Long trip back from Hokkaido, School Make-Up Rule

Hello!

In the last update, I wrote about taking a trip to Hokkaido.

Getting back from Hokkaido was difficult - I was originally scheduled to take a flight back to Osaka on Monday evening but there was a typhoon approaching the Kobe/Osaka area. The storm was not supposed to hit until Tuesday so it looked like maybe I might be able to make it back before flights got canceled.

But, on Monday morning, the airline let me know that the flights that evening were canceled and the earliest return flight they could offer would be Thursday.

I was aware of the typhoon a few days ahead of time, so I had thought about back-up plans. I had a work event on Wednesday I wanted to return for but it looked like the best I could do was to get back home Wednesday evening.

With not being able to fly, I thought the safest way would be taking the train. Since I would be starting from the Ainu museum, that was already almost halfway to Shin-Hakodate, which is the station from which I could catch the bullet train.

I made it to Hakodate on Monday evening, stayed the night near the station and then took the shinkansen early the next morning (Tuesday) south towards Tokyo.

The typhoon had caused all bullet train services west between Tokyo and Kobe to be cancelled on Tuesday, so when I took the train that morning, I knew that I would not be able to get closer to home than Tokyo. Since I had never been to the northeast part of Japan, I stopped over in Sendai and spent most of the day on Tuesday going to different places in that area.

Sendai is about an hour and a half train ride from Tokyo, so my plan on Wednesday was to ride the train to Tokyo and then from Tokyo to Kobe.

The major part of the typhoon had mainly moved through Japan and was out at sea, so it seemed like there should not have been further travel disruptions. But, as I rode the train early Wednesday, I saw an announcement saying that all bullet trains from Tokyo were cancelled. Turns out that there was some residual heavy rains causing issues.

To make a long story short, it ended up taking about 12 hours on Wednesday to get back on the train - several hours spent in Tokyo Station waiting for trains to run again, about 2 hours spent in line to get some information about my ticket and then over 6 hours standing on the actual train ride from Tokyo to Kyoto, then taking a local train from Kyoto the rest of the way.

Even though I was able to get on a bullet train that day, they were running very slowly - the train would end up spending 1-2 hours outside of each major station waiting. The ride usually only takes about two and a half hours, but ended up being many times that.

By now, though, this happened over a month ago, so I have mostly forgotten about it.

Classes started again just about two weeks ago. With this school's schedule, we have two weeks of classes and then the students will have their exams this coming week.

During the week before exams, most club activities are cancelled. But baseball has a fall tournament coming up so they practiced every day. Lately, Mondays have been their "off" day but a lot of players still go to the field to do self practice. Sometimes coaches will show up to help hit ground balls on those days.

In the classroom, I found out about a school rule that prohibits girls from wearing make-up while at school. I teach a class first period on Friday mornings and the Japanese teacher I work with pulled a student aside and told her something. The teacher told me later on that she noticed the girl was wearing makeup and had to have her remove it. This was the first time I had heard about that one.

Until next time,

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