Tuesday, March 15, 2005



It is allergy season in Japan. For an amazingly HUGE percentage of the population it is HELL!!

Allergy season is usually hell for anyone with allergies. I thankfully, knock on wood, do not suffer from pollen allergies or so called hay fever. I have a very mild allergy to rice flowers when they open but I only experience this if I am beside a rice field. Not as problem once we move to Canada.

This year is especially bad for pollen as the weather sucked last year. The scientists have estimated that the pollen levels are 30 times worse this year. There was a small blerb in the paper the other day on how there was a forest fire scare due to a huge cloud of pollen. Now that is bad.

JiXiang goes out for a walk every day. The way I see it, if this girl can survive this season and become sensitized to pollen now she will never have an allergy problem. So far she looks good.

It almost feels like every single Japanese person I meet has allergies. No exaggeration. You can divide the population into 4 parts.
Part one
is the lucky bunch with no allergies. Now my local observations tend to see this group as the elderly people. I think this is due to the way they were raised. I am sure that when they were little babies their parents didn't overly protect them by not allowing them to breath fresh air for the first 6 months of their lives the way Japanese parents do now. Life way back then had you outside at a day old and slinging an ax to keep the hearth going before you were one.

Part two
is the group of people what walk around imitating the Michael Jackson look. They wear masks of all kinds. The creepiest one is the one that strangely resembles a jock strap. These people claim that the masks really do work. I am just going to take their word for it as I have no desire to wear one my self. As an English teacher these masks make work very difficult. You can barely hear your student behind the mask and almost everyone who wears them mumbles terribly. Then there are the smokers who unhook only one side so that the mask is hanging off one ear while there is a cigarette hanging out of their mouth. I guess no one ever explained to them that smoking makes allergies worse.

Then there is part three.
These amusing people have NO qualms about walking around in public or shaking your hand with a straight face while giant wads of tissue paper are stuck up their noses. I personally find these people very amusing. Now I do admit that it is totally disgusting but I will accept the people belonging in groups one, two or three into my home any day of the week.

Now part four group people all need to be shot! They are the snorkers. BLOW YOUR DAMN NOSE!!!

Like I said, tissue paper up the nose is WAY better then a snorker any day of the week.

In this office we have all four parts. Even a jock strap mask.
Return Home

Posted by (Top)Andrea::3/15/2005 :: 0 Comments:

Post/Read Comments

---------------------------------------