What a wonderful couple of days! It all began on Tuesday while I was sitting in my pottery class. As I sat there next to the big, toasty oven, doing some that I really enjoy doing, I looked out the window and saw a most wonderful thing. A blizzard. Not a blizzard as anyone from Michigan or any other cold, snowy place would imagine, but for Fukuoka it was as blizzardy as it gets. Here it snows about 1-2 times per year and then never enough to stay on the ground.

In fact, it snowed all day Tuesday and by the time I was going home from work around 9pm the only thing to show for it were wet roads and buses with chains on the tires (which I thought to be quite amusing but I'll get to that later) Anyways, over night, a miracle happened...the snow stayed on the ground. Well, at least until about noon it did...but it was still snowing so the possibility was there. Of course, my classes were bare and the students who managed to brave the sole-deep snow, were late. I was talking to one of my adult students and made a little comment about the buses with chains, expecting him to kind of chuckle along with me. He just looked at me very seriously and said, "Yeah, I was going to get the chains out but then I decided to take the bus instead. It's because we don't get snow here and we don't have snow tires, we have to use chains or else we'll slip all over the place." The fact that there was absolutly NO SNOW anywhere on the roads was irrelevant, apparently.

Anyways, it was supposed to snow again today but instead the skies were clear and it was a crisp, blue day. Even though I love snow, I think it is for the best that it stopped...I don't think Fukuoka could handle any more.