I didn’t notice the snow this morning.  It’s a national holiday and we had no plans to go out.  Our apartment is on the 24th floor and when I looked out I saw white.  I assumed I was looking at a low cloud and thought nothing more of it.  As the day went on I saw more and more mentions of snow on Facebook so I decided to take a closer look out the window.  The low cloud was actually a blizzard of wet snow.  Our balcony was covered in snow and so it seems was most of the city.  I have never seen so much snow in Tokyo.

I like the way snow looks and I always think that it will be a good idea to go for a walk.  Marty was amused as he had suggested that we go skiing today and I had told him that I didn’t want to go out in the snow.  But I’m not always consistent and walking in the snow seemed very different than travelling to a mountain to get to snow.  I did end up wearing my ski wear as there was a gale blowing and I wanted to be comfortable.  As always it was not easy to walk in the snow.  After about thirty minutes of plodding along the muscles in my legs started to complain.  We had to be very careful near the roads as the cars were having a terrible time getting anywhere and some of them were sliding across crossings when they should have been stopping.

I wanted to take pictures but it wasn’t easy to do that.  Apart from the blizzard making it incredibly difficult to focus correctly the lens didn’t like the change in temperature and steamed up.

I do hope that the weather improves before I travel next week.  Snow always means delays and many flights were cancelled.  I was amused to read about the train delays in one news article:

Delays of as long as 10 minutes are expected for bullet train services to and from Tokyo.

I do love living in a city where a delay of 10 minutes makes the news.