Kumamoto: toshikoshi

Here I spent the new year with the my first host family. The new year tradition in Japan goes like this: eat soba, visit the shrine, pray for a good year, buy a lucky charm, head back home and sleep. All this takes place in the course of 31st Dec -1st Jan.

For dinner, we basically slurped down two bowls of soba. We, after a long day, were lazy and opted for instant dashi as base for the soba. Nice and simple.

We just made it to the entrance of the shrine at 12am, but oh how crowded it was!

Stuck in the crowd trying to get to the end point to throw in any coin with a hole (5 or 50 yen coin), into this wooden box and pray. I swear this process just takes 1 minute. And we were stuck in the crowd for over 40 minutes.

After praying, we headed to this side to buy our lucky charms. Mama chose it but my host grandpa bought me a lucky charm for travelling (as I will be travelling to Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong before uni starts again for me! ).

What I really looked forward to was the pathway to the shrine filled with food stalls buzzing with a festival-ish atmosphere. We had taiyaki (custard/chocolate/anko etc filled pancake-like hot things), okonomiyaki on a stick, toffee strawberry and fairy floss!

In the process of making okonomiyaki on a stick.

Cute! Toffee (strawberry).



The night spent wonderfully with Mama (middle) and Miyu (right). We've become closer than ever before :).

Happy new year!