It's supposed to be spring, damnit!

It started snowing just as we left to go out to lunch. What's with that?

Lunch was nice. We went to a restaurant in Nikaho I hadn't been to before. The decor was nice, with ornate high-backed chairs, red (fake) velvet hanging from the ceiling and lovely lamp shades. But the effect was slightly ruined by the fact that the pictures hanging on the walls were kids jigsaw puzzles that had been glued onto card and then framed. Anyway, the lunch was a chicken thing, and it was good.

The conversation over lunch started with gossip about the male teachers, and then moved to which teachers at which schools are moving to which other schools. But the conversation quickly changed to the topic that it always turns to when both Hiroko-sensei and Hosoya-san the office lady are present: Korean dramas. Korean dramas are popular with most Japanese women over the age of 40 or so. They seem convinced that Korean men are kinder / more handsome than Japanese men. First they talked about a recent plotline, and what I understood did not convince me to try watching Korean dramas. (A love letter written to one woman, but there is this other woman with the same name, and somone's mother read the letter, and there was confusion. Bleh!) Then they were all talking about how Korean men all treat their wives so well, and are always so polite and such. I thought to myself that the problem is more like Japanese men over a certain age treat their wives badly, but I did not say so.

I haven't read yet today. Well, not Gaiman anyway. Instead, I decided to go looking for a blog that I found a month ago and then Mozilla lost the bookmark for. It is a blog of a woman living in Russia teaching English. Take a look. It has lots of beautiful pictures.

While I was looking at that blog, I found a link from it to another interesting page by another woman who was teaching English in Russia. This page is in comic format, so of course I had to read all the comics. And that is what I have been doing today.