Kousa

This is the view outside my apartment. I wish I had a comparison shot, because usually I have a nice view of the mountains from here. You can sort of make one out behind the houses, but it's hazy.

That's not because of fog. It's because of the Japanese vocabulary word I learned today: kousa. There's no single translation for this in English. It's the Japanese word for yellow dust that comes over from China because of pollution.

Apparently it's strange because usually this only happens in springtime, and we're well into autumn now. No fun for people with allergies.

This little piggy

I was enjoying the nice cool autumn weather this week, when without warning the temperature dropped to winter-level cold. I turned on my heater, and my throat was getting scratchy from an incoming head-cold, so I did what someone recommended: I went to Trial (Japanese Wal-Mart) and bought a humidifier.

This doesn't sound like something noteworthy enough to write a blog post about, but the humidifier was so cute I just had to post pictures.



It's a　黒豚, or kurobuta, which literally translates to "black pig." This is a special pig that Kagoshima prefecture is famous for. In fact, I recently got kurobuta miso as a souvenir from Kagoshima prefecture.

And that's how my buying of a humidifier relates to Japanese culture. ;)

Silly weather

These past couple weeks the weather finally started warming up, and I thought spring was finally here.

I was wrong.

It snowed again today. Not nearly as much as the last time, but still.


I bought some heat packets for tomorrow. It's graduation day, and evidently the ceremony is held in the gym, where it is very, very cold. Then in another week the students are off for "spring break."

Where are you, spring?!

Let it snow

So my hometown must have heard about the record cold in Florida, because today it decided to get serious.

This is what I saw when I looked out my window this morning. My reaction was something along the lines of *gasp* "Wow!" and then How the heck am I going to get to work? (Afraid of the slippery sidewalks, I left the bike at the apartment and just walked. Work isn't far.)

It snowed on and off all day, and I wasn't the only person in the office to leave my desk and look out the window when it was particularly heavy. At first, I thought snow like this was a regular occurrence here, but evidently the last time it snowed so much was something like two years ago.

When I got home the kids who live in the apartment upstairs were throwing snowballs, so I spent some time outside to enjoy the weather as well. Though all I did was take some pictures of the immediate area.





Not much, but it's my little neck of the woods :)

Natural Disasters

There's a typhoon coming. The news stories I've read describe it as being really strong, but fortunately it's heading for Honshu, which isn't the island I'm on, though Tokyo's there. (And so is Chiba. Watch out, Jamie!) Unfortunately, that means it's going to start pouring rain here any time now. There have been big gray clouds overhead all day, and I was really happy to make it to school and back without getting wet.

Being a Floridian, though, I'm not too worried. I've got my bottled water, flashlight, and batteries, and I even bought a spiffy new raincoat. Typhoons? No problem. Earthquakes, however...

I have felt a few since I've gotten here, but they've all been really small. So small, in fact, that I wasn't sure I'd experienced an earthquake the first time and not just, say, a really big truck going by outside, until the other JETs texted about it.

Japan really is the land of natural disasters, isn't it? At least the closest volcano on my island is pretty far away...