COVID Closures, Temperatures and Lessons

Hello!

Short update for this week - I went hiking today near Himeji. I will share some photos from that in next week's update.

School continues to wind down for the semester. COVID interrupts classes every once in a while here - we have had a few classes sent home at various points over the past two weeks due to it.

I do not know the exact protocol, but it seems like if a student or two within a class tests positive for the virus, the school sends the entire class home for about three days. Quite a few students have been missing class recently - I assume COVID and other illnesses are the cause.

Another thing that I thought of recently is how I feel like it is more common in Japan than back in the US to experience temperature extremes while at home.

My apartment (and many similar places, it seems) does not have central heating. I have an air conditioning unit built into an outer wall that has a dual heating/cooling function. With temperatures dropping, I have had to use the unit for heat more often recently.

My apartment has many sliding doors - kind of the traditional, thinner-type Japanese style sliding doors with which you might be familiar. Not quite paper-thin, but similar.

People here seem to strategically close them in order to section off parts of their apartments and more effectively provide heat to the areas they sleep or hang out in.

This means that rooms sectioned off from the heating unit can become quite cold overnight. If you walk from room to room, you are likely to run into cold temperatures.

Related to this, there is a big market in Japan for electric heating items - electric blankets and the like. Most toilet seats are heated and they even sell floor rugs that you can plug into the wall to provide heat.

So, as a result, I find myself experiencing a wider range of temperatures while indoors than I normally would in America. It helps make you appreciate that warm feeling more when you are under a blanket or an electric kotatsu.

A kotatsu is basically a heated table - it is a table with a heating element underneath it. Usually the table also has a blanket that you use with it to trap the heat underneath.

They look like this (click the link to view the wikipedia article). I bought one around this time last year - it is nice to have!

This coming week will be fairly busy - I will be doing some lessons with our first grade students and then teaching several sixth grade lessons on my own. For the first graders, I will be reading a book to them, learning a Santa song (similar to the B-I-N-G-O song but using Santa instead of Bingo) and writing Christmas cards.

Until next time,

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