Holiday Break - New Year's Eve

New Year's Day is a big deal in Japan. It's more like family time (kind of the opposite of the USA, huh?). It's so big that a lot of stores will go on holiday for sometimes 5 days after the actual day. It's not really boring, though, if you know what to look for...

On New Year's Eve, I headed to Shinjuku to meet up with some friends who were visiting Tokyo. They go to my home university, but they chose to study in Osaka and Hokkaido. They were doing a lot of sightseeing.

When I headed out in the afternoon, the station was eerily empty...

Our plan was to walk around Shinjuku for a bit (where I showed them my beloved little visual kei corner of the district) and go to Meiji Shrine for 初詣 (hatsumoude - first shrine visit of the New Year). We knew it was going to be crazy and crowded, but we wanted to go anyways.

Before that, though, we met with one of my friend's old friend's (sorry about not using names; I'm not sure if people want me to use them!). We found a nice soba place in Shibuya - it's traditional to eat soba around the New Year.

Soooooo delicious omg.

 Since Meiji Shrine is in Harajuku and we were already in Shibuya, we decided to walk there. It was around 9:30 or 10 by this time. There were a lot more people out and about now. The closer we got to the shrine, the livelier it got. They even had a line of street food vendors. I got お好み焼き (okonomiyaki - it's like a Japanese-style pizza, sort of) while my friends got some 甘酒 (amazake - a sweet sake that has hardly any alcohol in it; they even give to kids) on the way back.

We got to the main part of Meiji Shrine around 10:30PM. Honestly, I didn't know what was going on, exactly. I was just told that we were going to Meiji Shrine and something would happen at midnight...so we basically stood around in a crowd for half an hour or an hour in the cold. I finally couldn't handle the cold and asked if we could just go in really quickly and leave (you could go in any time before midnight, but people wanted to wait until midnight). The crowd was huge and there were SO many policemen around, so I knew that the process was going to take a lot longer than just waiting until midnight. So...my 初詣 ended up being unsuccessful, haha. I guess there's always next time!

When the clock struck midnight, I was waiting on the train platform in Shinjuku to go home, listening to my iPod alone. It wasn't such a bad way to ring in the New Year, though; after all, I was in Tokyo, exactly where I wanted to be!

On New Year's Day, I woke up to find that my roommate had left me some soup that is traditionally eaten at the New Year. It was so sweet of her! :D

I was really tired, so I ended up not doing much on New Year's Day besides making cupcakes...haha. My parents sent me a few boxes of cake mix for Christmas, so I needed to get rid of them somehow! :P

So, that was my New Year's holiday! The way I spent it wasn't the epitome of tradition, but it was fun.