February 9^th is my birthday.

This February 8^th was New Year’s Day on the old calendar, so my husband came home from Singapore and we had a good time.

For a New Year’s visit to a shrine, we went to Tsubaki Taisha shrine in Suzuka. It took for about an hour and a half by car. It is located on a mountain side, so the air was really cold and it was sleety a little. We took part in a formal prayer in front of the main building of the shrine.

It took an hour. Then we went to the shrine’s historical tearoom and drank Maccha and ate nice Japanese cake. The atmosphere was really quiet so we could really relax.

Outside the shrine, there is a very reasonable self-service restaurant. It is famous for boiled rice with chicken and soy sauce. It costs 540yen with soup and pickles.

The tea was free of charge and it was very tasty because Suzuka is famous for a lot of tea fields.

Then we went to see plum flowers near the shrine. The plum garden is new but there are more than 100 plum trees. There are also many weeping plum trees and many kinds of Christmas roses.

I had never seen such beautiful plum garden and so many kinds of Christmas roses.

All the trees are from Kyushu.

Around the 20^th will be the best time to see them this year.

Finally we went to Ochoboinari shrine. “ INARI” means fox.

Inari shrines are good for business, they say. So we bought an ornamental broom.

Such a broom brings lot of luck.

The day was the last day of my husband’s stay in Japan so we had a good-bye party and my birthday party together.

We ate sushi we rolled ourselves and fish roe egg custard. My daughter sent me a

famous dessert from Tokyo.

It was also tasty.

I was happy and wanted to say thank you to my family.