Christmas Day!

Christmas Eve Dinner
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Spending Christmas in Tokyo was made a little easier by Pete’s arrival. The poor lad missed his original flight here due to a delay in Bucharest and when I realised the delay may mean he would miss out on our Christmas party, I made a mad dash to the airport to meet him and take him directly to the Tokyo Dome hotel where we were due to have dinner. As Christmas Day is a working day here – we decided to celebrate with a slap up all you can eat buffet on Christmas Eve. The food wasn’t bad but there was no turkey and no trimmings. Not even a Christmas cracker. To salvage some of the Christmas spirit we organised a secret santa whereby we each bought each of the other 5 trainees, two presents from the 100 Yen (50 pence shop). No expense spared! We also managed to make it to midnight mass at the local Catholic Church, although our hopes of belting out a few choruses of well known carols were thwarted by the Japanese/Yanks putting a different tune to all our favourites L Still, it was nice to be able to keep some Christmas traditions.

Karen & Cooper with their secret santa gifts...
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Fortunately, I had Christmas Day off work so had a nice lie in before opening my presents – thanks to those of you that sent cards and gifts, they were much appreciated. We then headed back to meet the other trainees at work for an extended Christmas Day lunch break at Breeze – a swanky restaurant at the top of a 36 storey tower. The food was excellent and washed down with some a glass of bubbly. We then strolled round Ginza for a bit before meeting the others after work in the pub and getting stuck into some Christmas karaoke to finish off the evening – when in Tokyo….

the food wasn’t bad but there was no turkey and no trimmings