Casualty Tardiness - Week 39 (February 10 - February 16)

Niseko Annupuri from the bottom of the hill, early AM.

See those clouds? You know what that means later on, kiddies

Truly a beautiful summit...

Same picture from the top of Niseko Village as on the previous post. notice something missing?

Whiteout conditions prevailed for most of the day

I discovered chair lifts make for interesting graphical composition

Whiteout, yeah?

Lunch! Kim-chi ramen is amazing. Notice huge brownie.

Grand Hirafu. The third resort and the only one I skied for one day only. The inclement weather mostly shields Yotei-san from close inspection.

The beginnings of sunset. Or an orbital defense laser. Not sure which.

Sugoi!

Last sunset in Hokkaido!

Dinner at the cafeteria...huge ball of wasabi on the left side.

Yeah, that's right. X-Wing. Star Wars reference ON MY SKIS.

Yotei-san from the train. What a view.

Shoreline of the north pacific...along with vacant fishing boat. Creepy.

Clean room = finger guns!


Casualty Tardiness

Week 39

I woke up the next morning in my quaint little hotel absolutely sore as hell. Skiing really takes it out of you, especially when you do as many runs as I did the day before. Towards the end of the day a minor injury I had in my left hip and leg began to seriously, seriously hurt. It didn't help that the hill was also getting progressively icier. The skiers among my readers know the feeling I'm talking about.

For those who aren't, here's the explanation.

Towards the end of the day on almost any ski hill, the top layer of snow (powder in this case) gets slowly compressed and pushed around, usually ending up mostly in small piles or in long flat patches.

The crappy part of this is the conditions it creates later on in the day. Basically, patches of slick ice combined with piles of snow, which makes for unpredictable riding conditions. It's also especially annoying if you happen to have a sore leg like I did at the time. Whenever you are carving back and forth down the hill, should you happen to hit an ice patch your skis (usually) immediately loose the edge they were cutting. This causes a kind of rattling effect in the leg lower down the hill as your ski slides against the ice. It causes a really fast, bumpy vibration, almost like those anti-sleeping-while-driving strips placed along highways.

Extremely uncomfortable for sore muscles.

So, extremely long story short, I was hurtin' when I got up that day.

But, I got over it quick and before long was on the hills feeling fine once again. This was of course after having a second EXCELLENT breakfast prepared for me by the owner of the hotel. They really were very, very nice people.

The second day up the mountain started with perfectly clear, beautiful, beautiful weather. I was on my way up for the first time shortly after 9 AM. Unfortunately though, these conditions were not long to last. After the first few runs the clouds moved in and started choking off the summit of the mountain.

The drag about this whole day was that the gates to the back country sections of the hill were open all day and I was sorely tempted to break off and enjoy some fresh, untouched powder. I had, however, promised my mother not to take any risks, and due to the fact that an avalanche had occurred the day before on the opposite face of the mountain and my lack of a proper partner in the descent, I decided to abstain.

I spent a good part of the beginning of the trip freaking out about trying to find an ATM. Unfortunately, nowhere on the mountain seemed to accept my card and I was fast running out of cash. I ended up checking the resorts at the bottom of all three of the hills and came up dry in each case. One helpful employee suggested I take a twenty minute bus ride into the middle of the city to visit a bank.

Yeah.

Not doing that in ski boots buddy.

So I spent the rest of the day doing the same old same old. Catching some nice powder, slingshotting back and forth between the top and bottom of the mountain, all that nice stuff. It started to snow in the early afternoon, so I ducked into the 1000m hut restaurant, the same place I'd eaten lunch the previous day. It was amazing, just like the day before when I had some amazing seafood curry. The nama biru was also very good. I also had a HUGE brownie, which was also fantastic.

The rest of the day went very well. I very nearly missed the last lift over to my side of the mountain though. In the last hour of the day I did three full summit runs down from the top of each of the three resorts. I made the final lift to the top of the mountain with about 2 minutes to spare. Close. The chair lift closed and ski patrol ushered everyone down shortly afterwards. I stuck around on the slope to take a few pictures of sundown, then partook of night skiing for a couple hours. I finished off the night pounding down the hills to The Killers' awesome track, Spaceman.

Exhausted, I stopped by the cafeteria at the bottom of the hill for a nice ramen dish before dragging my gear the ten minutes back to the pension. I informed the owner on my arrival that I was unable to find an ATM and needed to know where the nearest one was. As it turned out, it happened to be at a 7/11 several kilometers down the road. It also turned out that my hosts were about to pick up the next guest at the station. So, shortly after 9 PM I was withdrawing cash from an ATM then waiting for the owner and the next guest to return.

A few minutes later I was sitting in the dining room at the pension enjoying some light dinner conversation with the new guy. Turned out he was US Navy, up for 4 days of snowboarding. I tried to give him the best idea I could of the layout of the mountain before. Didn't stay up too much longer though, due mainly to the knowledge that I had to be up very early the next morning in order to catch my flight. I bid adieu and as a final goodbye discovered that my replacement needed to take out cash.

Ah, the cycle continues.

Next day simply saw me waking up nice and early to catch the very first train out of Niseko all the way out the airport and a quick flight back to Tokyo. It was a pretty cool train ride, starting with amazing views of Yotei-san, interspersed with large numbers of high school kids commuting to school. It all culminated when I noticed a couple of girls next to me trying to pronounce a particularly long word on one of their shirts. I helped em' out by pronouncing it for them, which led to a large number of "sugoi"s and embarrassed giggling. That's actually the first time I think I've noticed anyone trying to sound out English outside of the classroom in all of my time over here. I was expecting to be able to help people out with stuff like that much more...First chance in Hokkaido though I guess.

Always happy to help!

I enjoyed a nice BLT lunch in the airport and accidentally ordered a beer even though it was like 11 AM and I didn't really want it.

What, it's reflex now in a restaurant!

Hehe.

Finally back at my apartment after a short flight with a bit of turbulence (and a window seat, score!), I was happy to just chill out for the rest of the day and decompress.

The work week started for me on Thursday, having arrived back from Hokkaido on Wednesday. It went well, if somewhat weird due to how short it was combined with the erratic sleep schedule I'd had over the last week or so. This didn't help when I slept in on Friday and was late to work for the first time in nearly 10 months. It actually really deeply affected me. I woke up multiple times over the next couple weeks and months in a cold sweat thinking I was late for work. Nightmares, I'm not kidding. It still happens from time to time and really pisses me off.

The rest of the week, including the weekend was, if I remember correctly, extremely unremarkable. I spent most of my time planning up the trip that was to happen the week after, as well as cleaning my apartment, etc. Nothing great. Maybe Rock Band in Shimo? I don't remember...

Next week it's once again unto the breach for even more skiing action!

Snow-blindingly yours...

Ian "Mello Yello" Cantello

Solo Chute - Week 38 (February 3 - February 9)

Solo Chute

Week 38

Well, what can I say, other than vacation time!

This was a pretty brutally long week for me in that I was so excited for the weekend to come. I mean, it’s not every day you get to venture out completely on your own to a place you've never been before. Well, maybe not completely, but at least 91% on your own. That’s a completely scientific figure by the way. MIT calculated it for me. A shout out to my boy Dave in MIT's Complex Percentages Lab!

So the week was spent doing final preparations for the weekend, which would come one day early for me. I took the Saturday and Tuesday off so that I could link a Wednesday national holiday to the weekend and make for an ad hoc five day vacation.

On Friday my school was blessed with a new manager. I met her and worked with her and Kayoko’s substitute teacher, while my usual comrade in arms was still off in the south of Japan. Kayoko actually helped me out a lot in planning the trip up to Hokkaido, namely in regards to hotel reservations. She found some really great places as will soon be related.

I left with plenty of time on Saturday morning. I was trying to save as much money as possible on flights so it was pretty late in the day. I flew out at around 5:30 and arrived without much trouble on a snow-whipped runway at New Chitose airport shortly after 7:00. It was damn nice to feel legitimately cold again, and I was happy to have my ski jacket all set up and ready.

A short train ride took me to the capital of Hokkaido, famous for its brewing company of the same name, Sapporo. I stepped out of the station into the main reason I came to this area of Japan...

A blizzard.

Nice, fat snow flakes, and a lot of em’. It was a pretty heavy storm and visibility was quite low. I donned my Montreal Canadians tuque and headed off down the wintry streets, gawking at the uniform stretch of high rises close to the station.

I had a bit of difficulty navigating at first. I thought I had a good mental picture of how the city was laid out, but as it turned out that was not really true. I eventually had to bust out my compass and figure out in which direction Odori park lay, a thin strip of green space that bisects downtown to the south of the station. The snow didn’t help with navigation either due to the limits it put on how far ahead I could see.

Eventually I made it to Odori park, the location of the Yuki Matsuri, or the Snow Festival. It runs every year for week or so at the beginning of February. Most of the sculptures are built by the soldiers from the Japanese Self Defence Force base located near Sapporo with a bit of help from outside sources as well. It was coming up on 9 at this point but the park was still super busy and I got my first few views of the sculptures that had sprung up over the last month in preparation for this week.

Slipping my way through the park (I was wearing my converse all stars, not great for traction) I made it to the other side and walked a few minutes further to my Hotel, the Sapporo Prince.

The Prince Hotel chain is a set of luxury resorts across Japan. They specialize heavily in ski resort hotels and often own the ski hills they’re located at outright. This particular hotel I was staying in was quite nice and not too expensive I suppose for one night. It was conveniently close to the snow festival as well.

Once I dropped my stuff off and had a quick dinner I threw my jacket back on and walked the couple of blocks back to Odori park to get a quick look at the snow festival before the longer opportunity I would have the next day.

It was pretty cool to walk through the snow peaking at all the different sculptures, although they were slightly obscured by the few inches of white stuff that had already fallen. I’d guess that about 4 inches of snow had fallen in the last few hours so the sculptures were looking a bit fuzzy around the edges.

My trip out through the festival didn’t last too long that night though. It shut down shortly after I arrived, kind of in an unusual manner too, what with the troop trucks and military jeeps zipping into the park to do nightly maintenance on the sculptures.

The sculpture I was most happy to find that night was of one of the most famous of all videogame enemies in existence, a goomba from Super Mario Bros. Awesome.

Once the park closed I found my way back to the hotel and, small bottle of wine in hand, relaxed and enjoyed the enhanced sports package that came on the TV. I was happy to watch my first full half of English Premier League Football, Manchester City vs. Middlesbrough. After playing Fantasy Football with Sean and Tuan for so long it was nice to finally see an actual game, and even better to recognize the names of a few of the players.

By the time this was finished I was debating renting a movie and watching that too, but it was starting to get a bit late. Instead I took advantage of the bar on the 28^th storey of the building. I'd been debating about going up there since I got back from the park but was sort of naysaying myself over it. I finally decided that I would regret it if I didn't. I headed up at around quarter past 12 and spent half an hour reading the day’s newspaper while taking breaks to marvel out the window at the snow blowing over the city.

Melissa and I have sort of this running commentary on “Holy shit, I’m in Japan” moments. We both get this from time to time, just a sudden reminder for whatever reason that we happen to be so far from home and how amazing it is to actually be in Japan. The Prince Hotel’s bar was about 30 minutes of this for me. I spent probably 75% of my time there just starring out the window thinking about what I was doing.

It just struck me really hard that, on the eve of my graduation from University a couple years ago, had some mysterious figure pulled me aside and uttered the following:

“Ian, in about a year and a half, you will have quit your job, broken up with your girlfriend and travelled halfway around the world to work in a country where you speak essentially none of the language and will have been living there for 9 months. The weekend that you mark that ninth month as complete, you will be about to go skiing in Hokkaido. You will spend a night reflecting about this in an expensive bar at the top of a hotel by yourself.”

I’d have told this mysterious shadowy figure that he was full of shit. Why? Because at that time I was pretty much scared to do anything and could barely consider travelling outside my city much less travelling around the world. I'm not sure why that was and what changed my mind about that, but it certainly has.

Funny how life will throw curveballs.

I had one drink, stayed there for half an hour and paid 1900 yen. I did say it was expensive. The bar was totally empty, which was also unfortunate. I was hoping to meet a few other people up there and have a bit of a drink, but no dice.

Back to the room and up pretty early the next day.

I got up around 8 and flipped on the TV to make sure I didn’t fall back asleep. It was then that a wondrous thing occurred.

I saw the last 3 minutes of an NHL game.

It was The Canucks vs. The Thrashers, so I didn’t really have any vested interest in either of the teams, but it certainly was satisfying to see a tiny bit of live hockey this year. I wasn’t expecting to see ANY. Of course, Hokkaido is a little bit more pro hockey than the other parts of Japan. A few of my students have explained to me that Japanese schools tend to focus on summer sports in Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu. Hokkaido on the other hand, at least in winter, tends to focus more on sports of decidedly Canadian persuasion, namely Hockey and Skiing.

No wonder I love this part of the country.

The morning also provided me with my first proper views of the city itself. It has a really similar feel to Ottawa in all honesty. The buildings are all more or less the same height, much like the artificial height limit imposed by the presence of the parliament buildings in Ottawa.

After a quick breakfast I headed out to the snow festival for a day light perspective. Similar impressions from the day before I figure, except everything was of course covered in a pretty heavy blanket of snow. There were some really cool sculptures, impressive in scale. Perhaps the center piece of the exhibits was a massive Korean gate that had been burnt down the previous year. Truly massive, and the statistics were really amazing, thousands of tons of snow and hundreds of sculptors. Very neat.

I also spent a little while listening to loud punk rock and watching snowboarders pulling tricks off of a specially constructed jump in the middle of the park. It was very nice to see as it gave me my first real opportunity to try some sports photography. How did my shots come out?

They also had a pretty cool exhibit of life-sized ice sculptures, exclusively of aquatic creatures, the centerpiece being a massive whale shark.

It’s interesting to compare this festival to Winterlude. Although the snow festival appears to be generally larger, it definitely has a different atmosphere. The majority of the sculptures are more focused on corporate or popular pop-culture icons instead of the focus on the more traditional sculptures in Confederation Park. The snow festival also seems to work more frequently with, well, snow. The ice that is so omnipresent in Ottawa around early February is not so common around Sapporo. Just a different flavour I suppose.

I also noticed in one section of the park a signature drive going on for a rather interesting beneficiary, the Northern Territories of Japan. This is a series of four islands that were invaded by Russia between the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Summer, 1945. Russia declared war on Japan after Hiroshima and had planned to invade Hokkaido by island hopping from the north. They never actually set foot on the Japanese home islands, but they did capture and continue to hold occupy these four islands. The interesting thing about this is that, due to their continued occupation, Russia and Japan are still technically at war. They never signed a peace treaty. It's definitely not common knowledge, but World War 2 is still being fought, albeit on a political level. Interesting, no?

Shortly after I left Odori park for the second time, traipsing around with my nice big backpack, I noticed something kind of surprising about road conditions in Sapporo. Apparently the regional governments of Sapporo don’t place too high a value on snow removal. The entire accumulation of snow from the night before had been pulverized by passing traffic into a rock hard, icy sheet of snow about an inch thick. I did not see one single snow plow the whole time I was there and most of the sidewalks were conspicuously absent of high snowbanks.

Maybe they were just removed…

Maybe it’s been a slow year for snow in general…

Maybe some crazed yokel melted everything with a large hair dryer…

Nah…I’m pretty sure it’s just lack of snow removal/shifting/piling/etc.

So that was an overly long way of saying I was sliding around a lot and the footing was treacherous, not Senjo-ga-hara treacherous (week 31), but treacherous none-the-less.

It also started snowing again, and it would for the rest of the day, off and on, fairly heavily. I wandered around the city, bought a small pair of one-size-fits-all gloves and took in the sights.

The Sapporo government building, nickname “Red Brick”, was pretty neat to see. Designed in a very western way, it was one of the tallest buildings in Hokkaido at the time it was constructed. Also interesting architecturally was the Sapporo clock tower, which was constructed in Boston before being transported over here and installed in downtown. A lot of my students have informed me that they thought this was a pretty underwhelming sight, even though it’s one of the major symbols of Sapporo. I was forced to offer a contrary opinion however: I thought it was really fascinating. It’s not every day that you see turn of the century colonial architecture in Japan.

The last little stop in Sapporo was at the original Sapporo beer factory. Again, it shared a strong western architectural influence with the other houses around there. Just a little pointt of interest though, not much else. Sapporo beer was one of the first things I grew to like about Japan and I learned that without even having to leave Canada.

There’s a pretty nice upscale shopping mall attached to the Sapporo factory and I felt a bit out of place tramping around there with my huge backpack and ski jacket on. Not too much to see though, just sort of a unique atrium that was fun to walk around in for a couple minutes.

It was getting on to about 4:00 at this point, which meant it was off to Sapporo station for me and the beginning of a long train ride to my skiing destination, Niseko Annupuri.

I crowded onto a packed little train absolutely plastered with snow on the front. The blizzard was still blowing very hard and visibility was quite low. As soon as our train took off the windows clouded up from the temperature differential between the interior and the exterior. I was standing in the back by a window, constantly rubbing a small circle of clear glass to see the snowy cityscape, countryside and coastline swing by. On this section of the trip, just outside Otaru, I was surprised to see a few people out surfing, amazingly. Full dry suits, 6 foot waves and a blizzard, now that’s pretty hardcore.

Train transfer at Otaru to an even smaller local train and the last 2 hour portion of my journey was on its way to completion. I was happy when I got on that there were a lot of other foreigners there, as that’s usually a pretty good indication that you’re going the right way. I mean, this is rural Hokkaido, if I’d gotten stuck I’d have been in a spot of trouble.

I certainly did get a little freaked out though when we made it to a city a few stops before mine at Niseko Village. To my surprise almost every foreigner on the train got off. As it turned out Kutchan, the city we were stopped in, was much larger than my destiination and so naturally contained a higher concentration of hotels. I found this out later... At the time I was wondering how I missed the sign saying "if you're a foreign skier, get off here!". Anyways, as it turned out it was no problem, I arrived at my station about 20 minutes later.

A short taxi ride took me up to the pension I would be staying at for the next three nights. I’m happy I wasn’t a fool and tried to walk the distance up to the place, due primarily to the lack of sidewalks and the extreme overabundance of snow.

The owner was an incredibly amicable old Japanese lady who spoke very little English but made up for it with enthusiasm. She gave me the key to my room (named after spices, mine was rosemary) and asked me when I would take breakfast the next morning and whether I needed to rent skis. Wow. I guess they’re really used to taking care of foreign skiers there.

Next morning saw me hitting the slopes at 9 AM, a little bit tired, but optimistic for the day ahead. I got up at 7 and had an absolutely DELICIOUS breakfast made by the proprietor. It really was a great place to stay.

My day started on the gondola and never really left it. Niseko Annupuri, Niseko Village and Grand Hirafu, the three ski resorts that make their homes on the mountain, are all laid out in more or less the same way: A gondola takes you 80% of the way up and a single or double person chair lift takes you the rest of the way to the summit of the mountain and the longest feasible runs.

Unless of course you go backcountry.

Which I was sorely tempted to do.

But didn’t.

Partially because I didn’t have a partner to go with which, for safety reasons, is definitely a good idea. Also partly because my mom asked me not to. What can I say? I try to be obedient, especially when people tell me ‘be careful’ and 'don't kill yourself'.

The weather was perfect this first day out skiing and I explored two of the three resorts pretty extensively. The snow condition was excellent and as powdery as I expected the legendary Hokkaido powder snow to be. It was especially nice since the un-groomed sections towards the top gave me my first extended opportunity to ski in that type of snow condition. Most of the ski hills I’m used to were always heavily groomed, and therefore tended to be a bit icy, but at least predictable. The piles of deep snow I skied in Hokkaido were much different than what I was used to, but a ton of fun.

It was a bit windy at the summit, but that provided amazing views of Yotei-san, otherwise known as Ezo-Fuji due to its close resemblance to Mount Fuji itself. If the pictures above are any indication, you can tell how much I enjoyed the vista.

The other great part of Niseko was the near complete absence of lines at the lifts. The maximum wait time I saw was about 2 minutes. It was really up and down the mountain. I lost count of the number of runs I did, especially when it got dark and I was confined to my home ski hill at Niseko Annupuri during the night skiing. I was doing machinegun runs, up-down-up-down. Great time.

Anyways, I returned home at around 7 having had to schlep my skis and boots back from the ski hill for about 15 minutes. That wasn’t so much fun, but at least it wasn’t too far. I was more concerned with the fact that I didn’t exactly remember where the pension was… Always nerve wracking.

Unfortunately, the rest of the night was not so hot. I found out first of all that I should have requested for some kind of dinner from the pension owner (and paid for it of course!) ahead of time, because there were essentially no restaurant options close to the hotel. I ended up getting by on a beer and a few snacks I had in my backpack.

Ah well.

That’s the end of this week! See the next post for the remainder of Hokkaido!

Seriously exhausted after writing this one…

Ian “Mello Yello” Cantello

Photos: 1. Haneda airport. Nice and warm, 2. Sapporo, as seen from 18th floor of the Prince Hotel. Big difference, huh?, 3. Goomba snow sculpture in Odori park, 4. Snow sculpture of a castle built by Tokugawa Ieyasu, 5. My hotel, major blizzard, 6. Next morning, Sapporo again, much nicer, 7. Pretty impressive, no?, 8. Big Air, 9. The sculpture of the burned down Korean gate I mentioned above, 10. We want the Northern Territories back!, 11. Olympics bid, 12. Sapporo Clock Tower, 13. A handsome gent in front of the Sapporo government buildings, 14. Sapporo Government building minus handsome gent, 15. Reflecting pool near the government building, 16. Atrium at Sapporo beer factory, 17. Sapporo beer factory smoke stack, a long standing element of the Sapporo skyline, 18. Train transfer at Otaru. The lamps reminded me of my cottage, 19. First run of the day!, 20. Yotei-san being a dick to the clouds, 21. Niseko Annupuri summit. Note the lack of trees, 22. Yotei-san again, get used to it, 23. Check out the snow being driven off the mountainside on the left. Pretty cool, huh? You can also see the volcanic craters outlined very well, 24. That's either me standing there or some kind of counter-terrorism operative, 25. Yotei-san, Ian-less, 26. This is what happens when you cloud drunk, 27. Evening, 28. Dusk begins to set in, 29. The rest of the Niseko range, 30. Nightfall soon to begin, 31. And night skiing to finish a long day!