I hope you are all well, and that you had a good new year's celebration. Since I last wrote, I have: a) gone to a dinner party, b) ran out of kerosene (the day after it snowed) and gone to replace it, c) gone drinking and clubbing on New Year's Eve, d) looked at but not entered the Shinto shrines as they celebrate the New Year, e) been jogging and/or bike riding every day, and f) practiced my Japanese a lot at home.

The dinner party was the result of my second visit to Kaya, when Kei and Yukiko invited me to their place on the 29th. New Year's holidays began for everyone that day. We figured out with Google Maps that I lived about three minutes from their place. So I went over the next day. I was early, the first one to arrive, and Yukiko wouldn't let me help her. She had cooked up a storm that day; I was overwhelmed. Yukiko and Kei both work at libraries in Matsue, Kei at the Library for the blind and Yukiko at (I think) the main library near the castle. Yukiko's English is excellent; she studied sculpture in London, and has a thick english accent. Kei is the quieter of the two. Their apartment is very cool, with kind of a sixties mod-ish feel, a wall of music and books in the living room and a low table surrounded by cushions. The kitchen was bigger than most, and they had a small convection oven. Then Stephen arrived, bottle of wine in hand. He is a blue-eyed, wiry and weathered Australian in his sixties who came here ten years ago to teach English and quit his job, but stayed to teach on his own. He has a house here full of Japanese kimonos and artifacts, with apparently a fabulous garden. He was full of stories about living here, and said even after ten years the city still surprises him. Then I met Reiko, Sato, Junko, Aki and Takeshi. Reiko teaches Japanese here in the city. Junko is my close neighbour, and Aki is her boyfriend; he's a DJ at a place called Hydro Reaction. It was a good night. I practiced my Japanese, they practiced their English and occasionally Stephen would translate. Food kept coming out of the kitchen: bread and dips like hummus and guacamole, a cheese and cauliflower dish, chicken drumsticks in a sticky sauce, fish and potatoes, roasted potatoes and more! Kei and Yukiko were great hosts; Kei even tidied and did dishes; very unusual behaviour in Japanese men, I'm told. They were married in July, in a traditional Shinto ceremony; it sounded beautiful.

On New Year's Eve, I went to Kaya and met Yumi and Yoshi, whom I hadn't met before. I chatted with Seiji, and had a bowl of soba noodles. Soba is a traditional New Year's meal, and is supposed to symbolize longevity. (There are a lot of New Year symbols; I saw doorways hung with wreaths made of rope, from which hung tassels of straw, ferns and oranges. They symbolize luck and abundance - literally, a good harvest - for the coming year. I also saw at the bank, where they would normally display a beaming plastic Santa, a grinning red dragon with gold horns and wisps of white hair, draped in green cloth. Dragons are also good luck. I went looking for dragons on New Year's Day, as the dragon dance is still traditional, but failed to find any...) Anyway, back to New Year's Eve. I met Keith, another weathered, wiry guy in his fifties or sixties, but this time an Englishman, and apparently fairly drunk. He is in charge of the English gardens at the Tiffany Museum. He has reminded me I have to go there, although I'm prepared to wait until the gardens begin to bloom again. He also told me more about the drum festival in November that I read about, which is unique in Japan. Basically the streets are full of taicho drumming, and most of the city turns out for it. Hard to miss.

Seiji closed up at 11:30 and we headed to a club called Naked Space, which is by far the DARKEST dance club I have ever been in. The foyer, where the bar is, is brighter but very smoky. Although the streets had been dead quiet before midnight, the place started to fill up in the wee hours of the New Year. They had a huge half-barrel of free sake, to be drunk from traditional square cups. Two hours later, a very drunk Seiji was trying to pick it up to drain the last drops. I danced a lot ( although the music was mostly uninspiring), and drank a fair amount, and overall had a very good time. By the way, it's the Year of the Boar now.

I've enjoyed my explorations of the city, by foot and by bike. It's bigger than I thought. When I get more proficient at biking, I'll head south early on a day off to find the prehistoric buildings and tumuli on the edge of the city. I'm feeling very healthy as I make my way around. Yesterday I parked my bike by Lake Shinji and went for a gentle jog on the boardwalk, a strip of sandy yellow earth following the lakeshore. It was beautiful weather, and other people were walking, children were out playing and a couple of men were trying their luck fishing. I found a statue of "Mimi-nashi-Hoichi", or Hoichi the Earless, whom I was delighted to recognize from the book of Lafcadio Hearn's stories my stepfather sent me. The story is of a talented, blind bard who is called by the spirits of the dead to sing for them. When the local Buddhist priest finds out, knowing that the call of the dead is fatal to the called, he paints charms all over Hoichi's body to make him invisible to the spirits...BUT he misses his ears. So when the ghostly samurai is sent to fetch Hoichi, he finds only his ears, which he rips off to take to his lord. The statue shows Hoichi, bald and earless, but blissfully rapt in his music with his sightless eyes closed, playing the samisen. Someone had put a bowl of water and a cup which might have held sake in front of the statue. There is another statue in the park, the bust of a geisha who saved the town from invasion centuries ago. There are other statues, but I don't know who they are.

I felt I should describe to you the building I am in when I write from the Shimane International Centre. The Kunibiki Messe has been my common landmark for steering by on my early excursions in the city. There is nothing in the city quite like it. I think "messe" means somthing like "convention centre" or "gathering place", and it does have a large convention hall attached. The building itself could have been used as a set for Star Wars. It is a series of large geometric shapes, the largest (the part I'm in) looking something like a massive, brooding CPU with a glass centre full of yet more geometric shapes. Everybody knows where the Kunibiki Messe is, although opinion might be divided on whether it is beautiful or not.