雪の写真ばっかり -- Just pictures of snow

As promised, another post! Although, I feel like I should dedicate this one to pictures of snow. Just. Snow. Perhaps I just want to force my winter experience onto you, or perhaps you'll enjoy imagining living through this. (Which is it?)

It's nearly April, isn't it? Well, it was snowing just the other day (the 26th), and it makes us (yes, even the locals) all wonder until when it will melt for good. (For now, all it does is melt a little, then freeze at night, making it either difficult to walk through sleet, or extremely dangerous to slip on barely visible ice).

January 11th, 2012: I just came back from winter break in California and a few days in Tokyo. Of course, it's snowing, not quite a blizzard, but there's a good 25-30 centimeters of snow on the "road" to my house, so bad the taxi doesn't want to venture there and get stuck (nor do I ask him to). After 30 minutes of battling the snow on the ground and dragging one suitcase at a time, I make it to my house. The only reason I'm able to enter it, by the way, is because I have very kind colleagues, but this one in particular said he'd shovel the entrance, turn on my heater and turn the water back on (which had frozen regardless, it took him a good 2 to 3 hours?). I can't thank him enough.

As you can tell from the pictures, my feet and legs were quite cold by the time I made it inside.

Left leg, jean: frozen (would hardly bend).

Shoes: frozen.

COLD!

Right leg, jean: frozen.

Can you guess? Yep, frozen olive oil.

I do believe that's my breath you see.

My house, with a cleared path.

A sidewalk, though a preview of how narrow they get.

An empty house. Just look at that untouched snow!

A street. Not a great shot, but...

I present to you, the next day (I kid you not):

I literally couldn't walk out of my house.

Compare to above. Seriously.

Roof, meet ground. Ground, roof.

It snowed what, 40 cm over night?

After shoveling my way out.

See how the snow is about as tall as that car?

One of the empty houses.

The front of the BoE.

And with those implanted in your brains, I take my leave! The next snow pictures I'll share will most likely be those of the Snow Festival in Sapporo. Until then, stay warm (though, your spring is probably on its way... Lucky!)

クリスマスの時期 -- Christmas season

Excuses from winterland. I realize it's almost April, and you might be wondering why I'm still updating about Christmas? Because this was mostly written. From now on, I'll try to update more quickly, I promise!

Before it snowed, just when winter was beginning, I wrote a haiku: 

寒くなる、おでんの季節、食べたいな。

(Here's a very rough translation: It's getting cold, the season of oden, I want to eat [some].) Don't ask me why I was trying to compose Japanese poetry in Japanese, but it felt right at the moment, a fun challenge perhaps?

As the title indicates, this post is meant as an overview of the Christmas season at the schools. Unlike Halloween, I was caught up in things and didn't have the time to make awesome posters for both schools, or realized too late how soon Christmas was creeping up. Honestly, time flew much too quickly! Especially since I was due to leave the 24th for my winter break.

In any case, I got the idea from the 触れ合いパーク (fureai paaku) which is a (roughly) monthly event where S. and I do something related to English, or American culture, usually followed by some activity. That time it was Christmas cards, after we read kids' books: Good Night Moon and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see? So we made cards, but not any card. A pop-up card! How neat! Now I don't know about you, but the last hand-made card, let alone thing, I made which was unrelated to school projects goes back ages.

Excited for this fun activity that would not only let students be creative, but the directions I gave them were pretty straight-forward, and coupled with gestures, relatively easy to understand. So I asked teachers of nearly all grades if we could make Christmas cards. The 3rd and 4th grade teachers said okay and much later (one or two days before) the 6th grade teachers said ok!

Now, I didn't meant this to be a two-lesson kind of activity for 3rd and 4th graders, but I had no previous knowledge of their cutting, gluing and coloring skills. So they took longer than originally thought, especially on the decorating part. Because that's what's important isn't it? The coloring! Decorating that big white piece of paper with a tree into a nice, cozy Christmas card. It still amuses me that when I showed them my finished card(s), they were all awed and said I was 上手 (jyouzu), or very good. I would certainly hope that at 23, I no longer color like a 3rd grader.

Over all, the majority of the kids seemed to enjoy it (the younger the better), especially when I mentioned they could bring stickers to decorate, and wow, some kids barely drew on the card filled to the brim with stickers! (Stickers are great prizes, regardless of grade.)

The second time around, I figured I should give them a Christmas present so to speak, so aside from walking around in my awesome winged Christmas hat (which kids seemed to want to rip off my head), I bought Christmas stickers and told them they could get one. Oh the anxiety and decisions into picking the right one! And everyone except 5th graders - with whom I didn't have class with the last two weeks of school - got a "special" sticker. I was quite happy when some kids gave me one back in exchange (aww!).

One point to denote would be that I wrote Joyeux Noël on the front of my cards, because that's a part of who I am, all that French-ness. So I was really surprised, yet so pleased, when one class started copying the words on their own cards! Maybe that's what internationalization is about, or maybe not, but they seemed happy and proud of themselves when they were done. Now I just wish I'd taken pictures of all their cards to post on here, but I suppose mine will have to do...

We made snowflakes too in one class, and after I got the hang of it, taped mine to the teacher's office door. :)

My two cards, with my awesome hat back home (in CA).

The tree and bird things decorated with Christmas stuff (ES).

As for the JHS, I played Christmas bingo with the 1st years (Christmas stickers for the first five winners), a Christmas word search with the 2nd years (more stickers), and a puzzle-like worksheet with the 3rd years, where each part gave a clue and the end was a sentence assembling those clues, and the majority enjoyed it. I just have to tell myself over and over that no matter what I do, some kids will find it boring, stupid, and not enjoy it, and I don't know if I can do anything about that, but I can try!

Like at the ES, I wore my winged Santa Claus hat and tried to convince my JTEs to wear the antlers I bought at Daiso (100 yen store), which... brought a lot of  かわいい！(kawaii), cute, or 似合う！(niau), it suits you, largely from female students, haha, at least it broke some more ice on a larger scale.

My weak attempt at Christmas decoration...

Me and a JTE, perfect pair!

And just because it's about Christmas and the snow fall this year was is incredible, enjoy some more pictures of snow! (This is all December, by the way, more to come about later... get your surprised faces ready!)

This either makes me laugh, or tear up..

Already started piling up...

Yes, those are icicles threatening my windows.

I mean, really... mini walls, already.

Progression of the icicles...

And still a few days later!

冬と雪：北海道の生活 -- Winter and Snow: Daily life in Hokkaido

I meant to post this back in December, so please excuse the length...

I mentioned snow before winter last month, but I'm so glad there aren't as many 雪虫 (yukimushi), snow bugs, as there is snow. Why?

Let's just say that the first three days it snowed was enough to make me regret not buying boots earlier like I said I would, especially in the morning when I had to make my way to my neighbor's car in snow reaching above my ankle wearing only tennis shoes and jeans. Yikes. Also, tennis shoes are too slippery! Try walking on black ice with that. Black ice being the most dangerous because it hides under snow and you don't know it's there, and I'm pretty sure I knew this before, but forgot after living in a no-winter land, California, for eight years. I was lucky enough to have someone drive me after school to go buy some boots, although those proved slippery too.

As I'm writing this, it's another one of those "doesn't stop snowing" days, and the sky is simply white with a tint of grey. Walking home in that tires my eyes out because everything's white and my depth perception basically expires and it wouldn't be surprising if I were to trip on some snow I couldn't perceive as higher than my foot. If it's not snowing, it's really cold, even with the sun out. I walked to my BoE for the English conversation club, and it doesn't take more than 3 minutes, but I swear the inside of my nose froze!