Winter Wonderland

I'm no linguist but I would be willing to wager that Japanese is one of the more robust languages when it comes to expressing things having to do with snow. A quick search for "snow" in a Japanese dictionary will turn up dozens if not hundreds of entries, for expressing everything ranging from "sake drunk while observing a snowy scene" to "light reflected by snow". In this instance, I think the most appropriate term would be 銀世界 (ぎんせかい) which translates roughly into "snowscape".

This past Thursday and Friday marked the annual Aomori JET midyear conference. Now you might be saying to yourself "But wait, you've only been there for just over four months!" and you would be right. But in Aomori, we hold our midyear conference a bit early to avoid the difficulties that accompany the heavy snowfalls that the winter brings. So on early Thursday morning, Charlie Mac, the Misawa twins and myself piled into Charlie Berkenshaw's car and headed north for the bright lights of Aomori City once again.

Since all of us live along the coast on the southeast side of the prefecture (where the snowfall is comparatively light), we were all shocked to see how much snow has already fallen further inland. Where I live, we've had a few early-morning icings but no real snowfall to speak of yet. But up near Shichinohe (Leo's territory) we were greeted by the sights seen in these photos. If this is a sign of things to come, I should probably listen to my co-workers and put those snow tires on my car.

Anyway, I forgot to charge my camera's battery before leaving, so I was unable to take any photos at the conference. Let me assure you though, you didn't miss much aside from a bunch of boring presentations and a lot of rain. Perhaps the only highlight worthy of mention was when our very own Matt played the shit out of his drums at the Everest of Apples fundraiser talent show. We can now all bask in his reflected glory by saying that we knew him before he was a rock star.