My friend Kenta (the guy who played the live gig I went to see in late December) very kindly invited me to his house on New Year's Day to have lunch with his entire family. It was a pretty amazing day, as there were 4 generations worth of people at the table :) We had delicious osechiryouri and plenty of beer, and afterwards played some crazy card games before taking a nap in the afternoon and then finishing off the day with crab nabe for an early dinner. I was really grateful to him for inviting me along as it was shaping up to be a very lonely new year before he invited me over! And to be honest, I was pretty surprised that I had been invited as New Year in Japan seems to be a pretty serious family time. I would never have expected to be invited to lunch on New Year's Day :)

The next big thing after that was snowboarding with my friends Aimee and Goran in Nagano. It was a wonderful trip, as we went to a lovely little ski resort called Tsugaike Kogen. It wasn't too crowded, too, as we had used nenkyuu and were there on a Monday and Tuesday. I also went snowboarding the next weekend as well with my friend Minori, but it wasn't so good. We booked late so we couldn't stay anywhere, and the night bus - snowboard - night bus combination was exhausting. Still, it was lovely to catch up with her as I hadn't seen her for a long time.

The middle of January was taken up with the JET Mid Year Conference, at which I was a helper. It was quite enjoyable, despite the inevitable complainers, and being a helper and facilitating the various sessions was useful experience and kept my public speaking skills up. After the conference I finally got around to properly hanging out with the new ALT in Ako, Louise, and her boyfriend Skye. Only 5 months late, hehe. I went to dinner at their place and we had a great time catching up. It was lovely to hang out with some people who, coming from Perth, had similar backgrounds to me, and were also really cheerful :)

Following on from that, the famous Nick John came back to Ako for a visit with his wife Kanako. I caught up with him quite a few times, the first being at one of Okada-san's wine parties. It was a fun night, tasting wine and kicking back with Nick and a bunch of great Ako people. I also met one of the Ako librarians and the manager of Paone, my favourite supermarket - so great success! Aside from that, it was a bunch of random things again - frisbee started up again in Himeji and I saw my friend Yuko for the first time in ages and I went up to Toyooka to hang out with my friend Gareth and watch yukigassen (sports style snowball fighting that is like paintball). So all in all, a pretty good month! I met a lot of new people and finally, finally began to make some Japanese friends around Ako :D