Surviving a Japanese Winter

Let it be said: I hate winter.  With a passion.  I hate the cold.  I hate the rain.  I hate the wind.  I even now hate the snow.  I hate getting out of bed when the ambient temperature in my apartment is hovering around 2 degrees Celsius and hate going out to my car only to find the windscreen frosted over with ice which will need scraping off before I can go anywhere.  I hate putting on 17 layers of clothing just to keep warm and I hate being made to run around the oval every Tuesday/Thursday morning in an effort to warm-up in lieu of indoor heating.  I hate the fact that it gets dark early and I hate arriving home after the sun has set after a long day at school.  I hate not seeing the sun and feeling its warmth on my skin.  I hate the way Japanese houses have no insulation and the way that Japanese teachers insist on opening windows around the school on the assumption that it's colder indoors than outdoors at any given hour of the day.  To re-iterate: I hate winter.

To be fair, I don't usually hate winter this much in Australia and I didn't hate it as much last year.  It's just that last year's winter - my first in Japan - was such a rude awakening that I had a really awful time and it's scarred me for Japanese Winter # 2.  Last year, for example, I can recall being so ridiculously excited about seeing it snow for the first time.  I was hanging out, biding my time, counting down until the day that the temperature would fall low enough for it to snow.  I remember being giddy at the first sight of snow on the mountain-tops across from my apartment, jumping around outside with joy during my first snowstorm and taking pictures of the snow on everything (snowy branches, snowy cars, snowy playground equipment, snowy roads, snowy fields, snowy roofs etc) - I couldn't get enough!

But now I'm over it.  Snow was cool at first but now I'm done with it.  After all, I'm an Aussie girl from the hot side of Oz.  I'm not built for the cold, I was born into the heat.  I belong on the beach, not huddled under 4 blankets with the heater cranked up as high as it will go.  And as undecided as I am about where fate shall take me once I finish with the JET Programme, I know that chasing summer across the globe sounds like the best idea so far!