Mark Your Calendars

It’s official now. The plane tickets have been reserved. I will be coming home for Winter Break.

The big problem, and this comes up every year, is that in Japan Christmas isn’t a recognized holiday, so Winter Break is always tilted towards New Years Day instead.

Last year the last day of school was on Christmas Eve, and I spent Christmas day on the airplane. This year, the last day of school is December 26th.

As I’ve written before, I get very generous vacations with my new job. As opposed to the usual Japanese custom of coming into the office every day even when school is not in session (which most ALTs have to do), I am given the summer, spring, and winter holidays completely off. The trade off though is that I don’t have any flexibility, and I am not supposed to ask for any days off in addition to the scheduled vacations.

In this case, I was severely tempted to try and weasel a couple more days off, but, after consultation with the parents, I discovered that it is much cheaper to fly a couple days after Christmas than it is to fly a couple days before Christmas.

Anyway, to get to the point: I will be home from December 27 till January 8th. My family excepted, for most of you this will probably be better anyway because I know you’ll all be occupied during Christmas, but (hopefully) free to hang out after.

It is a short break I know. Not even a full two weeks. But come March, I’ll be coming home to stay, so you’ll see plenty of me then.

The fab Shoko will be accompanying me for most of Winter Break. She’ll be returning to Japan a few days ahead of me on January 4th, but otherwise she’ll be around for most of the time.
Rest assured I will be reminding you again as the date approaches, but mark your calendars and start planning now.

Link of the Day
From Media Mouse-the top 25 censored news stories of the year. If you only read one of my links, read this one. (oh, and read the Schrier one as well).