Hello friends and family!
First of all I want to apologize because I did not realize earlier that I had the comments set to where only blogspot members could write a comment. Sorry if you are not a member and tried to post a comment. Now you should be able to post as anonymous. Just remember to somewhere put your name on your comment so we know who you are.
Well, it feels like summer has been coming and going for the past month. We have had some pretty hot days and some very rainy days all month. But pretty much every day is very humid. And from what we hear we can expect the heat and humidity to rise to a near unbearable level....so as much as I'm looking forward to summer, I'm not sure yet how I'm going to handle the temperature.
I titled this post as I did because in Japan there is a certain time for short sleaves and a certain time for long sleaves. It does not matter how hot April and May are, you really aren't allowed to wear short sleaves until the end of May. It can get pretty warm up to that day, so you need to learn to deal with long sleaved shirts during that time.
Now, sorry I havent written in a long time, but I have been waiting to be able to post a funny story that happened to Derrick at school one day. But I keep forgetting to put it on my flashdrive to bring it to school, where I have internet. So you will have to wait a little longer for that.
In the meam time, I will write about our bike tragedy...
Every Sunday, we ride our bikes to the nearby train station (10 minute ride....30 minute walk) to take the train to the central Mito station, one stop away, to go to church. Last Sunday, after church we had lunch with some friends and then went home with Leah, our wonderful Canadian friend, to bake cookies. (sidenote: she also introduced us to a lovely Canadian tv comedy, Corner Gas...absolutely funny!) After baking cookies we went to the Sunday evening soccer activity that happens nearly every week ( we have to pay to be able to play soccer because there isn't enough land to have free soccer fields, unfortunately). After soccer, it was late and we were tired and Leah was very kind to drive us all the way home. We went to bed and all was well, right? Wrong.
We got up the next morning and went through our regular routine and walked out the door to leave for school at the regular time and realized that our bikes weren't there! Stolen? Nope. Still at the trainstation....30 minutes away...the opposite direction from both of our schools.
We started walking to the trainstation and calling our schools to let them know we will be late. Derrick got through to his school and they decided to come pick us up and drop me off at my school. So that bit of misery was over...but that's not the whole story...
I was at school. It was still mid afternoon. Apparently they let Derrick leave early. He took the train from near his school to our train station and found a surprise. I got a call from him saying that our bikes have disappeared. There is a bikeparking nearby (where you have to pay to be able to park your bike) and I told him to go talk to the people who work there. Since they spoke no English, I had one of my teachers talk on my phone to the bike parking people who were using Derrick's phone. We found out that they confiscated our bikes because they sat for such a long time in an apparently no bike parking zone. Now, we had parked our bikes under the stairwell at the station because it is closest to getting inside and because there are always a ton of other bikes there. We figured it would be ok because the Japanese people did it too....
So to end the story, on a happy yet sad note....we got our bikes back, they weren't stolen, but we had to pay $20 each. Needless to say, we do not park our bikes under the stairwell anymore....we found a free place around the corner where people park their bikes and scooters. We have looked and have not yet found any type of sign that might say bikes are not allowed.
Ok, well that is all for now. Sorry this story was more about our misery and less about Japanese culture, but hey...it ended up being a very interesting day.
Have a great day!
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