Down at the beach

After the epic rainfall on Saturday and Sunday, Monday dawned somewhat cloudy, though more importantly, dry. After two days of a three day weekend spent inside counting raindrops, we didn't need any weather better than that to jump in our car and head to Toyaura, a coastal village with a nice beach about an hour's drive from Muroran.

And we were all happy - Cian got to play in the sand and the sea, Mammy got to sit around doing nothing in particular, and Daddy got to catch some waves.

'Some waves', listen to me.

(Incidentally, if you are not all that interested in surfing then you might as well stop reading now. The rest of this blog is going to include words like 'break', 'awesome' and 'gnarly'. And probably a few 'dudes' scattered throughout. Which pretty much means only my cousin Moss is still going to be reading, so a big shout-out to all in the People's Republic of West Cork).

There was a two to three metre swell rolling through from somewhere just west of Hawaii, and it was pounding down. The beach we were at is renowned as a mellow break, but today it was biting. We got there just on low tide but all that meant was an endless series of booming closeouts.

So, I waited. Me and the ocean: mano a mare. For two hours. Until the tide rose enough to offer the possibility of something more than watery ignominy.

I paddle out. The waves wait and just as I enter the white-water a feckin huge set rolls in and I take an unmerciful pounding.

Yes, it was 'gnarly'. Dudes.

Finally get out beyond the whitewater and find myself contemplating the sort of wave I thought you only found on unpronounceable reef breaks off the coast of Tahiti. Out this side of the excitement things seemed innocuous enough. A large, but not particularly intimidating swell, would come through, gently rise and lower you, and continue on.

And then, at the same point every time, it would just pitch violently down and explode in this big, sweet-mother-of-jesus-what-the-good-feck-was-I-ever-thinking, roil of furious white water. You could literally paddle up to the edge of the break and look down the three metres or so where the face of the wave just dropped off and crashed.

The trick, as I learned, whilst bobbing out there in a mixture of elation and fear, was to figure out the heft and strength of the swell coming through. Too big and I'd be a sand pancake. Too small and, well, actually there wasn't 'too small', only 'too big'.

My first wave: the swell catches the board and as the wave begins to pitch over I shoot out diagonally down the face, pop up and there I am, swooshing down the line, this mass of blue water continuously poised to break over me. The water is so clear that I can see bubbles rise up with the crest of the wave, peaking over my head. Faster I go, whoahing my way along. And then its over, and I am clear through the break water and dude, well, really, you had to be there.

My second wave. I misjudge my takeoff, pitch over the front of my board and get flung straight down the face of the wave just as it breaks. Whoomp! and this wall of water crashes down on me. My leash snaps, my board shoots up in the air and I get pounded, rolled, pounded and rolled a bit more before being spat out by the sea for my previous impudence. And yes, it was a tad gnarly.

So that was my day done - no leash, no surfing. It was back onto the beach and sandcastles with Cian.

Biblical rain

When I first came to Hokkaido I was told that amongst its myriad of attractions (volcanoes, all the salmon you can eat, regular earthquakes, plains, fresh food, beautiful women from Tokachi, bears, it's not Tokyo, Sapporo Beer Festival, only two seasons - winter and August, etc.), was the fact we didn't suffer through 'tsuyu', the rainy season.

Well, dear reader, they took advantage of my wide-eyed, round-eyed, indeed blue-eyed naivety: they lied to me.

As I write it is pouring nekko and inu outside ('Cats and dogs' for all you monolinguals out there, or if you're from Dublin, 'fairly feckin lashing down'). Has been since Thursday and due to continue through until at least Tuesday.

It's a bank holiday on Monday so we have a three day weekend to enjoy, but I think the most we will be doing is helping the animals on to the ark, two by two.

Cian has already got cabin fever after watching our entire Pixar movie collection this morning (Cars, Wall-E, Up), exhausting all the spectacular crash possibilities of his train set careering in to a lego station, and throwing random objects around his room.

We are thinking of going up to Sapporo tomorrow if for no other reason than to let Cian ride the subway, allow Sanae to go shopping, and permit me to keep my sanity.

Late at night....

Due to a mid-afternoon visit to the local ear, nose and throat clinic with Cian, I had to work late last night in the university. It was after 11.30 before I finally finished for the night. As I was walking home, I heard the slap-slap-slap-slap of feet coming up rapidly behind me. I spun around and one of my students, oblivious to the classic 'preying-mantis-primed-to-attack-with-a-quickness' stance I had instinctively adopted, huffed and puffed his way past me. A minute later, more slap-slap-slap sounds and here comes another student, heaving his way up the hill towards me. In the 12 minutes it took me to walk home, I encountered six runners. All this fitness at close to midnight.
Nocturnal athletes - my university seems to be full of them. I don't know if this is a particularly Japanese thing, the result of too much rice. Back in the day (when, yes, I was the otoko), the only running I did late at night was a kind of drunken, lurching stumble down O'Connell Street to try and catch the last 68 bus home. Back then, running at night, sober, was for wide-eyed, skinny-limbed loons who howled at the moon as they jogged. Real Irish men were in the pub drinking and talking shite.

Though peversely, drinking actually made me fitter. On those heady nights of Guinness and chat I often lurched a little too late for the 68, and by the time I got to Fleet Street it would often be gone. And well, then, well, I'd just have to take my chances on the 51 to Neilstown.

Yes, Neilstown, on the last bus.

You want a rolling preview of the apocalypse and the end of civilization as we know it? Then take the last 51 on a Friday night. And sit up stairs. Down the back. If you dare...

Though I always got off in Clondalkin village before we got taken into the badlands proper - even drunk my survival instincts were still working. Then I'd spend the next two hours or so walking the five miles home. If I didn't fall, and fall asleep in a ditch somewhere on the back road to Baldonnel. (And yes, it happened dear reader; more than once. I'm not a proud man).

But all said and done, definitely much better in an affirming-my-innate-Irish-manhood-sort-of-way, than going for a jog at 11:30 at night.

Friday night, apocalypse now.... da dan da, dan, da, dan da, dan daa, daaa (or however you write 'Ride of the Valkyries').

More summer

God, an absolute belter of a day over here - sun, blue skies, heat, classes, comatose students, and a barely contained, primeval yearning to be outside taking a slow, crumbly, shoulder-high wave down the line....(dude)....
Ohh, the unbearable lightness of being inside in July...

Haircuts

I got a hair cut on Sunday and in the midst of it all I realized two things:
(a) it now takes me longer to shave than to get a haircut
(b) more and more white hair is being cut.
July, in my part of the world, is turning out to be a very melancholic month.
Time then for another photo.

Summer

One of the things I have never really got used to whilst living here in Japan is the concept of 'summer'. Not the seasonal/weather issue but rather the more temporal notion of it - when it begins and when it ends.

I grew with my clock set to June as the beginning of summer and September as its end. This was due to the rhythms of educational life with school, and later college, designating this the time of sunshine and outdoor play. Or, rather this being Ireland, showers and coming home covered in mud.

Here in Japan the school year for primary and secondary schools runs from April to March. As a result the summer holidays here in Hokkaido are only four weeks long (they are six in the rest of the country). They don't commence until the third week of July and are over by the end of the second week in August.

That, put simply, is not right. Not right at all.

Things aren't much better for my university students. Whereas by the beginning of June I was on a plane to either Munich or New York to earn my dollars or deutschmarks, and came home at the start of September full of stories; in Muroran the students finally finish their exams by the middle of August and are expected back by the end of September: a total of seven weeks in all.

That is not right either.

We are into July now and I still have another four weeks of classes to go, followed by a further fortnight of exams. I impatiently await the middle of August but when it arrives I always sense the summer slipping away before it has even properly begun.

Matters are only made more melancholic by what I term the 'Strangers in the night' effect (yes, after the Sinatra song) of the futile overlap between mine and Sanae's holidays. We get a week at most, in August, after which she is back to school and I am back to taking Cian to and from the nursery school every day and, well, they are not holidays any more, are they.

And it says something about the Japanese mindset that this shared week is deemed sufficient. Indeed, anything longer is seen as succumbing to western decadence and after that it's just a short slippery slope to complete amorality, heroin addiction and the collapse of Japanese civilization.

Which is probably true but I still wish I could blog about the first day of the summer holidays beginning tomorrow.

But enough of the melancholy. Here are some photos of my garden.