Rainy Season

I remember hearing about rainy season, and fearing it. When considering that I am made of sugar and melt in the rain, the prospect of a month (or 2) of rain was reasonably daunting. Added to the trouble is that I live a 10 minute bike ride to the train station, so if I wanted to leave my lovely town, I'd face a likely melting. While I love my town, an extended lack of face to face contact with the English speaking world would damage my ability to speak English at a regular pace and with multisyllabic words, something that could potentially damage my ability to function in an English speaking world when I one day returned to it.

However.

Rainy season seemed to only be a week long. Granted it was a very wet week, with slow drying laundry and 48 hours of rain followed by occasional storms, and I did skip Japanese class to avoid the melting issue, but that was it. And by that was it, I mean, that week felt like a month. No sunshine, high humidity and near constant rain left me with no energy and no motivation. After 5 days of it, I decided I had to move for fear of adopting a shape identical to that of my desk chair. So on a rainy Friday afternoon, I took my chances and went for a bike ride to a temple in my town I had just heard about. It was uphill (gah, on a bike with only 1 gear) but very beautiful. I also got a shot of Awaga-- one of my elementary schools, with the mist in the background, which makes it look a little less "40-year old poured concrete jail" which is how it tends to look on a regular day. This was followed by a trip to the Himeji yukata (summer kimono) festival. Which is mostly just a made up festival (invented tradition anyone?) based on the fact that people wanted to wear their yukata. It was VERY rainy, and I only narrowly avoided melting. The photo is of me with Suzie, the other ALT in my town, with Himeji castle in the background.














On another note-- Japan insists that one of it's amazing and unique features is that there are 4 distinct seasons, and I openly disagree with this. Firstly because 4 seasons isn't so crazy and secondly because rainy season, while it is short, is not spring and not summer.