I am very ashamed that I didn't update at all in the month of June, but since it was a pretty terrible month, nothing really was missed.

June is the rainy season in Japan, and it rained a lot. In my first months here I'd noticed and found odd the tall concrete walls and the shallow depths of water. Like why bother with all the concrete when the water barely dampened the earth underneath? And this was everywhere, in the city with the numerous bridges and Kawanabe, whose name means 'By the River'. But yesterday I learned that the 11 months of ugliness serves its purpose, in the one month where it rains and rains and the rivers often threaten to overflow. Yet another bullet in the list of what an important role the weather has in Japanese lives.

The rainy season is about to end, and I'm none too glad. It almost made me yearn for the freezing days of December and January, when no ants would use my house as their giant playground, no mold would grow on my dishes, my kettles, my clothes and my walls, and no puddles would amass in the bottom of my car due to the window being left a centimetre open. Nevertheless, I'm happy it's July now and not January, since it's uncomfortable but still bearable to take cold showers (as my hot water was lost since the strong rain knocked out the heating plug) and it also means only two weeks, and not six months, till summer vacation.

Yes, it's July, and we're still at school. Classes don't end till the 20th. I remember being in high school, finishing in early June, and silently laughing at my mom and my old elementary school that had to wait till June 28th to finish. And then university, where we'd end in April. Alas, the summer now starts three months later than it did last year. I guess that's fair, seeing as I'm supposed to be working, and in fact still have to go to work all through the summer. Somehow I finagled two paid weeks off, where I'll be in Sapporo, the far north and opposite end of Japan, where I'll be seriously studying Japanese and enjoying the non-crippling heat.

The sad thing about the summer, well kind of, is that I won't see my elementary schools till September or October. They're definitely the highlight of the day. I have seven schools, and there's only one that I kind of detest. And even then I can't hate it completely, because most of the kids are great and it's not their fault they go to a hillbilly school. It's not actually hillbilly, but I saw a snake slithering away down the road from the school, and literally half the kids have the same surname, and most of them have really bad teeth. Although bad teeth are common everywhere in Japan, I should mention. The kids there are mostly good though, except for a few smart-alecky fifth and sixth graders, and one first grader who just really creeps me out. I've never seen such a creepy looking kid ever. He should be cute, but he's so skinny and small with such old man sunken cheekbones. He looks like a Floridian retiree in a four year old's body. The kids had to introduce themselves, and the way his jaw moved when he slowly enunciated his name sent shivers up my spine. It was just so creepy, like as if an octagenarian poltergeist invaded his body. It doesn't help that he wears a blazer too.

Besides creepy 6 year olds, the kids are awesome. I visit 7 elementary schools, and it's very hard to remember names. Especially since it seems every school (if not every class) has its stereotypical staples: the skinny girl with short hair and glasses, whose intelligence is leagues ahead of her classmates'; the sweat-drenched sports obsessed kid who repeats every word in a deep bellow; and the smiling chubby boy who eats paste when the teacher isn't looking and always falls down with excitement when I say that we're gonna play Fruit Basket. Also the kid that hates English and refuses to participate, and the clingy 7 year old who bosses her classmates around and cries at the drop of a hat, but those ones aren't as cute or funny.