New Years Holiday

 For us, the New Years celebration was nice and quiet.   

On the 31st David had work, I thought it was at the usual place which is about 10 minutes by bike.  Mikey said that he was taking David to work, I thought it was because the rain was very heavy.  Turns out that David was asked to go to a different branch in the next city.  David could have driven himself but he didn't have confidence to drive back after working all night.  He was asked to go to that branch because last year they were overwhelmed with customers.  This year, however, there were very few customers, a combination of the bad weather and the economy failing!!

New Years Day I did a lovely roast dinner.  I'm never inspired by traditional Japanese food, it looks nice but isn't filling and very expensive.  A good roast chicken with stuffing, roast and mashed potatoes, sausages wrapped in bacon, Yorkshire puds, and steamed veggies is a lot better and about half the price.

lovely lunch

Everybody helped to clean up in the morning.  I noticed that the lads had disappeared, I thought they were in their own rooms until I heard them laughing.  They were playing some card game!  It's nice to see them do that, with everybody being busy and having very different schedules they don't have time just to hang out together.

Lads playing a card game

The rest of the day we just hung out.  Christopher and Hannah walked to the local recycle book shop and got some more books.  I don't mind but I'm trying to downsize!!

Just after 4pm, our phones started to ping, breaking news from the news app.  I was shocked to see that such a large earthquake had occurred.  I know this is Japan and we do get a lot of earthquakes but most are small and aren't mentioned on the news but this was a 7.5 quake.  Plus the tsunami warning.  I feel so sorry for the people in the area affected by this.  New Years is such a big holiday, most families get together, spending two or three days.  It's a nice time to relax, enjoy good food, catch up with family and friends.  To have that shattered in such an awful way is so sad.  Also, the constant aftershocks do nothing for your nerves.  You spend every minute waiting for the next one.  The aftershocks could go on for a week or more.  Plus a lot of people had to evacuate their houses, some because of the tsunami warning, others because their houses had collapsed or were unsafe.  Not nice spending time in a school gym.  Plus it's very cold in that area.