Day 96 in Japan - Kotatsu HAJIME!

Pouring rain was a surprise, so I woke up a bit late. When it's raining, I have to catch the train and bus to Shimizu, or else be totally soaked on my way to work. It's really hard to stay dry while riding a bike, although the Japanese do have a full body raincoat thing that they use for riding bikes. I do have one, but riding up the hill means that I get quite sweaty and damp and uncomfortable inside the raincoat. Anyway, since I didn't know it was supposed to rain today, I wasn't up in time to be on my train, so I didn't get onto the bus (it was too full), and I had to walk half an hour to work in the rain. At least Shimizu days are consistent :P

Four students wearing the whole body raincoats on their way to school.

Today I started teaching Halloween lessons, and I learned two things. One: Charlie Brown It's the Great Pumpkin, while a classic, IS ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE. Two: don't underestimate the capacity of teenaged boys to eat a lot of candy very quickly. I suspect that the two boys who cam to ESS club may have been sick tonight. I let them eat as much candy as they wanted in the 20 minutes of club (they came really late), thinking that they couldn't do too much damage. WRONG! They probably hammered at least 3 handfuls of hard sugar lollies each in that time. Gross. If it was chocolate, on the other hand, I would have been fighting them for it...

Colour? At Shimizu? Some pretty doorknob hangers that the very
talented students made.

Tonight, it was absolutely freezing. Actually, scratch that - today it was absolutely freezing. So today Sam and I turned on the kotatsu for the first time. It was susrprsingly comfortable to sit under a warm table and study Japanese. I was very good tonight and did about 2-3 hours of Japanese study (and another 2-3 hours of Community at the same time - I am really enjoying that show!).

Food Highlight of the Day: Today I award ice-creams the ironic food of the day. I realised that I was sitting under a heated table, thinking about how cold it was, whilst snacking on a frozen treat. Idiot me.