old people
The cucumber is a magnificent vegetable. Apart from simply being eaten as part of a healthy diet, they can also be cute, made into art, brought to life, and even given as treats to helpful Shiba Inu. With so many uses, is there anyone out there who could possible hate cucumbers?
Apparently, yes. There’s one town in Japan where it is strictly forbidden to grow or eat cucumbers. Why do they hate the vegetable? And is their rule actually valid or are they all in a pickle over nothing?
Japanese people have a reputation for being polite and well-mannered, so the frequent sight of so many people, rather than giving up their seat as they should, suddenly becoming engrossed in their smartphones or pretending to sleep when a pregnant woman or elderly person boards always comes as a bit of a surprise to me.
Of course, there are still plenty of kind and courteous people who offer up their seat without fail. On such occasions, the elderly passenger will often decline the offer, either because they will be getting off in a couple stops, or because despite appearances they still feel young and genki enough to stand for the journey. One elderly man in particular, though, took offense at a young boy who kindly offered up his seat recently.
Life as a retiree isn’t exactly easy. Sure, you don’t have to get up and go to work every morning, but that also means you don’t have a very substantial income. While your retirement checks might help you put food on the table, they’ll probably seem a bit underwhelming as you get even older. And in Japan, you can’t even go out and get a depressing job as a greeter at Wal-mart.
But there’s always Yahoo! Auction, where you can sell any manner of things you might have lying around the house. Old instruments, old clothes, old dolls, or even, what the heck, how about some old pornographic photos? Any of those are sure to fetch a tidy sum online, but you might want to be careful about those explicit photos–they could very well end up with you getting arrested, as one 83-year-old Tokyo retiree learned!
How limber are you? If you’re like me and you sit in an office chair all day hunched over a computer, you’re probably not too flexible. But, you know, that’s what happens with age, right? You start getting older and all of a sudden your body just goes kaput. I mean, it’s not like there are old women doing sideways somersaults and throwing their legs over their heads with reckless abandon, right?
Oh, wait, of course there are!
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