around 9pm for the past few nights, we've been having more uninterrupted sleeps. I feel like I'm finally back into the Japan swing of things again.

Before we left, Scott downloaded a program on the computer that allows you to play N64 games, so to combat the jet lag the day after we arrived, we played N64 pretty much the whole day! Mario Party, Mario Kart, Zelda—you name it, we played it! Scott even bought some USB converters so we could play the games with controllers from the computer. On Friday, we went into Den-Den Town (electronics capital of Osaka) and purchased some used N64 controllers from that same store with the mysterious QTip (yep, I checked and it was still in the same spot). We also went out for some lunch at an Indian restaurant nearby.

We're thrilled for our upcoming trip to Tokyo this weekend. Tatsu, Kuni's friend who came out with us for drinks, helped us purchase bus tickets for an overnight trip to Tokyo. It's only 4800 yen and is a great alternative to the shinkansen (bullet train), which costs about 15000 yen (approximately $150). We decided to take the bus into Shinjuku station—the hub train station in Tokyo—and then take the bullet train back to save some money for our trip to Thailand in February. We'll be leaving here on January 12 and coming back on January 15. Three days doesn't seem like a lot of time to fit in all the sights and sounds of Tokyo, but we're going to try our best. We've already been trying to plan what to do with Laura and Colin’s help (they went there to visit a friend over the holidays).

Thailand here we come! After some debate about going to Phuket or Bangkok, we booked our tickets to Bangkok this morning on a whim. No hotel or plans yet, but we're hoping something more concrete will unravel once we arrive. We've heard from several teachers that it's not only a beautiful place to visit, but also really cheap. Apparently, it's not hard to find an inexpensive accommodation for the night. Because we won't be able to visit Phuket (since it's too far from Bangkok and won't make good use of our time), we're planning to go to a picturesque white sand beach on a small island called Ko Chang. Although the island is small, it has gained popularity in recent years and is becoming a booming tourist spot. We'll probably head to the beach (which is about 300 km from Bangkok) after exploring the capital's rich culture for two days. Personally, I'm excited to eat some real Pad Thai!

Over the holidays, Scott and I decided that we'll be coming back to Canada after our current contract ends (on March 31, 2008). We plan on doing some more travelling around Asia and possibly Australia before heading back North to get a real job/go back to school!

We hope you're keeping well and it was so great to see some of you over the holidays. We miss you already, but will see you all in four or five short months!

xo

Jo & Scott