Coming here to Hokkaido has introduced me to a lot of "firsts." Today, it was surprisingly warm. I got up into the positive side of the thermometer... in celcius of course. And so, because it went to the positive side, the ice and snow started to melt.
My apartment is in front of a really narrow concrete road. But before you can get to the concrete road, you have to walk through about 5 yards of dirt starting from the steps entering the apartment complex. Well, for the past 2 or 3 months, I couldn't see the dirt... all I saw was snow and ice. Today, I saw the dirt very well. But it wasn't dirt anymore. It became mud because the snow and ice melted.
After walking on nothing but hard, slippery surfaces for quite some time, mud might as well have been some foreign substance. Anyway, as the sun went down, the temperature fell below 0 celcius, and the water from the melted snow and ice, became ice again.
But the mud... this was today's "first." It got hard. The mud froze. The mud was hard. It's the weirdest thing. You see something that looks like mud... it has the color of mud (and not dirt or rock or concrete), it has all the properties of mud, but when you step on it, it doesn't make that expected gushy feel under your feet. Instead, it feels like rock. Crazy!
Oh, and I got the comment box back up. Post!