Birthday Weekend!

This Friday is both Valentine's Day and my birthday! I'm very excited to be spending both of these in Japan!

In Japan, girls make chocolates and give them to the boys they like on Valentine's Day. Because of this tradition, all of the 百円 shops (hyaku en, dollar stores) have giant bars of chocolates, mix ins, molds, and cute wrappers. My friend Leah and I went on a shopping spree (as much of a shopping spree as you can have in a dollar store, anyway) and bought a bunch of chocolates. Although I don't have anyone here to make chocolates for, we though it would be fun to make them all the same! We got cute wrappers with hedgehogs on them and are going to try to make both caramel crunch drop chocolates and truffles flavored in almond, cocoa, and strawberry. Hopefully all goes well and I'll have some delicious looking chocolates to show you next week!

Leah's birthday is the day after mine, so we are celebrating together. On my birthday we are going to meet after school and have a nice dinner out. Then head to Lush, do a little shopping, and start making chocolate! On her birthday, Saturday, we'll finish making chocolate and have an at-home spa day with the things we got from Lush the day before. We'll paint each other's nails, put on face masks, and generally lie around the house and have a good time. We also have reservations at a restaurant called 牛さくら (gyusakura). It's one of my favorite restaurants in the city and serves 焼肉 (yakiniku, grilled meat). The tables all have little grills in them, so you pick your meats and vegetables and grill everything at you table. It's a lot of fun and the food is always amazing! We have some of our other ALT friends coming as well as a few new friends. We'll spend the night out and have a good time! We also want to give everyone some of the chocolate we make as little goody bags!

Another thing that will happen on Saturday is that I will get to pick up my new fish! I've been preparing the tank for a while now and will soon have some cute green spotted puffer fish as pets! I'm very excited! They are small, but very cute. Hopefully I will have some pictures of them as well next week. The next weekend I'm off to Korea for a wedding and I'm super excited for these two upcoming weekends!