Salamin

I was browsing through our old photos, when I chanced upon a couple of photos taken almost exactly around this time, five years ago: August 16, 2002. I couldn't help but feel so nostalgic.

What were the circumstances then?

Due to the O-bon festival/summer holidays, Aya's piano class won't meet for two consecutive weeks. But in order to make sure that the kids still get to practice their lessons even during the holidays, they were given sheets of paper where they will color objects corresponding to each day they practiced. If they have practiced for more than 4 times in a week  -  they will get nice stickers from the sensei.

 

 

 

If you think about it, there's absolutely nothing exciting about getting stickers on a piece of paper. But you know how kids are - they want to impress not only their sensei but also their classmates. So I guarantee you that Aya will definitely make sure that she gets all her stickers at the end of the holidays. 

 

There are at least three main activities that occupy people in Japan during summertime:

1. Swimming at the pool or the beach

When I first got here, I was surprised to know that swimming pools and beaches are open only during specific periods in a year, i.e., July-August. Boohoo. In the Philippines, save for typhoon seasons, we get to enjoy the pool and the beach 365 days a year. And the waves there won't look as if they were trying to eat you (see photo at Hasanuma beach below).

Aya and Tatay running away from the giant killer waves! Taken in 2005.

 

During the one and only time we went to the beach, to our dismay we found out that it was just too crowded for comfort. And as you can see in the photo, the place wasn't that great at all. And get this, everybody takes a "break" between 12 to 1 pm, and again sometime during mid-afternoon. As in, everybody gets their butts out of the water and waits for the announcement when it's okay to resume swimming. How KJ is that?!!

Natsu da! Matsuri da! I missed Aya's natsu matsuri (= summer festival) at the daycare this year. I was in China then. This happens to be one of their major activities, so I'm so sorry to have missed it. Inspite of my initial misgivings, I did have fun last year when I attended it for the first time. And it even rained then, so most of the activities were confined indoors.

 

Fortunately, Aya's Tatay and Lola were there to participate in the event, and gladly took pictures and videos so I could at least see what I'd missed.

Almost everyday, Aya brings something home from the daycare. Kids from her class always do - may it be colored illustrations, works of origami, or anything they picked up from the park like stones and stuffs. They call them omiyage, which means souvenir. They bring home their omiyage to show their parents like prized possessions.

When we picked up Aya from the daycare yesterday, she proudly held two plastics - one was holding a colored liquid (mizu iro = colored water), and the other a collection of cast-off skins of cicadas. She told us that they call them semi no nukegara in Japanese. Semi = cicada, nukegara = cast-off or shed skin

Cicadas? Eww.

In Japan, summer season is BUG season. I can handle the occasional fruit flies and the blood-sucking mosquitoes, even the centipede-looking hairy thing that turns up every now and then. But one thing that definitely gets my hackles up is the La Cucaracha, the bane of every household, the vermin that appears out of nowhere, and that can make unsightly appearances in the most unexpected places.

Baggy not only hates them; he also fears them. A cockroachaphobia, if you will, although no such term exists. According to him, when he was a child, he was "attacked" by a flying cockroach while he was alone in the house one day. Yeah, and I bet the cockroach also wore a helmet and brandished a sword, and was excessively menacing. So if he chances upon a roach anywhere in the house, he could never bring himself to kill it. He always calls on me to do that grim job.