So the past couple months I've gone skiing at three different places in Japan. First, one Sunday I went to Echigo Yuzawa about 1hr 15min from Tokyo on the shinkansen. I was supposed to go with three friends Andy, Florent, and Jeff, but there was no way I could get up in enough time to make the 6 AM train, meaning I would have to get up at 4:30 AM, on a Sunday, then ski all day. Well I eventually made the 9 AM train and made my way to Echigo Yuzawa. I thought there was just one ski area near the station but turns out, there were about six. So I tried to phone my friends but did not get through so I ended up asking for a suggestion from a worker at the station then went skiing by myself all day. It seems like the entire youth of Japan is learning how to snowboard. The runs are narrower than I'm used to in Colorado and there were a lot of people. Still, skiing for the first time in five years was fun. And the shinkansen ride was fun, too. I was on a double-decker type train and sitting on the top, so the view was nice and the ride was peaceful and quiet. As opposed to the ski lifts on the mountain which were blaring American hip hop and Japanese pop music. I got my groove on though.
Two weeks later I went with a large group of 32 people to Hakkoda in northern Honshu. It was about half people from work, the rest being girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, wives, and friends. We flew into Aomori airport and then took a bus for a couple hours to Hakkoda. The mountain has been open to skiing for only seven years or so. It's not really a ski resort, just a mountain with a gondola. When the crowds are thick, you have to wait in line for about 45 minutes and the gondola ride itself takes about 15 minutes. Quite a different experience. The mountain is beautiful though. The top of the mountain is covered in snow, even the tall pine trees are almost completely buried and covered in snow, so much so that they refer to them as snow monsters. The hotel had an onsen, which is the Japanese style public bath. There are separate rooms for guys and girls, and you sit on a little stool about 1 foot off the ground and bathe yourself, then sit in some steamy hot water fed from a hot spring. There are all sorts of etiquette rules to follow while you're in the onsen, you only have a little towel to cover yourself, I thought it was a wash rag, and you're not supposed to put any towels in the spring water, so you just sit there butt naked with all the other dudes and fold the towel on your head. At first I wore the regular-sized towel into the onsen, not knowing I was only supposed to take the small one, but hey every gaijin is allowed mistakes.
Two weeks later I went to Kagura Mitsumata on the IT ski trip with a group from work. It is near the same station I went to the first time I went skiing. The snow was quite icey but the weather was sunny and clear, I got a nice burn on both of my cheeks that has peeled away now. We stayed at a Japanese ryokan, which is just a traditional Japanese inn type of place, which basically means they have no beds or towels. Our rooms were tatami mats and we slept on futons, just a cushion on the floor. In the middle of the rooms they have little tables covered with blankets, that are heated underneath, I think they're called kotatsu, which sounds very similar to tonkatsu, which means pork. So the running joke was "hey come put your legs in the hot pork".
Hanami time is approaching, when all the cherry blossoms bloom. The weather has warmed a bit and I can already feel my allergies acting up. Soon there'll be lots of people walking in the streets with surgical masks on to block the pollen and whatnot. It's just something they do here. It's quite funny. Another interesting note is that after WWII they planted a ton of trees near Tokyo and every springtime they create lots of gunk in the air. Just have to deal with it.
