Booberfish.com
New Years Day


Me and my host family on New Years morning. You can probably figure out for yourself what generation everybody belongs to.

The fancy breakfast, which was a lot like a dozen big obento boxes (for those of you who know what those are), and included whole fish (you can see them in that white bowl at the bottom right), sashimi, strange foreign (as in not Canadian) fruits and vegetables, rice, omochi (yummy rice pasty stuff), sweet black beans, and so on.

The biggest of the three main shrines in Nagasaki city, Suwa Jinja.

Me and Tomomi in front of the crowds of people walking up to the shrine.

A view of this part of the city from the top of the hill.

Up in front of the shrine is where everybody does a little "onegai shimasu". It's also where a TV reporter tried to interview me (a gaijin at a Japanese shrine on New Years!) but didn't get any good footage. How was I supposed to know that "onegai shimasu" can (sort of) mean "make a wish"?

One of the other shrines. I forget what this one was called, but we did the "onegai shimasu" thing here, too. By this time somebody had explained what "onegai shimasu" meant, so I knew what to do, but there were no TV reporters around this time to interview me!

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