Japan

Slippers are everywhere. We wore them in our hotel rooms, in museums, in the schools, and then in our home stay. You take off your shoes when you enter. This happened every place we visited and our home stay was no exception. They provided us slippers so we didn’t have to dig ours out of our suitcase. Good planning on their part. Then, there are slippers in the toilet room. They are there all the time. You don’t wear your house slippers in there. Keiko-san made her house slippers. They were constructed out of old T-shirts. Waste not, want not. One shirt will make a pair of woman’s zoris. We call them flip-flops. When I was a kid they were called zoris, as do the Japanese. Now I know where that word originated. Keiko-san had made us each a pair. She said it would take too long to teach us make our own. I’m sure Andy-san will figure out how to do it when he returns—he’s pretty clever that way. I’d like to have my students research this so we can make some for ourselves. It really is a cool thing. We learned how to make cranes—we can learn to make zoris. However, I’ll bet the directions are in Japanese. Would someone see if they could find directions for T-shirt zoris, please? Let me know in a comment to my blog what you find.

Notice Andy-sans slippers at the temple.  I thought the green was interesting.