Your Japanese word of the week is...

"yuki". It means snow. It is, however, not "yuuki", which means courage. But, considering it's snowing right now, it does require some amount of courage to escape the warmth of my small heater to bike myself around to all the places I need to be. Though one consolation is that, like Vancouver where the temperatures dip in and out of the minuses, it doesn't tend to stick for very long and soon melts. Then again, slush causes a whole other set of problems.

However, winter in Japan has been pretty mild, I've found. Sure it gets cold at night, especially with paper thin walls. It also doesn't help that 3 of my 4 walls are exposed to the cold AND 50% of the total wall surface is single pane glass. But it's easy to deal with since it's not like I have to heat the whole room, and most days are sunny, so being outside in the afternoon is quite comforable. In my room I have my small electric heater and, when I'm sleeping, an electric blanket! That is probably my single best purchase in my time here in Japan.

Luckily, however, most places outside have effective space heaters or central heating. Like the community room at a nearby Hasuda city. See, Hasuda's community centre runs a free weekly Japanese class that I've been attending since about August. It's taught by volunteers from around the area and the students range from immigrants to exchange students to business people transferred from their home countries. And some really interesting people roll through sometimes. Like a Kenyan nearly fluent in Japanese or a Kazakh Japanese teacher.

Last week though, was their "New Year Party". The normal 10am-12pm class time was spent preparing food (well, I spent it standing on a table stringing up flags of different countries without falling off =-P) and from 12-2 was the actual party. The food was rather good and we played bingo! They also had some people give small performances so some people played the guitar or sang a song. They also asked me to do a karate demo which was rather nerve wracking haha......

That night, I went to Richard Sensei's house for dinner and we watched "The Bridge", which is a documentary on the Golden Gate Bridge and some of the people who ended their lives off it. And one man who tried and failed.

The most intense shots were when they were filming the whole bridge and a few seconds later, a splash erupts from the water below. It's shocking. Suicides on the bridge average nearly one every two weeks. It's probably distinctly high since the bridge is so famous for its size and infamous for its suicides, that some people are probably swayed by that fact to travel there to take the leap. But still..................... freaky........ check it out when you have a chance.