Christmas letter 2004

We are now completing our second year in our new house, and we are enjoying it very much. We finally have something to put over the fireplace! And somehow, when we bought the frame, the cost came out to $12.90 instead of $129.00 as it said on the price tag. We love computers!

In the fall, Kyoko's dad visited for about a month. Jim spent time with Kyoko's dad to help him with his golf swing. Unfortunately, by the end of the trip, it's questionable how much help Jim was able to give to Kyoko's dad, but since most of the practice sessions were videotaped and then copied over to one of our (many) ReplayTVs (digital videotape recorders) and subsequently copied to mpeg format, there's a lot of material available for studying -- with hopes of finding the right keys to improve his golf swing.

Kyoko continues to volunteer at a nearby local high school for assisting in teaching Japanese. Kyoko also has some students she is tutoring. If you are interested in learning Japanese, please let her know!

Jim continues his current project which takes him to Vienna, Austria practically every month. In the Spring, Jim was actually able to take a business trip to Japan and Taiwan. Jim and Kyoko then took a rare Springtime vacation to Japan. In fact, the last time Jim was in Japan in the Spring was in 1990, back when he was 10 years old (ha!). Even though we've seen cherry blossoms 2 years ago in the DC area, it was nice to see cherry blossoms in Japan.

Later in the year, Kyoko was finally able to make it back to Europe. It had been 3 years since her previous visit to Europe. On this trip, we spent some time within Austria, going on a cruise along the Danube, visiting Graz (but somehow we missed seeing the Arnold Schwarzenegger museum... Awww...) and visiting the Salzkammergut area of Austria near Salzburg. Then, on the last weekend we were in Europe together, we went to Amsterdam, Holland. One common theme on all of these trips was rain! It rained every weekend, but we still had a lot of fun.

We took a cruise found in one of the Vienna tour books. The tour was approximately 8 hours, practically the whole day, so it seemed like it would be a nice, relaxing cruise on the Danube. As it turns out, the cruise itself was only a couple of hours and quite a bit of the rest of the time was on a bus, which is not exactly our idea of a nice cruise. Part of the tour also included a tour of the Melk Abbey. We had seen the Melk Abbey on a previous trip to Vienna many years ago, but this time, since we paid for the tour, we were able to see parts of the abbey which is not available without a paid ticket, so this was nice.

We went to Graz on another weekend. Jim had not set up any hotel reservations in Graz, so he was frantically contacting places to stay just before going. Fortunately this meant that some places were offering special deals since they still had some vacancies. We took advantage of a suite for the price of a hotel room. Unfortunately, it rained buckets, but Graz was still an extremely pleasant city to visit.

We rented a car to drive out to the Salzkammergut area of Austria. Jim had forgotten to get an international driver's license, which turns out to be required in Austria. Fortunately, the agent at the rental car counter was very understanding ("So you showed me your international driver's license, right?"). The scenery around the Salzkammergut area is peaceful, with the mountains right next to the lakes. It's just amazing. It's so relaxing out there that it makes you want to even consider to move out there, but we can imagine the winters out there can be very severe. Anyway, this weekend, we were able to find a dirndl (traditional Austrian dress) for Kyoko.

The last weekend in Europe, we went to Amsterdam. This was our first trip to Holland, and it was a fun weekend. Coincidentally, during the week, there was a meeting in Vienna with a couple of participants from the Netherlands, and when Jim and Kyoko went out to the airport to head to Amsterdam, we met up with one of the people from the meeting. We then decided to meet on the weekend. Jim hadn't realized that Amsterdam consisted of a complex canal system and fortunately the person we met took us on his boat. It was nice to get a personalized tour of Amsterdam. When we asked some people about traditional Dutch food, most people just laughed, meaning that there's not much to say about traditional Dutch food. Because of this, Indonesian food is sometimes considered the adopted national food of Holland, so he took us to a restaurant with Indonesian food. I wouldn't necessarily call it an Indonesian restaurant because from the outside, it looked like a normal pub. Anyway, we liked the food very much... But what we didn't find out until toward the end of the trip was that we should try Dutch pancakes! We have always enjoyed Dutch oven pancakes at the Original Pancake House (in Champaign Illinois or Dallas) so we decided to try Dutch pancakes in Amsterdam, and guess what! They must have stolen the recipes from the Original Pancake House because they really do taste similar! In fact, if I had known this, I probably would have had Dutch Pancakes all weekend long. Of course, a favorite spot of Kyoko was going to the Heineken museum! We also made it outside of Amsterdam to Zaansche Schans to see the windmills. Even though it was a touristy area, we really enjoyed it. The cheese tourist shop out there has great soft serve ice cream!

Anyway, that's about all the room we have. We hope everyone is doing well and that everyone has a great 2005!