It’s midnight, which means that Thanksgiving has officially started. There is a national holiday here on the 23rd, so I will have a day off on Friday (yay!), but I don’t have any plans for tonight. I suppose I’ll try to get my coworkers to go out with me. But Thanksgiving exists here even less than Halloween does. In fact, it’s totally nonexistent. Big surprise, right?

Anyway, even though I have a lot to be thankful for — and I am — I will be missing turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and candied yams and green beans and cranberry sauce and gravy and funny foreign beers that my dad finds. Luckily the weather here is very much like Philly, and the mountain outside my window is turning beautiful shades! The cold weather is refreshing and the air is very clear. The sun rises and sets too early, but that’s ok — Fukui has one thing that Philly never will; thunderstorms in the winter! Apparently there was a huge one last week when I was in Tokyo, but there was another one today during work. My teachers called it “snow thunder,” because I guess our snow storms here are accompanied by humongous thunderstorms. And the thunder today was really big! So I’m really looking forward to winter now!

Parakeets kind of smell like chicken or turkey when they’re wet, so maybe I’ll give Pi-chan and Kiiro-chan a bath and then sniff them for my Thanksgiving meal…