In the time since I last posted, I have learned two things:

I love Hokkaido snow. It's deep and fluffy and soft and it silences everything, especially at night. It piles up on roofs in glittering mattress-thick layers and slides off with muffled "shhhwwwhump"s; in the quiet of the evening it sounds like the houses around me are having a very ( Read more... )

IT'S SNOWING.No, really. It's snowing at last. Here I sit, in the teacher's office, in an idle moment between classes, looking out at a low-hanging grayish cloud cover that seems to gradiate gently into air and onward to the earth, instead of ending cleanly several thousand feet up. There are white flakes falling just visible thanks to a tree ( Read more... )

Technically, autumn is winding down in Uryu. Most of the local plant life with detachable leaves is bare, ice is starting to feather its way in broad calligraphy sweeps across the pond in the school courtyard, and the grass is frosted in the mornings. There are a few splashes of orange foliage left on the mountains, but they seem to be rapidly ( Read more... )

So, on two out of the last three mornings, I have had dreams in which I was visited by a North American friend, resulting in my sleeping very late ( Read more... )

My third year students are studying an essay about Chris Moon out of their textbook at the moment. It's a very inspirational story about how he lost a leg and hand to a land mine when he was on duty in Cambodia, got a prosthetic, and went on to run in marathons to raise money for landmine removal. (Apparently a land mine costs $3 to make and up ( Read more... )

The other night, while I was chatting with my friend Steph over AIM, the subject of cultural naturalization happened to come up; specifically, the subject of bathroom slippers. She's been writing a (pretty dang funny) composition about the elaborate rituals of shoe-switching enforced by Japanese culture, and we got into a friendly discussion about ( Read more... )

Winter is creeping steadily up on Uryu. The fall foliage has peaked in a blast of orange, patchworked over the mountains that surround the town, and faded out again--the leaves are falling rapidly now, and I'm enjoying crunching through heaps of them in the park near my house ( Read more... )

Today, on my way to work, I saw a hawk hovering shockingly low and close over the roof of a house just off the road, flapping laboriously to stay in one place. It was the closest I'd ever seen a wild raptor on the wing, and I slowed down my bike to watch ( Read more... )

My wonderful supervisor, Kakizaki-san, is dealing with a rough time right now. Her father passed away last week, very unexpectedly. (His funeral is tomorrow, and I find the idea of an actual Halloween funeral the only pleasant note among the tragedy, but I suppose as an older Japanese man the significance is rather lost ( Read more... )

Today's grammar point was "It is (adjective) for (entity) to (verb)." The kids were given a fairly free-form worksheet in which they had to take adjectives from a list and fill them into the blanks left in example sentences. And bless Onodera-sensei's heart, because one of the sentences was "It is [ ] to love people ( Read more... )