Did you know, some ward offices offer resources to get companies up to speed on earthquake preparedness? No vacuum-sealed meals or astro blankets for office workers, but the ward that my office is in will donate supplies for securing big and potentially dangerous furniture like bookcases, and coating for windows that aren’t shatter-resistant. I always hear a lot of nervousness from my relatives overseas about earthquake-prone Japan, but the fact is, with some disaster likely to happen in any part of the world, I feel safe being in the most earthquake-prepared city in the world. Now, to get those bookcases hooked to the wall…

Beautiful KOBE night scenery at the bay.

Just like a little Yokohama. Very cute and pretty.

Why, cause that KOBE tower is actually very small, that is why it  is cute.

A night scenery from WAY UP the mountain …

After driving for 1 hour those super curved tiny roads, almost passed out.

But it was worthy, cause look, this beautiful scene.

But suuuuuuuper cold, sure one can imagine.

This is フカヒレ soup、from Yokohama!

Tastes soooooooo good ><

And it is only ￥１５００、makes us wonder if this is a real one.

And honestly, I am really not looking forward to a real one,

cause it means a shark loses his/her fin …

The reason why I like it cause the soup ……. geez, the soup …….

Will they start consider serving this type of soup with 春雨？

LOVE thick soup.

The surprised countdown was in Yokohama, super amazing.

Feeling the firework soooo close.

Then the next day, it is our trip to KOBE. ^^

My very first real 新幹線 旅行。

SO fast, 2014.

My New Year was awesome.

But again, never knows what is going to happen …

… till the day you leave this world, then one can conclude.

I pray that we all be healthy and well.

Both physically and mentally and financially.

順番は、just like the above sentence.

I’ve decided there is nothing more stressful than trying to communicate – or do just about anything, really – in a language that I’m not fluent in. On the plus side, now when I run into any challenge in my native language, no matter what it is, it seems so much easier.

As proves true every winter, we humans are sometimes just big bags of germs, and when you put a bunch of bags of germs in crowded trains, I eventually wake up with a cold. I’m a huge baby about being sick, but in a foreign country where my purchasing cold medicine relies as much on looking at pictures as it does on reading, I’m even worse. Still, I’ve put on a brave face for work – and I think it’s paid off? At least, I’ll take my coworker coming over and dropping a fistful of cough drops on my desk as a good sign. I’m not sure how else to take it.

I sometimes watch my friend’s cat while she’s away. I was never a cat person before, but her cat has warmed up to me, and most of the time I think he’s pretty sweet. Sometimes, though, I look at him when he’s at his scratching post, or yawning with his giant pointy teeth, and he starts to look a lot more like a tiny, adorable lion. It makes it a lot less adorable when a rattling noise wakes me up in the middle of the night, and I see him staring at me from the dresser. Please don’t try to hunt me, cat.

Some people are awful, and some of those people find it even easier to be awful on the internet. You know the type. And even if we know that awful people and whatever they have to say aren’t important to us, it’s hard not to be bothered. That’s why I really appreciate kind words from people who do matter, and I try to give other people kind words, too. They seem so little, but between other people being awful, or silence, they can mean a lot.

There’s something about beans and luck. In Japan, I went to an osechi cooking class, where our teacher explained the involved process for cooking black soy beans, and how, among the many osechi dishes, black beans were supposed to bring luck in the New Year. At home in the U.S., I grew up eating black eyed peas as part of dinner on New Year’s Eve. They, too, were supposed to be lucky. This New Year’s, I covered my bases and just and just had some of both. If two groups of people on opposite ends of the planet thought there was something important about beans, I might as well give it a try.