The way things turned out I hadn't taught my Friday evening class in three weeks. Though no students showed up for class last week. One of the students was unable to attend because she had to attend to her mother who had broken her foot and ended up in the hospital. When she was telling me the story I was glad that her mother hadn't broken her hip.
Anyways, one of the items on tonight's lesson plan was a review of the class homework assignment from two weeks ago. The assignment was to make a list of suggestions when travelling abroad. One student had actually done the assignment, the other was in a "Oh, we had an assignment, didn't we" mode. So he decided to wing it.
As it turned out, he was left with drawing on his personal experiences when he was posted in China. The first item on his list was "You should take instant ramen from Japan with you when you go to China". Okay. That was pretty straight forward. The next work required a bit of work to figure out. His original suggestion was along the lines of "You should take medicine for...emissions". This was going to take a bit of guess work. After a couple of questions I managed to dig to the bottom of it all...he had suffered through a three day bout of diarrhea whilst on a business trip to China. I ask for any more details...all I could say was that I was glad that my co-worker with his diarrhea song wasn't present....
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Tonight's drive home was a bit of a challenge, even more so than the time when I drove home through some pretty thick fog in the stretch between Kaminoyama and Akayu. Somewhat unusually, snowfall turned out to be a bit heavier in the area around Yamagata city than in the Okitama area where Yonezawa is located. In particular, to point out the amount of snow which had fallen, I cleared my parking spot and car at 7pm of the snow which had fallen since noon and by 9pm an equal amount of snow had fallen.
To make a long story short, one of the most challenging moments in my drive home tonight came when I exited the south end of the Iwabuyama Tunnel. There had been swirling snow at the north end of the tunnel but visibility had been relatively good. Coming out at the south end, visibility was limited to about ten or fiften metres. Needless to say, everyone dropped speed quickly to deal with the severe conditions....
A photo from last Friday...the morning after a short blizzard....
