Week 13 - Water shortage

I started to notice that my knees were hurting a little so I relaxed on the cycling thing for the whole week. I did start to look for a bigger seatpost, though, because the one I had now was just too short. There was none to be found in Kitami, though.

I could make good progress with our Japanese book, Minna no Nihongo I. I did all the exercise for a couple of chapters per day so I could finish studying that book by the following week. Of course, there are always things to interrupt studies even if you really wanted to concentrate on them. So, the daily life of us exchange students in Kitami is basically going to lectures, to lunch and around the city every now and then. Usually, if someone wants to go shopping for clothes, for instance, a bunch of people join him just to keep company.

I also went to onsen with Oeda-san, the Japanese guy I had done some jogging and cooking and stuff before. We could talk something in Japanese and some local people in the onsen were interested in talking to us as well. Mostly, they were interested in Finland, sauna and swimming in the snow.

On the weekend, I went to Obihiro as usual. I really wanted to cycle there, but it was raining on Friday, so I passed and went by bus. On Saturday, there were breaking news from Kitami on TV, about something related to water. It was easy enough to guess that the city was out of it and something didn't work since there were large stale pools of brown-blackish water being pictured by the cameras and following that, a shot of a woman trying to use the water in a kitchen, but nothing would come out of the tap.

In reality, about 80 000 people in Kitami were without water. For whatever reason, there was water in the dorm, but not in the school cafeteria and Mika and Samuli's apartment was out of water, too. They had to pick water up from in ten liter plastic bags from the university, to which water tank trucks had parked. There were same trucks in the city centre as well.