reasons Saturday rocked

1. Starting the day with Japanese toddlers amped up on Christmas cookies.

Japanese elementary school kids and kindergarteners are already notoriously cute, so preschoolers are pretty much unbearable. My friend was enlisted by a preschool downtown to play a real, foreign Santa for the kids, while me and another disappointingly Asian girl acted as his jolly helpers. After watching a show put on by all the toddlers (with a little help from the talented staff), we went from class to class handing out presents.

Some of the kids were definitely young enough to believe that my friend was Santa, just flown in from the North Pole, so it was pretty wonderful.

2. Parting gifts.

The preschool staff sent us on our way with a huge pile of gifts and snacks and a yummy lunch bento.

3. Coffee, on Santa.

My friend Santa treated me to coffee and dessert, so now you know -- that is exactly how nice I've been this year! Catching up with Santa and having some stimulating conversation was also nice.

4. Finishing Let's Go Jungle.

I met up with Greg, and then with our powers combined, we defeated this brilliant arcade game that I've been dying to beat for ages. It gives you compatibility statistics afterward, and uh, I can say that at least we passed the 50% mark. That aside, I placed 12th in the game records with my score!

5. Winning ホワイトさん

I had been eyeing this machine prize for a week. Tried to win it once and failed, but this time victory was mine for only 300 yen!! Now I have a matched set of capybaras taking up precious real estate in my room -- they are dubbed Nibbles and Wiggles. Nibbles (the brown) is quite a bit bigger (and lacks the little Xmas hat), but it's okay because he likes his ladies petite.

From here on, I am determined to become a prize machine master.

6. Free dessert

We went to a chic little yuba/tofu restaurant for dinner. They always have issues trying to understand our order, and this time, par the course, we got something slightly different from what we had expected. It was still good, though, and they brought us a free dessert at the end. It also didn't hurt that they had Kiki's Delivery Service playing on a huge LCD screen above us.

7. Slumber

There is nothing like the deep, delicious sleep you have after a long and exciting day...and the best part was not having to squeeze in a blog post first!