Nagano

So with winter in full swing, and vacation time to use up, my friends and I headed out to Nagano to do some skiing. Now, I'm not a half bad skiier, I can get down my fair share of hills, no problem. But I had never been snowboarding. It looked easy enough, one suicide stick to control instead of two, though you dont get the handy balancing poles. I suppose you could use them, but you'd look like a jackass, and looking cool is way more important than keeping your ribs intact.

So, sign me up for the largest pair of rentable snowboarding boots you've got, I decided to give it a try.

I was on my ass within seconds of strapping onto the board.

I picked myself up, dusted myself off, hit the snow three seconds later.

Not a great start.

Now I should preface this with the understanding that the Tokyo girl I was seeing at the time, who was there with me, was damn near professional grade on a snowboard. She was also absolutely without mercy.

We started on the black diamond course and moved up from there on the difficulty scale. If you don't know what a black diamond course is, you can infer from the name. Let's just say its not the "pleasantly emerald" course.

My two other friends are not as skilled, but they'd done it before and quickly got back in the hang of it. I soon found myself alone on the slope. Soon, like, 30 seconds after they dragged me up the damn thing. Great. I guess I'll just figure it out on my own, thanks, no worries. Trial and Error, the best way to learn a dangerous and often lethal sport.

Pure Evil.

My troubles were compounded by the fact that I couldn't see a damn thing through the goggles. I'm one of those people that radiates heat like a blast furnace at all times. Women with cold bed feet love me, but goggles and I don't get along.

I'm nothing if not stubborn though, and I'd be damned if I'm getting stuck up on that hill alone. So several hundred bruises and a stress injury to the tendons in my thighs later, and I've pretty much got the hang of the side to side, lean back turn, and I can get a good 30 feet or so before I wipe out. A couple hours sees me safely down the mountain.

Awesome, made it down alive. Now I can find the bunny slope and get some practice time on the basics in a controlled (considerably less likely to kill me) environment.

Somewhere inside my head I hear Murphy laugh, and sure enough, I turn around and there are my friends. We're going over to the double black diamond.

Outstanding.

So, up we go, and down I go again, and again, and again. Soon, I'm alone on a slope that is about 3 degrees shy of being categorized as a cliff. Nothing quite so humbling as watching little Japanese girls go swishing and giggling by you as you try to pick yourself up out of the snow every 30 feet or so.

But they say you learn fast in the metaphorical fire, and I was getting better, albeit, the injuries I was sustaining via this method of practice were slowly making it harder for me to put what I was learning into action. Muscles were screaming with strain and exhaustion, the concussion I got from a frozen rock in a patch of ice that put me down head first had my brain throbbing against my skull, my normally impenetrable impact cushion in back was warning me that shields were failing and I would not be sitting comfortably on anything that week, and perhaps most importantly, my beard had frozen solid and was starting to fall off my face in the form of icicles.

Yeeeep. Time to hop that bus home, I reckon.

So I'm halfway down this slope when, you guessed it, I run across my friends again at one of the midway stations. This is a sort of "choose your course" area on the slope. Go slightly right and you're on a leisure cruise down to the bottom, go center and you've got a bit of a challenge. Go slightly left and you get to dodge trees while you try to see if you can outrun your own sonic boom.

 I could have gone right.

Everyone was ready to call it a day...

Except my girl. (Sound of laughter in the back of my head, Murphy grabs a beer and settles in to watch the show.)

She wants to take the far left path and go to the Olympic Course slope. Yes, we're at THAT Nagano.

Now I'll admit, I was intrigued. I like seeing things that have historical significance, and this certainly qualified. The two friends took the easy course down and hopped a bus.

I got a smile from the girl as a reward for my decision to die an icy death, and followed her along a very narrow trail into the woods.

Less than a minute later, the woods open up... and I am snowboarding along the side of a 50 foot cliff over rocks and trees, on a path thats barely wide enough to turn the board sideways on...

People, I don't know how to stop this frikking deathsled without veering to the side.

Option A: Hold it straight and pick up immense speed along the narrow path beside the probably fatal drop, hoping there are no sudden turns or bumps.

Options B: Try to slow down and probably slide my bruised ass right off the side of the cliff.

Needless to say, since I'm sitting here writing about it, I went with option A.

Anyway, we made it to the Olympic Course, and I got left behind again, so I took the opportunity to snap some pictures and make my leisurely way down to the bottom.

 Beautiful Nagano

The lift down from there took us out near our lodge, and we actually ended up beating our friends home by a couple hours, as their bus went all the way around the base of the mountain, making stops.

Now, I make light of it all, but it was in fact a very exciting day for me, and I had a great time. I got a chance to push my boundaries and survived the hell out of that bitch. It was a day well worth remembering.

I decided a trip to the lodge's hot spring would do alot to alleviate the accumulation of bruises I'd aquired throughout the day, and headed in to try it out. This was another first for me, and it took a bit of getting used to.

After showering in preparation, I picked out a pool and stepped in. It didn't take me long to notice that whatever spring I sat in, all the Japanese men would get up and move to another one. Needless to say, that was a bit offputting, but I was on a mission to limit my bruising, so to hell with em, I'd have my own pool and like it.

I was a bit worried that I'd missed a step in some kind of custom and had been offending everyone, so when I got back to the room, I asked my girl why they kept moving. She laughed and lifted her pinky up in the air, wiggling it around.

"Penis fear."


Come to think of it, she wasn't such a bad chick after all.


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Top Shots [Kannon's Pagoda]

Kannon's Pagoda

Sensoji Temple, Tokyo

Christmas Time in Tokyo

That first Christmas/New Years in Tokyo.

Kannon Pagoda at Sensoji Temple in Asakusa, Tokyo.

I headed to Sensoji Temple to hear the ringing of the bells that I had been told was the seasonal tradition. There was a large crowd gathered, we stood, time passed, no bells. Gyped.

Turned out it was just Hatsumode, the celebration of the years first visit to the temple, so at midnight, a bunch of monks came out and let the crowd rush in. That was pretty much the highlight of the evening.

Anyway, I did get a few good shots while I was there, so it wasn't a total loss. The nightshot of the Kannon Pagoda above, is still one of my favorite shots from Japan.

New years day rolled around, and again I was told that the tradition was to go to the Imperial Palace to hear the address from the Emperor. It's one of only two times each year that the Inner Grounds are opened to the public, so of course, I wanted to see inside.

I must have missed something, because mainly I was just herded along a driveway with several hundred other people, and we ended up in a big parking lot overlooked by a balcony in a fairly normal looking building. The Emperor and his family came to the balcony, said some things I, of course, could not understand, and everyone waved the little paper Japanese Flags they'd been given.

Pays to be tall in the land of the Rising Sun.

So, yeah, it was a bit underwhelming, but I'm a silver lining kind of guy. I got a neat paper flag for free, and some nifty shots of the city on the way out.

 This part of town is considered a park. Notice there are actual gaps of sky between the buildings. Downright rural, for Tokyo.

And to be honest, it was a truly beautiful, brisk winter day to be out on the streets. I didn't even really notice all the weird stares and double-takes at the big foreigner in the long black coat, or the extremely nervous looking security guards.

I'm fairly certain the horse was asleep at this point.

Not a half bad way to usher in a new year.

Oh, one last thing before I go. At some point my buddies and I went out for a couple drinks. One or two at the most, I'm certain. Anyway, I fell asleep on the train home along with all the other people drunkenly falling asleep on the train that time of night, and was awoken by the gentle poking of the train conductor, informing me the train was at the end of the line. Well, that's what he would have been informing me if I spoke Japanese, I figured it out regardless.

I had missed my stop. Actually, I hadn't, I would have had to have been on the right train to have missed my stop.

Anyway, there was one other person vacating the train. A man in a pale tan long jacket, with a rounded english style bowler cap and a brief case. He walked quickly down the corridor. I followed him around a corner, and ended up here:

Ever have that bout-to-be-made-into-soylent-green feeling?
 

Except... there's nobody there. At all.

Now, number one, where the hell did that guy go?

Number two, I don't know if you've ever been to Tokyo but... there is nowhere this empty in the subway system in downtown. Ever.

And it was absolutely silent. No road sounds. No train sounds. No sounds.

Then the beeping began. Faint, off in the distance, a strange pattern. Then it stopped. And the absolute silence returned.

Seriously considering fleeing.

I'm not quite sure what happened after that. I have no idea where I was. But not long after, I woke up on another train that was within jogging distance (4 miles) of my apartment. I was good and sober by the time I made it back.

Anyone been here before?