Japanese New Year

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It is a bit late, but I want to use the chance to indroduce Japanese New Year!

Japanese new year is great! If you love eating, you'll also love new year.

The reason why: new year means generally eating all day long - an that for three days in a row.

I had the great opportunity to spent new year at the house of a friend in Kyoto. The familiy there is very old and very traditional, what gave me the chance to have a very traditional new year.

But let's start at the evening before.

At the night of the 31th I went to another firends house to have a countdown-party.

Celebrating the night before new year is actually still new in Japan and not very common, but my we collected a few people who have been to europe for an exchange semester/year and knew this tradion. We mixed Japanese and western elements. Made Takoyaki, had sparkling wine and ate soba - they say it is good to eat soba, because they are long and you will have a long life, if you eat them at the end of the year - well, let's see about that later.

Because there are no fireworks at japan at new year, we watched them on TV.

After that we decided to use the time and go to have the traditional first shrine visit - and "sekkaku dakara"(because it is something special) did we decide to go to one of kyotos most famous and mightiest shrines - the yasaka-jinja at the heart of Kyoto, Gion.

It was a nightmare. There were hundreds and hundreds of people who had had the same thought and the police dived the masses into giantic waves and let them in wave by wave. It took ages to enter the grounds and we couldn't hardly move. But somehow we got through.

Also did we recognize some strange behaviour in the people around us. Like at an festival, were there some stands where you can by foods and drinks and what astonished me was, that in front of every castella (small round cakes) there people where standing there in rows and waiting. Only castella, nothing else. Wonder why...

early in the morining me and two friends got home. We went to sleep instantly.

The next morning began early.

The night before, we had been told that it wasn't good to wish everyone a happy new year before we hadn't talked to the master of the house. So getting up in the moring was weird, cause we were to afraid to speak at all, afraid to say someting wrong and ruin our karma like for forever or so. true, beeing tired helped a lot, though.

The food was amaizing!!! Coming down the stairs it was waiting for us in tradtitional boxes.

A lot of food, and so pretty! Ate for maybe three hours. Cleaned up and prepared the kotatsu (a table with a blanket over it, becomes warm throgh electricity). Spent the whole day under the kotatsu eating mandarines and having sweets.

In short: Japanese New year is like heaven.

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