The Blue Line

After we had finished eating our lunch at Kuriyama, we went for a drive up the Blue Line. It is a road that snakes up one side of Mt. Chokai to the fifth stage and then goes down the other side. The parking lot at the top of the Blue Line is as far as you can go up Mt. Chokai in a vehicle: you want to go further, you gotta leg it. Fifth stage is at nearly 1500m, which makes the 380m of the hills I pass over each week to get to Kamagadai seem piddly. I saw the wind turbines of the Nikaho Plateau from fifth stage, and they looked so far down. Near the top the Blue Line, even in May, is enclosed in huge snow walls. It takes until well into summer for the snow to melt away.

This photo is very hazy but you can just see the wind turbines on the Nikaho Plateau. To the right of them at the edge of the photo is Kamagadai.

Wow, I'm on an only semi-dormant volcano . . .

Yes, I stood on the edge of a huge cliff on slippery snow to take this photo. But I was inside the safety boundary, I swear . . .

Fubuki

The weather over the past few days has been extreme. On Saturday the weather was bad. On Sunday it was snowy, freezing and so windy that the trains stopped running. Come Monday, it was still far too windy for the trains to run. Apparently there was awful trouble with the Sr. High Schools, the students of which rely on trains to get them to school. It wasn't an ordinary school day, either. It was a test day for the current students, and also for the kids who will be students there from April. I stood at the window of the staff room on Monday, looking out with wonder at the clumps of sea foam that were blowing about in the air and falling onto the school field. The school is not next to the sea.

On Tuesday when I went to Kamagadai I found that a lot of new snow had fallen. The whole time I was there it continued to fall heavily. I only had one class, so after it finished the vice principal gave me a one hour lesson on the koto in the music room. After work, I needed to go into Honjo to take back some DVDs. I hadn't been able to take them back over the weekend because the video store was undergoing a renovation until Monday. So they were due back no later than Tuesday and no earlier either. Unfortunately, the trains were still not running. I told the driver about my dilemma on the way back from Kamagadai, and he took me to the bus stop to check the bus times. We found when the next bus to Honjo would leave, but not where in Honjo it would stop. There are two places in Honjo that busses may stop, one place being a fifteen minute walk from the video store and the other being over an hour away. So I went home thinking that I had one hour before I had to start my horribly inconvenient and freezing trek to the video store and back. But then, I got a call from Machiko-san at the BOE. Apparently, the driver had gone there and told her about my problem, and she (as always) had a solution to it. Apparently her husband would soon be going into Honjo to pick their son up from school because, of course, since the trains weren't running he couldn't get home on his own. So Machiko-san arranged for her husband to come and get the DVDs from me and to take them to Honjo for me. I was so happy and relieved!

I had a very quiet day at the Elementary school yesterday. Apparently on Monday there was a continuous stream of second and third grade pupils going to the sick room with, uh-oh, influenza. All the sick kids were sent home but on Tuesday even more kids were sick. Yesterday, all the second and third grade kids were at home whether they were sick or not in an attempt to stop the virus from spreading, but unfortunately that measure had been taken too slowly and many pupils of other grades were absent too. Out of the other four grades worth of pupils who should have been at school, 56 were absent, 53 of them with the 'flu. Fully half of the first grade pupils had the 'flu, as well as about a quarter of each of the higher grade classes. All together, less than half of Konoura's Elementary school kids actually attended school yesterday. The lunch room felt very empty indeed.

Today the weather is much nicer, although it is still snowy and cold. I hope this cold snap does not bother me next week when I go on holiday to the Kansai area.

Some pictures I took last week

I'm not a liar

I didn't do much over the weekend. I had been planning on going for a walk, but the weather was very bad so I decided to cancel. Yesterday and today it has been snowy with gale-force winds. It was a battle just getting to the supermarket.

Yesterday I received a phone call from Kobayashi-san, the lady whose house I went to last week and who keeps lending me books whether I want to read them or not. Yesterdays call was a follow-up on a call from several months ago, when she had asked me to return a book that she had never lent me and I had never heard of, and I said that maybe she had lent the book to Tshepo (the Sr. High English teacher who lives in this area) and just thought she had lent it to me. Well, she rang me yesterday and said "This is the first time that a New Zealander has ever lied to me."
"What?" I said.
"You lied to me," she said in a cheery voice. "L. I. E. Lie."
"Ah, I don't remember ever lying to you. What are you talking about?"
"I Talked to Tshepo, and he does not have my book. Can you tell me the book's publisher? I want to know its publisher."
"I don't have your book," I said, starting to feel rather irritated. And hopeless too, because she's obviously not going to believe me until the book turns up in either her house or Tshepo's.

Happy New Year!

Welcome everyone to 2007. How was your new years? I saw in the new year with Atsuko, Miwa and Taisuke (a friend of Sayaka's). We had been planning on going to an onsen, but of course the plan got cancelled. We had dinner at Atsuko's house instead. I cooked a beef mince pie for them. We spent hours watching the K1 because Miwa loves it, and Atsuko loves Masato. (Ok, maybe I like him a little bit too ;) )

When the K1 finished at 11.30pm I put on Pirates of the Caribbean 2. What better way to see in a new year than by watching a Johnny Depp movie?

After midnight we went for a walk to the shrine. It was actually quite a nice walk on account of the unseasonably warm weather. No snow has lasted in Konoura for more than a couple of hours yet this winter. I spent pretty much the whole time at the shrine saying 'Happy New Year' repeatedly to students of mine both past and present. I went home at about 2am.

Today I didn't go anywhere. I watched a couple of DVDs and cooked a spinach, tuna and cheese pastie for lunch. The weather was disturbingly nice, and I briefly entertained the idea of going somewhere until I realised I had nowhere to go. Such is life.