On the first day of the year, I joined my friend Komatsu to visit a shrine in Tokyo, so-called the first visit to shrine, Hatsumode (初詣).
The shrine we went, was Yasukuni Shrine (靖國神社) located near the center of Tokyo, close to the imperial palace.
We reached about 1pm where the crowd has gathered up, naturally.
So, both of us join in the crowd line up, moving towards the main shrine. Well although the queue was quite long, the line move forward pretty fast.
Needless to say, the shrine earn quite handsomely as I saw someone donated Mr Fukuzawa heh, the biggest value banknote in Japan.
Our late lunch was grilled chicken fillet. I get myself a grilled scallop as an extra. These goes very well with a serving of amazake (甘酒), warm Japanese sweet wine.
Actually during this time's new year holiday I didn't really went to many places, nor met with lots of friends, mainly is because I was busy completing assignments. A break from all the works is always welcoming. Since I didn't spent too much on outings, I decided to treat myself to eat something better, none other than sushi. :P
Winter is the season of crabs. Yummy~
Some of my friends back in Malaysia would know that I would brought back limited edition Starbucks Japan's tumblers on demand, and oh boy currently I've more than 10 of them with me now!
Normally I'd take a pic like this, post it up on Facebook and tag them asking if they're interested or not.
The most popular request would be this, black Valentines with red hearts. It may look rather plain for a Valentine's tumbler, but the trick is once you fill in hot drinks, the heart will "glow" on the tumbler, some sort of thermo-ink effect. Due to it's popularity, I only managed to get 2 of them. I've checked almost 10 other Starbucks outlets, and found none.
Last week a shocker happened. My ASUS laptop couldn't boot up. Probably the most fearsome problem among computer users. Normally in such circumstance, the culprit likely to be harddisk failure. But upon inspection, the harddisk is actually moving on, just that nothing shows up on the screen. The technician in the university suggested BIOS failure, which may result in totally memory wipe out.
Sent for repair at BicCamera Ikebukuro. Said to take up to a month's time to fix it, so hopefully I can get it back before I'm heading back to Malaysia in mid Feb.
Luckily, I got most of the important files backup on Dropbox, very useful when you have multiple devices accessing the files. Best of all, it's available for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and even BlackBerry!
The first snow of the year happened on 20th January. It was just a brief snow but managed to cover the field near the university in white. At the moment I'm typing this post, another round of snow just happened moments ago.
For this year's Chinese New Year, well, almost no celebration at all, except for the brief dinner we had with fellow Malaysian Students Association in Japan members. We had our general meeting and CNY dinner event at the same time this year.
So, yeah, that's all for this year's CNY lol.... How pity compared to the lush feast they had back home eh? But anyway, I don't feel sad at all. I take it as a reserved reward that I will be claiming it in later days, inclusive of incentives.
There goes, January update on this blog.
Final exam's season is hitting up the gear, come into early Feb and I should be able to end the semester for good. I sense that interesting things might be happening in early February. :)
'til then people.
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