Water freezes before it can even go down the drain.

“It’s hot enough to fry an egg” is a pretty universally accepted way to emphasize how unbearably warm the weather is, but how should you describe the opposite situation? What shocking phenomenon would adequately illustrate that it’s far, far colder than normal?

You could go with “It’s cold enough to freeze tap water,” and as these images from Japanese Twitter user @rokudokubu show, it wouldn’t necessarily be just an expression.

@rokudokubu makes fishing lures, and on the morning of January 25 he turned on the tap in his workshop in Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture. But with the sudden plunge that temperature have taken across Japan, he found that his sink had been turned into an ice dispenser, with the water turning to ice almost as soon as it left the tap.

This bit of pipe-dispensed freezing rain wasn’t something only @rokudokubu experienced, as an elderly woman who lives in his neighborhood reported the same thing happening at her house. Nor was it a one-time affair, since @rokudokubu turned on the tap with similar results the next day.

And just to prove he didn’t stage the photo by breaking off an icicle from somewhere else and standing it up in the basin, here’s a video taken on the 26th, which hasn’t been sped up and thus shows the water solidifying in real-time.

So why did @rokudokubu want some water in the first place? Apparently his job can get a little messy, and, according to his initial tweet, he wanted to wash his face, which he did with what little bits of liquid H2O he could procure. Knowing that, we’re surprised not only that his workshop’s pipes didn’t burst, but that the craftsman’s face didn’t freeze either.

Source: Hachima Kiko, Twitter/@rokudokubu