More winter moans
Quirks of winter in a Japanese house:
Your bathroom has become an igloo-like tomb of absolute cold, salvation lying in the shower cubicle and the searing hot water within. After summing up the courage to turn off the shower, you exit the cubicle and stand before the mirror, where your body instantly starts to steam. Vapour rises from your skin in a beautifully impressive manner and for a few moments you use the situation to your jest, posing naked in front of the mirror whilst your body gives off a thick mist. That is, until you realise that your extremities are now blue with cold and your genitals have shrunk to the size of a tic-tac.
The toilets’ painful sensation of icy-cold porcelain on your warm buttocks is now something you have learned to conquer, with a strategically placed heater. When positioned by the door for 10 minutes before you need to use the toilet, if offers a modicum of relief from the short-sharp-shock you would otherwise have to endure. However, having a heater in such a place means that as you sit facing it, your back frosts over whilst sweat drips from your nipples, and every time you bend forward your face comes near to being burned off.
Anyone who says that the fumes from a kerosene heater are harmless is obviously in a state of apathetic, kerosene fume-induced euphoria and is probably on the very brink of some kind of massive mental breakdown. I can categorically state that since I started using my kerosene heater, I have been feeling more fatigued and narcoleptic in the evenings. I’ll sit on the sofa and the next thing I know I’ll wake up and its next week, there is a chopstick in my eye and for some reason all my cigarettes are on the floor, spelling the words “DIE DIE DIE DIE”.
Clothes now take an extremely long time to dry. In Japan there are many aspects of life that just do not make sense to the gaijin, when you consider that Japan is a technologically advanced 1st world country. One of these aspects is the non-existence of tumble dryers. Everyone air-dries their laundry at home in Japan. As such in winter, its not unusual for clothes to still be damp (and freezing cold) a couple of days after they were washed.
If you are like me - which I sincerely hope you aren’t, for the sake of the sanity and good health of yourself and all the people close to you - your detrimentally casual approach to housework and general un-cleanliness of all living / eating / washing areas in your home starts to have less of an immediate effect on your life expectancy, come winter. This morning I ate a banana that had been sitting on my kitchen table since last week. In the peak of summer heat, this banana would have been all but a fluffy moulded mess after a few days of exile on my table. In the ridiculous cold of the recent weeks though, the banana had been nicely preserved, and even felt slightly frozen on the inside. Laughing Death and any suggestion of home-pride right in the face, I now pile my kitchen table high with perishables of all kinds, whilst my fridge has been consigned to keeping the items that I cant fit on the table*
Today at shogakko I sat in the freezing staffroom wrapped in my winter coat and scarf quietly preparing lessons as usual, whilst one of my colleagues who was similarly dressed, happily played a bright red ukulele on the other side of the room. Ah, Japan.
*this is an exaggeration of course. Mum, shame on you for thinking I am that stupid.
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