*I taught my last class in Japan and am officially on vacation!!!! Yahoo!!!!
Today is hot. The rain has let up recently, allowing an intense heat to settle over the area. And it's not just hot- it's humid. I realized the other day, while trudging up a flight of overcrowded stairs at the Sagami-Ono station, that I was breathing half oxygen, half moisture. The air is so thick that you can feel it in your throat and lungs. And as for my hair, well that's just a complete lost cause. Today I finally went to the hair salon because I could not stand it any longer. The guy chopped off a lot more than I had expected (and more than I think I asked for... but I did ask in Japanese so maybe instead of "just the ends" I said "hack of a few inches", I can't be sure.) but the good news is that my shorter hair-do is much cooler and more managable in this humidity. And hopefully my hair cut will also keep me from shedding lke crazy during my homestay in Nara. My apartment gets so disgusting after just a few days, with hair tumble weeds rolling from the kitchen to the bathroom and sticking to my clothes and feet. I really don't want to gross out my host family like that. I would be seriously embarrassed.
And so maybe it is because of this intense heat that I almost accidentally cooked myself to death inside my apartment. The temperature has been rising lately, and so I have been using the airconditioner more and more. At first it worked fine, but recently it seemed like it wasn't getting cold in my apartment. Today was the climax. It was so hot in my apartment. I figured it was too hot outside and that my air conditioner just couldn't keep up with the heat and humidity. I got out of my apartment and walked around for a while, enjoying the air conditioned stores around my house (it did not, however, occur to me that the stores' air conditioning was working fine. Idiot.) But I started to feel a little tired from walking around in the heat, so I headed home. Inside the 'oven', I decided I needed to lay down for a bit. An hour later, my doorbell rings and wakes me up. I hadn't intended to go to sleep, but I am pretty sure that if my neighbour hadn't come over to my room to ask me a question, I would have remained in my heat-induced sleep coma all night. By then, unfortunately, my brain was cooked. I was so drowsy and disoriented that I think I first spoke to my neighbor in Spanish, and was really confused when she answered in English. Finally, Koichi calls me on Skype, and after talking for a bit, asks me what's wrong. I tell him about my sweltering apartment, and he asks me to hold the AC remote (which is all in Japanese) up to the web cam. After a few minutes of fidgeting, sweet, cold air starts to pour out of the air conditioner. I immediately feel 100 times better. So what was the problem with my air conditioner? I had turned on THE HEAT! Yes, so in 90 degree weather, I had my heater blasting away night and day. I almost gave myself heatstroke inside my own apartment.
There is a happy ending to this story, though. The AC is softly blowing 23 degree C air into my apartment, and I am starting to shiver a little as I write this. I am kind of afraid to turn the AC down though after my near-death experience, so I think I will just put on extra-warm socks tonight, and maybe use an extra blanket to sleep. I just hope I don't wake up with frostbite...
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