Living in Student accomodation means that even if you were to never leave your room and always kept the curtains shut, you would ALWAYS know when it was snowing. This is due to the screeches of Malaysian, Thai and Greek students who have never seen snow before (don’t get me wrong, I’m not mocking them for the fact. After all, one of my course mates (age 20ish) has never been to London. I know a japanese girl who once, when on a train with me, suddenly started pointing out the window, shouting, “Look, look! That cow, it’s SITTING DOWN! Having only seen them on TV or in photos before (and always standing up) she was not aware that they had this ability. Some of my classmates (in their second year of Japanese Studies) were saying the other day that they have never spoken Japanese to a Japanese person (other than Sensei). “Is it a real language? Does it actually work?” they asked, taking the piss out of themselves. They did make me laugh…!)

Such was the case last night then, when we had our first proper snow of the season. Initially I felt a bit bah-humbug ish, as they were disturbing my work, but then I decided to cheer up, and walk over to *Cough’s* to pick her up for the weekend.

It was still snowing heavily; this made me smile.

Having dropped *Cough’s* 13 suitcases off at my place, we went to the park where she rolled a jolly big snowball. Too tired to roll another for the head, I volunteered my own atama, as shown below.

 
 
 

Following our frollicking in the snow, and having watched *cough* munch her way through a kilo of pack ice, I began to feel a bit peckish. Coupled with this was a desire to take a romantic stroll through the snow-covered city centre, and another somewhat stronger inclination to avoid doing any more study.

We finally chose to eat at the all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurant ‘Jumbo’, which I’d never been to before. Must admit I think I had more cheesecake and grapes than noodles and rice.

Incidentally, the Chinese characters for ‘Jumbo’ literally mean ‘rare treasure’. However, pronounce those same kanji in Japanese (Japanese using at least 3000 ‘borrowed’ Chinese characters) and it comes out at ‘chinpou’, which means, somewhat inappropriately for a restaurant, ‘penis’.

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