The Green and the Black: Snowboarding for Beginners

Having inhaled copious amounts of kerosene, drank myself though a box of wine (this week), and lost count of the consumed chocolate bars, this is probably going to be the worst attempt to catch up on blog posts ever. Most of you know this, but for those who don't, I recently signed my contract to stay in Japan for a third year. I've already lost count of the times that I have smacked myself on the back of the head for this decision but to be completely cliche, money talks.

Kaitlyn and I after finishing a long Saturday of snow boarding.

Today would be one of those head-smacking days. I had two miserable classes in which I nearly shouted at a few surly teenage boys who tried to smart-ass me in Japanese and wouldn't complete their assignments because they outrageously claimed I never told them what to do. The highlight of the day was when the JTE (Japanese teacher of English), who sits next to me and has been reading a murder mystery novel in English, leaned over and asked me what the internet slang FOAD meant. I had no idea, but immediately pulled up Google and searched. A minute later I turned to her and relayed the definition, "Fuck off and die." No wonder it didn't appear in her Japanese/English dictionary. However, if I could have told today to foad, I would have.

Time to take a deep breath and remember last weekend, which was one of those great moments in Japan that makes me want to stay here longer. A group of about 17 excited snow sportsmen and women met in Hakuba, Nagano for a cozy weekend of skiing and snowboarding. I tried skiing last year, but decided to try snow boarding this year because there were a couple of other beginners. The weekend was amazing.

 Kaitlyn and Cory at the top of a run. 

The weekend began after Kaitlyn, Max, Jon-Mark and myself skipped out early on the Prefecture recitation contest to catch our train to Hakuba. We must have been the only group to travel without any of us owning an iphone. Also, none of us remembered to write down the name or address of the hostel. Everything was fine until we reached Hakuba around 9 pm and realized that the hostel must not have reception because none of our desperate phone calls were going through. Not panicking yet, we hopped in a taxi and took it to a hotel that we remembered was supposed to be within walking distance of our hostel. Once there we found a bar with wi-fi and Kaitlyn remembered that she had her itouch on her. After nearly 20 minutes of attempting to locate our hostel's address on the itouch, Maggie had thought to step outside and check her missed calls. Thus, she called us and came to our rescue a few minutes later whisking us off to get a cozy night's sleep.

Saturday, after the drawn-out process of eleven people renting snowboard  and ski gear and purchasing a ski-lift pass, Cory, Kaitlyn and I set out to teach ourselves how to snowboard. If you combined Kaitlyn's three experiences, Cory's one-time experience in high school, and my one-time sand boarding in Namibia, we had about 4 1/2 days worth of experience between us.

 Saturday night multi-lingual/cultural Catch-Phrase.

Cory and Kaitlyn, I believe, managed to get through the weekend without any much embarrassing mishaps. On Sunday, I, on the other hand, fell off the green beginners trail and onto a black advanced hill. Unable to crawl back up to the green, which I tried for longer than I should have, I realized that I was going to have to heave myself down the terrifying mogul hill in front of me. So I took a deep breath, cursed at myself, stood up on my board, balanced, and plunged forward. I fell on my already sore butt. Cursing, I stood up again, balanced, tried to more tentatively ease myself over the mogul. I fell again. This became a pattern I kept all the way down the hill. Stand, balance, heave myself over a mogul, fall on my butt.

 Saturday night nabe dinner.

When I was about halfway down the mountain, I spotted Cory and Kaitlyn sitting at the bottom of the mogul mountain looking around, presumably, wondering where I could have gone. Not wanting them to witness my disastrous crashing down the mountainside I waited until I had only about 15 meters to go and could see an end to the mogul hell before I called out to them. There were lots of shouts as I slid past them continuing down the mountain on the once again green trail.

Nagano mountains.

Next Kaitlyn and I decided to head up to another green trail on the other side of the mountain. We realized that this might have been a mistake when we arrived at the top and saw wind funnels of snow making their way across our path. We had to sit down on the side of the trail and wait for the wind storm to pass before making our way down. We noticed that there were quite a few less people attempting the trail today than the day before. Inching our way along, pausing whenever we saw funnels coming our way, we made it down the mountain in pretty good time with relatively less falls than our other runs.

I'm already looking forward to my next weekend snowboarding, whenever that may be.

Most photos taken by Adam Fore.