Week 29: Skating and Science

This week I went skating!!!!!!!

I heard from my prof that it was possible to go skating in the neighbourhood beside ours (Tsukisamu), so I made plans with my labmate and her family to go on Saturday. My Chinese labmate overheard, so we invited him and his wife.. and then another labmate overheard, so we invited him, too! In the end there were seven of us, but only two of us had ever skated before. I was glad that my Japanese labmate came, because he already knew how to skate and I wasn't sure how I was going to teach five other people how to skate simultaneously.

After I led everyone to the wrong location, we eventually found the arena at the Tsukisamu Gymnasium. I was a bit surprised, because to me the rink was tiny considering that it is the sometimes-home of the Oji Eagles, but the ice was in great shape and there were a good number of people.

Go Eagles!

Everyone turned out to be a very fast learner, so there were no injuries and only a few small falls. By the end of our two-hour session, pretty much everyone was skating with only minimal use of the walls! The rink also rents skates, which is helpful because it seemed like there ware a lot of first-timers on the ice. The default was actually (black) figure skates, which I think is a good move because I think it's much easier to learn to skate with figure skates vs. hockey skates, but I wasn't sure I was going to be able to convince the guys to try figure skates. 

There were some young figure skaters practicing in the middle of the ice. They were AMAZING. If I could have taken photos without being a horrible creep I would have. 

On Sunday I ran a few errands. I picked up a Japanese copy of Anne of Green Gables ("Redhead Anne" in Japanese). That will be my winter project. I had been thinking of buying it for my labmate's kid for Christmas, so I asked her mother if she thought that she'd be able to read it, but she worried that it might be too difficult. But today I showed her my book and asked her if she could read the title and she told me that she's reading Anne of Green Gables at school! So I guess it's a good thing that I didn't buy it for her after all :p

Redhead Anne

I made muffins today with my friend's kid and helped her and her friends make some "invisible ink" lemon juice drawings. That made me very popular with her friends. I have a lot of friends under the age of ten in Japan. Here is some artwork:

A snowman

 

Two artists

Kitty!

A ghost

"Linda-san"