Swimming

So I went swimming for the first time in Japan.  I went to a small local pool.  It had half a dozen lanes set up in the normal way.

One lane was set up for the elderly to walk around, one lane for practice, and the others for people of varying speeds.

What interested me was the fact that everyone was slow.  Regardless of lane, everyone moved at a snails pace.  There were very few people in the pool, luckily, which meant I was able to go for 50 metres, duck under the lane and carry on in another.  This allowed me to get a bit of fitness in, while not stressing my bruised foot.  Prior to this I visited the gym.  Jumping into the pool after being in the gym is a glorious feeling.  They also have an entire ceiling shower feature, so you walk through a wall of water before you hit the pool.  It's quite cool.

What wasn't cool: a brother/brother combination intent on being social rejects.  They were incredibly bad swimmers, and would wait for me to reach their end of the lane before setting off, forcing me into a different lane.  Realising their tactic of stopping me swimming in a single lane wasn't working, they split up between two lanes, hoping to stop me entirely.  Luckily, there were three free-moving lanes, and I simply hopped into the free lane whenever necessary.  Let's just hope they don't have another brother.  (One was eighteen, the other fourteen.  Kids in Japan lack the maturity of Western counterparts, that is to say, when you meet an eighteen year old in Japan, he's actually mentally sixteen.  Extremely annoying.)

This aside, I had to go to the gym on my crappy backup bike, because I got another puncture.  This time it was a five centimetre staple.  Nice.

In related news, it was thirty-three degrees indoors, with a humidity hitting 95%.  I had three ice-cold showers yesterday, and I would still be sweating within ten minutes of leaving them.  I'm talking ice-cold, dropping my core body temperature to hypothermia levels.  I would come out shivering and still be sweating.

I don't think I've ever had heat affect me this badly before.  In Korea everyone has air-conditioning.  In Japan, my room doesn't, and schools refuse to turn theirs on because they have no money.  With my pay, I can believe that they're broke.

The upshot is, headaches every day.  Sweating when I wake up, having been sweating when I was asleep, sweating in the shower, sweating on the bike ride to school, sweating in class, sweating in the teachers room.

It's extremely hot.