I love colors!

[spacealien_vamp]

The green pen I've been using to write comments on student papers is starting to get low on ink, so yesterday I decided to buy a new one. The bad news is, at the place I went shopping, the only pens they sold individually were black, blue, or red. The good news is, they had a set of ten colored fine-tipped pens in a plastic case, so I bought the whole set. Pretty colors... And they make nice, skinny lines, so I can scrunch the comments in between the students' lines without the ink blurring.

I didn't have much spare time today because a grading assignment was sprung on me, but in the few minutes at the beginning of the day before that happened, I started trying out the cro-tat set I had brought along with me, using some spare yarn leftover from the snowpeople. It's trickier than plain crochet, that's for certain. But the end result should look cute. If I do it right.

When I was leaving at the end of the day, the sun was just setting, and there were huge pink clouds all over the sky. I took a picture of this one from the hallway/balcony right outside the faculty room. The left side of the picture shows the hallways for the student classrooms (one grade per floor). The classrooms where I teach are the third (language lab) and fourth (seminar room) floors of the wing in the center of the picture. Beneath the cloud, you can kind of see the misty snow-covered mountains in the distance, also reflecting the pink light.



Colors are just awesome.

I did have one weird interchange with one of my team teachers. I still have no clue what it was about.
Teacher: I hear when you arrived at the airport, you smelled the takuan.
Me: ...?
Teacher: Takuan, Japanese pickles.
Me: ...?
Teacher: The moment you arrived in Japan, you could smell it.
Me: ...? Um...no?
Teacher: That's what I heard.

Comments

[wednesday-10-00.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure about the takuan part, but I got asked about the "Japan smell" recently myself. My guess is that the teacher meant "I heard foreigners can smell a distinct scent of Japan as soon as they get off the plane," or something along those lines. (And I have actually heard some people say this, but I have no clue what they're talking about.) At any rate, that's what Masaki-san asked me. Only I said I never noticed any smell and we laughed about it actually being the smell of the airport that they were talking about.

[mereflair.livejournal.com]

I know that smell~! The smell of Japan. It really does smell different! I think, anyway.

[spacealien-vamp.livejournal.com]

I have a really pathetic sense of smell to begin with, so I guess it's no big surprise that I've never noticed any "Japan smell."

"Manga smell"...now, that's something else entirely. If he had said, "I heard you could smell the manga the moment you got off the plane..."