ただいま～！ -- I'm back!

Can I just say I have more legit excuses reasons this time for being MIA?

Honestly, my weekends have been booked since September and on the rare chance I'm home relaxing (recuperating, really), I forget to update because I'm making 61 bracelets for my graduating 3rd years. Ok that last one is kind of a lie... I already have 45 of them done (in one day, might I add).

Anyway, after a few intense days of TEFL-ing (yes, I make everything verbs, it's English, whatever) and feeling quite proud of myself, I now find myself struggling to finish the last question of Unit 7 (only 13 more to go... D: ) and what better way to get rid of struggles than procrastinating!

In attempt to confuse you at a least a little, here's a brief summary of how summer came about:

The latter half of June felt like spring, with a week or two of rain, humidity and a brief typhoon (hello raging winds). Suddenly, temperatures jumped from maybe around 20℃ to 27℃, basically in two days. Ouch. Oh and by the way, I joked about it all winter, then continuously forgot to take pictures, but yes there is still snow in June!

To be fair, this was one of the dump sites, which seriously evolved to a massive mountain. (I'll add a picture once I find it...)

Continuing, backwards in time (confused yet?), I'm going to skip graduation (mostly because I don't have much in pictures) and go straight to my second visit to Otaru in March. But I will include pictures of both times I went there, so you can "compare and contrast." (But no essay required, really.)

In brief: Otaru is a port city northwest of Sapporo, apparently a 25 mn drive. It's a lovely little town, full of tourists and famous for its fresh seafood (sea urchin in particular), glass blowing, crystal jewelry and music boxes. The #1 picturesque spot is probably the Otaru canal, which is gorgeous in the fall, check out the pictures! (The first batch being from October 2011.)

Said canal, at the end of October.

If I add any captions, blogger will turn me into a hellfire-spitting-flame-monster (AGAIN!), so I think it's safer to omit captions, or include them somewhere else. However, as I've already lost twice the time it took me to write, organize, prep this update, I give up. Give yourself a medal blogger, you make blogging near impossible. (I now officially blame blogger for 60% of my lack of updating.)

 My dad came to visit in March, so I booked us a bus tour for a day. We visited a wine shop, a glass and music box museum, a sake factory and Mount Tenguyama.

5 months later, the same canal, different feeling.

 

As ranted above (blogger = ARG!), here are my condensed captions: the one by the sea is where we ate lunch, somewhere next to the sea in a hotel (buffet lunch). After that, we took the ropeway up Tenguyama (Mountain; it's really redundant since 山 yama means mountain) and you can see the beautiful view despite the clouds. The red face is the face of the tengu (long-nosed goblin), after which the mountain is named (I don't know why, no in-depth research done here). And to finish off a nice day spent in the cold, nothing like spicy soup curry to warm you up (my dad was sweating, serious spices!!).

There, Otaru in a nut-shell. Next up, Osaka!

季節のこと -- About seasons

It's been about 8+ years that I haven't lived in a place with real seasons, and by that I mostly mean a real winter (with snow), because let's face it, California might have four seasons (floods, fires, riots and earthquakes), but half aren't exactly Nature's.

The arrival of autumn came sort of as a surprise, mostly because the leaves suddenly changed colors. Here are a few pictures:

Before I knew it, the mountain next to the city had turned into a beautiful landscape of colors and shades. I regret not getting any pictures of that! For next year... And with it came a bout of cold and I had to start layering long sleeves with pullovers, sweaters, etc. Fall had indeed arrived.

One of the surprises of Hokkaido (or parts of it), is that it snows before winter. You might ask yourself, "How is that possible?" Well, I got my answer towards the end of October when biking back from school, I noticed a lot of bugs in the air. The more I biked, the denser they became! These white bugs, called 雪虫 (yukimushi), literally "snow bug," stick to everything, don't move a lot and are in over abundance! Thus the snow before winter, because they seriously look like snow storms! But no, the bugs' appearance simply announces the coming of winter.