Life in Japan, round 2
Sep. 4th, 2007 09:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kodalaiYesterday, I got what I think must be my most unique spam in history: The subject title was 'Present for a Jewish new Year' and the text of the email was in Hebrew. I do not lie.
Well, the heat of summer in Toyama is finally starting to wind down towards fall. Having experienced one full cycle of the seasons here, I think I can definitely understand by now why the Toyamen prefer fall over any other season. Summer is unbearably humid and hot; winter is too cold, snowy, and above all too long. Spring tends to be short, squally, and swinging radically from one temperature extreme to another. The falls here, however, are long, (relatively) dry, and pleasantly warm/cool. I could really settle in to enjoy it if not for the inevitable looming presence of winter at the end of it.
Mostly I think what's getting me down about the weather is the shortening of the days. I never really valued Daylight Savings till I didn't have it any more. But it seems immensely unfair that I should still have to suffer the 90 degree heat and humidity, and yet by 4:00 the daylight is already almost gone, grar.
Daylight here has always ended early; I think we must be east-shifted in our time zone, since the morning seems to come in stupendously bright and early to compensate. It doesn't really help, I suppose, that my apartment window is situated such that the morning light comes right in through my window unimpeded (directly onto my bed, in fact!) but anytime after noon, the hill and the trees and the other apartment building directly behind mine block all view of the sun. Even without that dampening factor, though, the afternoons always seem peculiarly feeble and dim. No sunsets; the light merely gets dimmer and dimmer until it finally goes out. Japan is definitely more of a morning country than an afternoon one.
I miss California.
It's somewhere between comforting and anxiety-inducing to think I'll be returning in just a year – well, less than a year really, but for some reason I didn't think of the month of August as part of the new year, mostly because there were no classes. Classes started up again just last Friday.
So far the new academic year (well... semester, really, it’s the same academic year here) is shaping up beautifully. I'm no longer teaching the low-level ichinensei; instead, I have special classes with the returning sannensei, who are frankly the most advanced English students in the school. I've actually gone down a bit in workload, from nineteen classes a week to seventeen, which gives me more breathing time than last semester, but still plenty to keep my occupied (unlike the ten class hours they gave me first thing last year, omg so boring.) The problem exchange student has gone home, and the new exchange student seems promisingly easygoing and adaptable. Even the oppressive coworker has lightened up immensely (I think he had a chance to relax over the vacation, finally.) It's strange starting things for the second time – I'm torn between an immensely relaxed, easygoing feeling of 'Psht, I have it all in hand' and a tearing urge to MAKE IT BETTER THAN EVER THIS TIME OMG.
I didn't get labor day off, here, but! In compensation, starting now this weekend but next weekend, I get no less than four consecutive long weekends. And then midterms. Ha ha! On at least one of those weekends, I plan to go down to Osaka; on another, I can't go anywhere because I'm on call for speech contest, and on another, another JET will finally come and take away my huge queen-size bed, to replace it with a more reasonably sized double. Good times.
Another thing I observe in the cycling of seasons is the cycling of seasonal foods. Popcorn, which had been conspicuously missing for the last six or eight months, has made a reappearance on the shelves. Hmmm. I wonder if ice cream will soon follow suit, again. (It's beyond me why the Japanese cycle some foods as seasonal which aren't dependent on a certain growing season, but they seem to be highly devoted to the ideal of the appropriate food for the appropriate season. Though why mint ice cream is considered a winter food and not a summer food...)
One of my resolutions for the new year was to this year, do more of the social/cultural events which I avoided around this time last year, out of still-adjusting stress. So far unfortunately that hasn't come up. I really, really wanted to go on the Mt. Fuji mountain climbing trip this year, but the it was scheduled for the same weekend as English Camp; there was no physical way to do them both. The fuckheads.
And finally: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article2343711.ece This comes as no particular surprise, I have to say. Internet cafes have been functioning as cheap overnight stay places for travelers who couldn't or wouldn't spring for a hotel room for years – this is just the logical next step.
Well, the heat of summer in Toyama is finally starting to wind down towards fall. Having experienced one full cycle of the seasons here, I think I can definitely understand by now why the Toyamen prefer fall over any other season. Summer is unbearably humid and hot; winter is too cold, snowy, and above all too long. Spring tends to be short, squally, and swinging radically from one temperature extreme to another. The falls here, however, are long, (relatively) dry, and pleasantly warm/cool. I could really settle in to enjoy it if not for the inevitable looming presence of winter at the end of it.
Mostly I think what's getting me down about the weather is the shortening of the days. I never really valued Daylight Savings till I didn't have it any more. But it seems immensely unfair that I should still have to suffer the 90 degree heat and humidity, and yet by 4:00 the daylight is already almost gone, grar.
Daylight here has always ended early; I think we must be east-shifted in our time zone, since the morning seems to come in stupendously bright and early to compensate. It doesn't really help, I suppose, that my apartment window is situated such that the morning light comes right in through my window unimpeded (directly onto my bed, in fact!) but anytime after noon, the hill and the trees and the other apartment building directly behind mine block all view of the sun. Even without that dampening factor, though, the afternoons always seem peculiarly feeble and dim. No sunsets; the light merely gets dimmer and dimmer until it finally goes out. Japan is definitely more of a morning country than an afternoon one.
I miss California.
It's somewhere between comforting and anxiety-inducing to think I'll be returning in just a year – well, less than a year really, but for some reason I didn't think of the month of August as part of the new year, mostly because there were no classes. Classes started up again just last Friday.
So far the new academic year (well... semester, really, it’s the same academic year here) is shaping up beautifully. I'm no longer teaching the low-level ichinensei; instead, I have special classes with the returning sannensei, who are frankly the most advanced English students in the school. I've actually gone down a bit in workload, from nineteen classes a week to seventeen, which gives me more breathing time than last semester, but still plenty to keep my occupied (unlike the ten class hours they gave me first thing last year, omg so boring.) The problem exchange student has gone home, and the new exchange student seems promisingly easygoing and adaptable. Even the oppressive coworker has lightened up immensely (I think he had a chance to relax over the vacation, finally.) It's strange starting things for the second time – I'm torn between an immensely relaxed, easygoing feeling of 'Psht, I have it all in hand' and a tearing urge to MAKE IT BETTER THAN EVER THIS TIME OMG.
I didn't get labor day off, here, but! In compensation, starting now this weekend but next weekend, I get no less than four consecutive long weekends. And then midterms. Ha ha! On at least one of those weekends, I plan to go down to Osaka; on another, I can't go anywhere because I'm on call for speech contest, and on another, another JET will finally come and take away my huge queen-size bed, to replace it with a more reasonably sized double. Good times.
Another thing I observe in the cycling of seasons is the cycling of seasonal foods. Popcorn, which had been conspicuously missing for the last six or eight months, has made a reappearance on the shelves. Hmmm. I wonder if ice cream will soon follow suit, again. (It's beyond me why the Japanese cycle some foods as seasonal which aren't dependent on a certain growing season, but they seem to be highly devoted to the ideal of the appropriate food for the appropriate season. Though why mint ice cream is considered a winter food and not a summer food...)
One of my resolutions for the new year was to this year, do more of the social/cultural events which I avoided around this time last year, out of still-adjusting stress. So far unfortunately that hasn't come up. I really, really wanted to go on the Mt. Fuji mountain climbing trip this year, but the it was scheduled for the same weekend as English Camp; there was no physical way to do them both. The fuckheads.
And finally: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article2343711.ece This comes as no particular surprise, I have to say. Internet cafes have been functioning as cheap overnight stay places for travelers who couldn't or wouldn't spring for a hotel room for years – this is just the logical next step.
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no subject
Date: 2007-09-04 02:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-04 04:29 am (UTC)Fall is my absolute favorite time of the year.