Friday, February 3, 2012

Back to my Real Life (and Snow)

 So as you may have guessed, winter vacation has ended (and ended almost a month ago actually) and I have returned to school.  A couple of my elementary teachers asked me to talk about New Year's Eve in America.  Basically, New Year's is a very big deal in Japan; you spend time with your family, eat specific New Year's food (like ozouni with mochi), and maybe even visit a shrine.  At midnight all of the Buddhist temples ring their bells and you're supposed to watch the first sunrise of the year with your family.  Visiting a Shinto shrine and praying for a good year is also common (you can get your fortune for the year on a slip of paper).  In Japan there are tons of traditions associated with New Year's but when the students asked me what I usually did over New Year's all I could think to say was "watch fireworks".  Anne tells me that many of the older pagan traditions of New Year's were absorbed into Christmas which I guess explains the tree, but seriously whoever sorted the traditions could have left a few for New Year's.  I didn't want to mention to the kids that it's a holiday known for partying and drinking too much so I told them that in America New Year's is a time to spend with friends and that adults may drink champagne... haha.  When the students asked me what special foods we ate, I told them there weren't any specific foods (just party-type foods and snacks).  They were shocked to hear that there was no mochi involved and were even more shocked when I said that mochi wasn't common in the US.  The only time I ever saw mochi was in a specialty super market and it was mochi filled with ice cream so it wasn't exactly traditional (but still delicious and highly recommended).  Anyway, I showed them some pictures of fireworks from around the world and they were satisfied with that.

There has been a fair amount of snow recently, maybe about a centimeter or two every couple of days.  This amount of snow wouldn't register with me at all except that the roads are never plowed (if you can believe that) and so it feels snowier than it actually is.  I'll admit that I saw one active snowplow a few weekends ago when Anne and I were going grocery shopping but that was in Tome (the next town over) and they get noticeably more snow than we do on the coast (since they're in the mountains).  I'll also admit that I was very spoiled when I lived in Massachusetts since my town was particularly well known for having clear roads in the winter (which wasn't so good when I was in school since we never had snow days but it's something that I appreciated when I got a car).  So what prevents me from crashing on Japanese roads?  I believe it's a combination of the winter tires and the textured roads, but I don't know for sure.  Maybe I've been lied to my entire life and snowplows aren't necessary for small snowfalls... (I think my internal world is about to collapse so I guess I'll talk about something else semi-related).

So, about a week and a half ago it was snowing outside as I was sitting at my desk at Hashi JHS, we were in a break between classes and I was feeling grateful that the teacher's room is usually quite warm (unlike the classrooms which can vary widely in temperature).  Suddenly there was a noticeable earthquake, maybe a 3 on the Japanese-scale, and the other teachers flicked on the TV to see how strong the earthquake had been and to see if there were any notices or warnings.  I was a bit shocked, not because of the earthquake (since we have them everyday) but because there was an earthquake while it was snowing.  My readers are probably thinking, "duh!", but for some reason I never thought that there would be two weather-events at the same time (though of course an earthquake isn't a weather-event, I guess that's where my problem lies).  Anyway, I guess the moral of the story is: mother nature doesn't stop a snowstorm for an earthquake's sake and vice versa.

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