Happy Thanksgiving! It seems a little bit weird to be celebrating two American Thanksgiving inspired dinners as a Canadian in Tokyo, but it's also a Japanese holiday today, which makes it all a bit less American-centric. Today is Labour Thanksgiving Day here in Japan, giving everyone the day off on a Thursday, but forcing them back to work for one more day before the weekend tomorrow, which seems a little cruel!

We have a dinner planned at Bourbon Street tomorrow, but tonight, Peter and I went to Tommy and Marina's house for an absolutely delicious meal cooked by one of the other guests (isn't that just the kind of guy you want to invite over?!) There were about eight of us including Mibu, Nana and Spiros who were also at the Glitterball.... We were a pretty international bunch representing Japan, the USA, Australia, Greece, and Canada...

Also briefly in attendance was Tommy and Marina's adorable 16 month old daughter named Jadis, who charmed everyone toddling around the living room in a very cute dress, and being VERY interested in Peter's laptop... A child of the 2000s :)

Dinner was great - chicken cordon bleu, rice, salad, a 'turkett' (a turkey breast maybe?), stuffing, cranberry sauce, green beans, etc. For dessert we have fantastic homemade cream puffs with chocolate sauce, and then also a variety of these Macarons which were so good! The guy who makes them is very inventive with the flavours, and apparently comes up with new ones each year. Among the flavours we sampled today were a toffee/caramel, chocolate, lemon, peach, and a couple of mystery flavours...

We all got into some pretty varied discussions including getting parking tickets when you're actually sitting in the car (Oma got SO mad at me when I let that happen as a five year old at the TD bank!), bizarre food you can eat in Japan (sperm!? not sure which animal, and don't think I thought to ask!), Coen brother's Movies (like Raising Arizona, which I still have to see), and lots of random things that just came up, as does tend to happen! There were a couple of photos taken, so if I can track down one or two shots I'll edit them back into this post later on...

As for the rest of the day, we really didn't too very much - I slept off two 3 or 4am in a row bedtimes, getting up at 11, eating breakfast, and then going back to sleep until 1:30ish :o... Mostly just read and hung out until we got ready to go and left the house just before six.

Oh yea, as for last night, I have no photos, sorry! We all met up and went to an Irish bar in Roppongi, which was VERY Irish, right down to all the bartenders! and then decided that Lexington Queen wasn't on, so we headed to Vanilla (or here), which was PACKED! We quickly found/were found by the USC/UCLA guys hockey team which was over here on some kind of tour, it was a bit bizarre to find so many foreigners there all at once! I was totally lame and bailed early, at 2ish, but I hope everyone else had a fantastic time the rest of the night! Clubbing in Roppongi is an experience for sure!

Also got my first cab (on my own), which was way harder to flag down than you might think! Tons of the ones which were showing availability were driving right past us (and there were a lot of people like me having flagging down issues!) I finally walked to Roppongi Hills, just about a block away, because I figured I could get a cab at the Hyatt... There ended up being one close by and quite happy to take me to 'Yoyogi Uehara', which is kind of the general area around us. I'd originally planned to just go to the eki and walk from there, but then I decided I was lazy, and I'd try and get closer to home.

Which would be fine, If I knew any directions other than straight! So I managed to tell him to keep going straight, the first time he asked me, and then finally realised that at some point we'd either have to stop, or turn. So I asked him to turn left, hoping he might know that, but he was like 'lefto? Ok Righto" and moved into the right turn lane... I was like "Uhh left" and pointed to the left, but either I wanted him to turn somewhere he couldn't/ wouldn't go, or I didn't put enough R into my L, or something...Anyway, we ended up turning right, which was fine - There is a pretty close Lawson, and I just got him to stop there, giving me a convenient excuse to grab one of my favourite ever ice creams - its a flattish block of vanilla ice cream, with a wafer thin chocolate strip through the middle, covered in ice cream cone material. (I'm thinking material isn't quite the correct word for this situation, but anyway, you know what I mean!).

I really must start taking some Japanese lessons down at the ward office - several people have told me that they offer good free classes now, I'll need to get on that!

Anyway, those Turkey drugs are putting me to sleep, but more Thanksgiving dinner blogging, this time with a Cajun twist, tomorrow...

D