What is this I don't even

There's been a cool change this week, both in the weather and our level of activity, which is probably for the best in both cases. "Silver Week" has just wrapped up, a dual-public-holiday week that was spent gloriously far away from Tokyo and its wallet incinerators. Most notably, Friday was the Sports Festival at one of my schools, which in short is an insane version of the sports carnivals we have at home, featuring tricycles and cardboard box tank treads.

You probably still won't understand when I explain it.

Another year over, 35 days after it started

Exam time has now officially started in chilly Kobe (and the rest of Japan, for that matter), which means it's a month of no classes followed by end-of-year holidays. I've just had Aussie summer holidays and my natural rhythm had me primed and prepped for another full year, which makes things very confusing. I started the marathon 200m from the finish line and now I'm staring at my winner's trophy with a very strange expression on my face.

Sports Day

This is a bit overdue (4th of Feb?), but I finally got around to uploading the photos from Kobe High School's sports day. It was basically a big hike up the nearest mountain and then a marathon.

We'd probably call this strange creature "cross country" back home, except that this one was about 689m taller and had blue lips.