Happy New Year (also happy belated Christmas!)!

Wow… it’s been almost 2 weeks I’m here in Indonesia.

Dec 26, Mum’s birthday, we had a little house party where we had our North Carolinian neighbors (a.k.a. my parents’ tenants), where we cooked some Indonesian and Japanese foods and finished it off with some American and Swiss desert.

Dec 30-31 was the Eid Al-Adha. This is also known as the celebration for the end of Hajj pilgrimage.
For this celebration we went up to Subang, a city 1.5 hours drive away north of Bandung. We spent a glorious weekend with my paternal uncle’s family. My brother came to join us. This short trip was particularly special because it’s been some 10 years that we took a trip together as a family that didn’t involve seeing anyone off at an airport.
Food was great and super delicious at this visit. Normally for this celebration goat or lambs are the typical meat to be feasted. You know what - this is another topic to blog about. I’ll blog about it when I returned to Japan. My parents’ internet connection is dial-up, thus running a research on this can take a very long time and I just don’t have the patience to do it right now.

New Year’s Eve was never very monumental in our household. With the mad rush of visitors from the capital, my little hometown Bandung turned into a forest of cars and traffic jams. I was planning to meet up with some friends, but with the insane traffic situation, we called each other up and rescheduled to the following morning brunch instead.
So, as an alternative I figured that the wisest thing to do would be staying put at home with a bunch of DVDs to watch in a marathon manner.
I got Alias Season 4 and 5, so I was all set.

The 17-days holiday turned out to be as speedy as the year 2006 had been for me. Time flies so quickly. I am sad to think that I will have to say good bye yet again to my dearly beloved in a matter of days, but going home to Tokyo is a happy thought as well.

Ps: thanks for the visit, I’ll catch up with yours as soon as I return to good ole’ Tokyo.