Mo' Boardin

When I initially heard that I would be heading to Hokkaido, I decided that it would be pretty silly to waste the opportunity and not learn how to snowboard. This was despite the fact that I had never done it or anything similar before, and despite the fact that I am rather uncoordinated.

Almost three months after my start, the season is now nearing its end and I finally have some decent pictures to show for it. On Sunday we drove out to Kurodake, a mountain in the middle of nowhere and still snow-covered. Since I have a new camera, I documented the experience here for the enjoyment of all!



We headed out in the morning in high spirits, despite it being 7:30 AM. Full of dreams of snow, energy drinks, and beer, we made the roughly two-hour drive into the mountains.



We rode a large ropeway gondola up the mountain, which I didn't get any good pictures of. The ski course at Kurodake is fairly short, but its almost all the way up the mountain - good snow and good views abound.



This is the view from the top of the ropeway - there's still a short walk and a chairlift to ride to the top of the snowboard area.



Here's the view of the mountain peak from the chairlift. One of our party hiked the whole way up. Myself and another guy tried to do it carrying our snowboards, and made it about 200 meters before giving up. As you can see, however, we had a beautiful day for the attempt.



Later on the weather turned worse, but still tolerable. No night skiing at this mountain, however, so we headed out at 3 for ramen, hot springs, and the drive home.

Enhanced Invigoration

My apologies for the lack of updates! My camera is currently broken, which means my supply of pictures is limited, and a post without pictures is a post without joy. Here's a post about January, however, for your reading pleasure.

For the bulk of January, my schools were on break - this is the break between the second and third trimesters of school, and lasts about a month. Hokkaido is filled with snow, mountains, and cows; during this break I decided to exploit two of these three resources and learn to snowboard (and I could always have a hamburger afterwards),

Snowboarding, like do-it-yourself piercing and teaching English abroad, requires a special kind of idiocy to attempt, a brand of gleeful obliviousness to consequences. It was in this spirit that I traveled with friends to Kamui, a mountain a few hours away. In the grand scheme of things, Kamui isn't that big; to somebody from Minnesota, it's a monster. With a great sense of foreboding, I got on the gondola and ascended into the fog... and ascended... and continued ascending. I estimate when we finally got out, we must have been at approximately the cruising height of a commercial jet, or possibly a weather balloon.

The next step is to grunt and struggle like a beached whale while you attempt to strap your feet to a (borrowed) plank of wood, or fiberglass, or whatever those things are made out of. Then you just flop around until you end up with the board end down, and fall down the hill. Easy!

My first day snowboarding was a disaster. I am told that this is a common experience. Since that day, midway through January, I've been out a little over a dozen times. Monbetsu has a ski hill in town; while it isn't quite on the same sub-orbital level as Kamui, it gets the job down and provides a good place to practice.

Here's me and Adam at the top of our local hill:



You can see the ocean behind us! Here's me a bit farther down, looking about as cool as I ever do:



Beautiful!