St. Patrick's Day!

AKA: I'm Just a Poor, Wayfarin' Irishwoman...

St. Patrick's day is pretty much unheard of in Japan. While there seems to be (according to the Japanese wikipedia page) some small celebration of it in Tokyo, there is little to none of it out in the inaka ("country-side") where I live.

Still, St. Patrick's Day is one of my favorite holidays, so I did what I could. I decorated my English board with a St. Patrick's Day theme, I taught a couple of St. Patrick's Day classes, and I wore green. After that, I went home, and did what is turning into my annual tradition - made an Irish dinner, drank beer, and watched an Irish(-themed) movie.

Now, making a traditional Irish dinner here would be next to impossible, or at the very least required more effort than I was willing to give. I compromised with a dinner of green, white, and orange, all of which are the colors of Ireland.

My mom pointed this out to me, and, while I already knew it, I will pass it on to my readers - the flag of Ireland represents the two factions of Christianity, Catholicism (green) and Protestantism (orange), and the hope for peace between the two (white). My mother, who comes from a Catholic line, said that orange was never allowed near her St. Patrick's Day meals when she was young, but that "a meal of all green is not very pretty."

In any case, I was proud of the results of my cooking.

	The whole spread...
	....and a view from above.
	The sides: salad with cucumbers, 2 kinds of lettuce, orange bell pepper, carrots, and homemade dressing; rice with sweet potato; and some random, heart-shaped, green and orange chips.
	The main dish: salmon sashimi on a bed of shredded radish, with a side of spicy-marinade cucumbers and some delicious vegetable for which I don't know the name.
	My beer; I couldn't find any Irish beers, so I just went for one in a green can and my normal Asahi Super "DRY" (scare quotes added by Asahi, not me).
	My dessert: green an-mochi, white an-mochi, and mandarin orange segments. See, it makes the flag! I'm so cute.

Of course, I couldn't finish all of this; I never got around to the bottle of Asahi, and most of the rice in that bowl went to waste. Still, it was delicious and I was pretty pleased with how well it all turned out! :D

Oh, and by the way, if you were curious about which movie I ended up watching, it was: