Won't Be Long Now (Hopefully)

Here in western Japan, spring is knocking and it can come in, as far as I'm concerned. The cherry blossoms are out, the snow on the mountain tops is nearly gone, rice paddies are being tilled, and slowly but surely the temperature is rising. I am by all means ready for the season to change. In reality, we got about one week of winter here in Kanazawa, with daily snow and pretty white mountains. Otherwise it was mostly cloudy, cold, but never really doing much wintery. But where Kanazawa is mediocre in winter, it excels at spring. Spring seems to last forever here, in terms of warm/hot but not uncomfortably hot days. Even at the end of June it's usually just about perfect. Come August though and this place becomes hell on earth, but we're accenting the positive at the moment.

I took a trip down to the beach today and what a difference a week makes. When we went there a last Sunday with Chieko's friend, it was windy and cold to an unpleasant degree. But today I was strolling along the shore in the sun without a hint of a breeze and nothing more than a long sleeved t-shirt. In another month or two I'll be swimming.




I didn't take many pictures when we went to the zoo the other day, but here are a few. It seemed to be 'Act Dead' day while we were there, but it was more of a case of the animals just looking extremely dead as they basked in the scarce sunlight whenever they had the chance.




The exception were the penguins, who dutifully marched out of their pool and into the crowd of annoying children (did I say that?) to get up close and personal with humans but mostly to get at the bucket of fish that the trainer had. I'd never been so close to a penguin, and to be honest I wasn't all that impressed. They seemed a lot like seagulls that can't fly, the upside being that they can't get high enough to crap on me. I don't know why I was expecting penguins to do something fantastic, but I had higher expectations.



I generally find zoos to be depressing as the animals all seem so unhappy despite the best efforts of the zoo, and why wouldn't they? There's nothing like running wild. A lot of the animals are there because they were injured in the wild and wouldn't have survived otherwise, but is surviving in a cage a better alternative? If those friggin penguins could talk I might have some answers...

I was surprised though not really impressed to learn that our local zoo here in podunk Ishikawa actually has the oldest Hippo in Japan (about 54 years old). That sounds impressive (sort of) until you consider how many Hippos there actually could be in Japan.

On the other hand, some interesting Hippo facts:
-their closest living relative is the whale
-the earliest Hippo fossil dates to about 16 million years ago
-they are the most dangerous (in terms of killing people) animal in Africa
-(my favorite) they can run up to 30 mph

It a rather quiet Saturday evening around here. My wife has been on a Korean drama bender the last few nights and has fallen asleep prematurely this evening, which means she will probably wake up around midnight and then not sleep until tomorrow morning, but that's the way she seems to do things. I, on the other hand, am strumming a bit of guitar and having a few beers, but mostly saving myself for some springtime fun beneath the cherry blossoms tomorrow afternoon.

Enjoy your weekend people.