Yesterday my brother told me he can't come visit me in Japan this summer. He can't afford it. It's kind of ridiculous since I know he has tons of money, but he's a good saver & I can respect that. At first I was upset, but then I remembered him saying he wanted to climb Mt. Fuji this time around.
Today I climbed a mountain with my students. Well, more like a mountain range actually. Of course it was MUCH less work than Fuji-san would take, but still I think I'm glad I won't be doing that this summer. You know that expression, "what goes up, must come down,"? Well, in mountain climbing it works the opposite way; what goes down, must go up. Again. Because, of course, you've already gone up once in order to get to the place you were going down from.
I pretty much hate mountains. And climbing. Up or down. As I was walking (read: slipping, scrambling, sliding on my hands and knees over the wet, dirty, mossy rocks) with a few of the 2nd year otaku girls all they could say was, "I can't do this! I'm gonna die! I wanna go home!" And I couldn't have agreed more. Of course, I couldn't say so b/c as a "teacher" I have to be a good example. But I couldn't really say much in the way of encouragement either since I was barely breathing enough just to walk (read: drag myself up the mountain on tree branches that left huge splinters in my hands) without talking. I just contented myself with thoughts of the dead bodies of all the other teachers (and maybe a few students...) strewn across the mountain path after I blew them up for taking us on this "outing" where we didn't even look at anything or stop to learn about the area.
Yep, Hayato would've been proud jealous of the massacre I was planning.
We had one interesting conversation along the way though:
Me: What do we do if it rains?
Ai-chan: We get wet.
Me: Eh?
Mizu-chan: You brought a raincoat right?
Me: Yeah...
Mi-chan: If it rains, put it on.
Me: And...we keep climbing up?
Ai-chan: Well, we can't go back. We have to keep going forward.
And that's the way it goes.
It rained. We put on our raincoats & went on. They kept saying they were going to die the whole way. I kept thinking about how I was going to kill everyone there. But we went on anyway, & when it was over I decided, yep, I still hate mountains. They got my shoes dirty after all.
