Pete and Mari's Wedding

Took a day off yesterday, had to rest my aching head!

On Saturday Chris and Aki, Miyuki, Ritsy and I went to Peters wedding held at the local Grand Tiara (a place made exclusively for weddings). Look at these attractive people...

The event kicked off with a little wait where we could enjoy a spot of wine. Afterwards, the ceremony started right on time. Both Pete and Mari looked great...

The reception was held in the 'Rose room', any guess as to why it had that name?
There were a lot of good pictures from this day(So I threw together another video and uploaded it to Youtube Here) , but I can't really post them all, here is a good one with the bride and groom
Chris and I sang Shima Uta to rave reviews. The only hitch was that the MD we had was too quiet so they had to abort the song and fire up the karaoke machine- then they proceeded to pick the wrong song some old Japanese Enka song...
The initial party concluded with the happy couple coming down the steps, Mari sporting a new dress, unfortunately all my pictures are a little dark, sorry!
At that point the camera's battery ran out of power. After that we all went home and changed and came out for the nijikai (or second party) which was quite fun- especially with Peter's crazy surfing friend getting much delight in making me gulp back entire glasses of beer at one time ( a Japanese party tradition). We later found ourselves off to a sanjikai (third party) at an izakaya (I don't know it's name) and Chris and I caught the $50 (5000 yen) taxi ride home around 3:40. All in a very fun ceremony and a good time! My heart went out to Pete, Mari and their family as they woke up at 8 am to go and see Kyoto!

Anniversary Dinner

Some people think it is crazy, but Ritsy and I choose to celebrate our dating anniversary as well as our wedding anniversary. I would like to think it's because we want to celebrate the importance of that begining but I think it really is because we both like an excuse to celebrate (there was talk of celebrating the cat's birthdays).

We went to a place called Setsu Gekka. If you live in Hamamatsu it is on Hamakita Ohashi Dori next to the kyolindo, and it is expensive, but the food was so excellent, I recommend it as a great 'date' venue. We were celebrating 6 years together. You can choose between French cuisine or Japanese, we chose French.

There was five courses, every one of which was excellent. First there was a smoked salmon plate followed by foie gras. Next was a Carrot soup, here is a picture of us enjoying our soup.

Of course we enjoyed some wine with our dinner:

Next we had a small serving of Gold Eye Red Snapper (kinme) and that was followed by an impressive plate of lamb;
That was followed by some cake, which we managed to stuff in, but we were both quite full.

Tomorrow is the last day of freedom for me before getting back to work. I will do my best to make the best of the day but I would say the holiday was restful and fun.

Edit: for the tales of our end of year parties, Chris has blogged about our adventures here.