Snowy Days

It is another weekends.

In spite of still having quite a number of stuff to update from my trip home, this will just be a filler post as I will make it just a short update. The hostel here is having another hostel festival over this weekends. Unlike the previous one held during the summer, it will be the winter version of hostel festival this time. Having experienced the summer version when they have sumo wresting on slippery stage and drag queen contest among others, which I would say not as interesting as its name suggests, I didn't really bother much about the festival this time.

They rear a baby alligator in the pond.

They were planning to organise a on-the-ice-sumo-wrestling tournament. If that had happened, I would be really looking forward to it. However weather forecast a week ago indicated that it won't be snowing this weekend, which made the plan has been cancelled.

Vegetable's farms being covered with snow behind my hostel. Note that the canteen in at the bottom left.

To make up for that sumo tournament, they only went ahead with karaoke competition and midnight theater. Despite calling it midnight theater, the shows are shown during the afternoon. The only reason they call it a midnight theater is because they will switch off all the lights, fix thick curtains to the window to make the canteen into total darkness when the show starts.

The bicycle shade is not being spared by the snow either.

The only bright side of this festival is I got to eat mochi again. Mochi is a Japanese rice cake made of glutinous rice pounded into paste and molded into shape. There are three types of mochi, eaten with red bean paste (angko), covered with grounded peanuts (kinoko) and wrapped with nori inside soybean sauce (syoyu mochi). I only took the first two, and the third one doesn't really fits my taste bud.

I ta pao-ed some mochi back to my room as well.

It has been snowing throughout the past week. The snow is getting thicker and thicker and it seems that it will not be getting any better as in for now. The temperature also has been around two or three below zero degree, to one or three degree Celsius. I am no longer touched by the snow like the first time I saw snow months ago. Nevertheless, I have a new found game with the rest of us.

Snowball war.

Just a few months ago, those trees are in green and yellow, but now not anymore.

It looks like it has become a must for us to play this game after our Japanese language class everytime. Just yesterday, I teamed up with my roommate against three other students and battled along the way back to our hostel. It is really fun - as much as the fun I had during the ski trip. We even made some of Japanese students had some heart attack when they saw us holding two large snowballs.

The story was like this. Apparently, we had agree to end the game and walk back to the hostel with the three guys. However, the two of us felt that we haven't had enough of snowball war. So, both of us hid and waited behind the walls for the three guys to appear later on. However, instead of the three of them, a couple of Japanese student appeared and I was so closed to throwing the snowballs I was holding at them. It gave them a big shock, but in the end, they helped us to indicate the moment the three of our earlier opponents was coming out from the building. When we got the cue, we straight away attacked them and without any snowballs, they couldn't make any counter attack on both of us. We didn't look back after attacking them, as we ran immediately into the hostel.

We enjoyed the fun, but eventually, all of us found ourselves with red numb palms.