It's been a while, hope everybody's doing ok. How is your summer/winter going? Are you folks watching the Olympics? I have to admit, I'm watching it more than I had anticipated. The thing is, here we have an amazing Claro service, the biggest(?) telecommunication company in Latin America, offering us every single event on their YouTube channel both live and archived aside from the usual TV broadcasting. Very convenient. Seeing athletes competing against each other seems to inspire me to push a little bit harder whenever I work out these days. I'll have you know that my humble attempt to get fit is going well enough for a woman of my age; next month will mark the anniversary of my healhy journey, yay! Language study-wise, I'm still slacking off, hence my absence from this platform. I started to learn Russian for a change of scenery, and it's been fun so far. Their alphabets is quite confusing since there are some characters that resemble Latin letters, which my brain is so used to. Sometimes I feel like the Arabic alphabet was easier to learn in a way because there was no such confusion since nothing looked familiar in the first place. At times, unlearning something you know can be more difficult than learning something new.

Enough of my update, I wanted to tell you guys about a surreal thing happening in the wonderland called Internet right now. I was lucky enough to witness the process. Some of you might've gotten the glimpse of it if you're on social media, especially on Twitter (I refuse to call it X, thank you). If you're Japanese, the chances of having heard of it is much higher. There is a seal rescue center in the Netherlands, Zeehondencentrum Pieterburen, and they have a YouTube channel where they livestream the pool of the rescued seal pups 24/7. The rescue center wasn't a well-known facility nor was its YouTube channel. It was far from it.

There was only a handful of people watching the livestream until one day, one Japanese user on Twitter posted about it, calling it アザラシ幼稚園, "Seal Pup Kindergarten." He promoted the livestream, saying how adorable all the pups were and how relaxing it was to watch them. This happened on August 1st. I remember sharing the post because that playful nickname of Seal Pup Kindergarten sounded so adorable in Japanese. I wasn't the only one who felt the same. Tens of thousands of people shared the post and, before you knew it, a multitude of stressed Japanese were subscribing to the channel and flooding into the the livestream to admire the pups and ease their tired minds.

I really didn't give much thought about it when I subscribed to the channel. I'm more of a cat or a bird livestream person, but I'm definitely an animal lover who supports this type of organizations here and there. Needless to say, the seal pups are cuteness overload just by existing, but I have to be honest that I was more attracted to the overall hype. Everything exploded so fast within just a week. When I first took note of the subscriber number of said YouTube channel, it was around 67k (I'm imagining it was way lower than this at first), a couple of days after 125k, and it went up to 250k today. They didn't even have Super Chat function on the chat until today. The livestream now constantly has around 10k viewers every day, and the chat is literally a cascade of Japanese users and their comments. Since Super Chat became available today, the chat looks like nothing I've seen before, donations are swamping in every minute or so... well, more like every second.

You can imagine the bewilderment and the panic that surely followed the rescue center staff in the Netherlands. Out of nowhere, here came the horde of Japanese people greeting, cheering, aww-ing, supporting by throwing donation money at them with such force that they crashed their website. It was a happy panic for them, of course. As far as I know, the organization mostly depends on donations, and they were not doing great financially until this curious turn of events. So, they soon regained their wits and welcomed all new unexpected supporters who don't speak Dutch, let alone English, with open arms. Soon they started to use English and Japanese, possibly with a translator, to communicate better with the vast Japanese audience. Japanese followers are not deterred by the language obstacle, either. They use translator tool and some of the users who do speak English contribute in translation in the chat section.

The whole thing is so surreal to witness. I'm not glued to the chat or anything, but it's quite entertaining to watch everything unfold. The Japanese viewers are completely enamored with the pups, myself included. Some of them are planning on actually visiting the rescue center, I mean, the Netherlands. Some of them now want to learn English so that they can understand better what staff are saying. Many are losing sleep over this livestream. More and more people are posting adorable drawings of the pups on Twitter, which draws more attention to the livestream. It seems like a Japanese celebrity posted about it, too. There's so much going on. By the way, one particular man mistakenly donated 1000 euros ($1092) instead of 1000 yen ($7). God bless him.

It's also very entertaining to read comments on the chat. Japanese people tend to play with words on the Internet and this case is no exception. They describe every tiny aspec of seal pups' behavior in a very inventive way that only Japanese speakers can understand its depth and hilarity. I wish I could lend every foreigner the ability to understand Japanese and see how hilarious their conversations are in the chat. It's quite funny to watch non-Japanese people get puzzled by what the translator come up with those Japanese comments. Their usage of words is so witty and beyond hilarious, and it's entertainment in itself. I'd love to explain some of the words that have become staples in the community, but it'll make me ramble on forever. But, you don't want that.

If you're interested, go and take a look at this surreal phenomenon >>> Seal Pup Kindergarten

Happy Summer!