Week 37: Really real snowboarding!

Ok I know that I said that last weekend I went snowboarding for real, but this weekend I went snowboarding REALLY for real!! On Saturday I went to Fu's Snow Area just outside the city! This time there were just four of us (one other beginner, an intermediate-skilled person and an expert).

Here is Ms. Beginner, my labmate / labmate's wife whose name I now know!

Mr. Intermediate, who spent the day trying to learn a new trick

We couldn't have been more lucky with the weather. All day the skies were blue and there was just a light dusting of snow falling. For most of the duration of our six hour lift pass the temperature was about 0 C, so we were mostly too hot! But by about 4 pm when the sun was starting to think about setting it started getting COLD! But because it was such a clear day there was really a beautiful view!

The ski lodge

This was my view for most of the day

Anyway, this time I got to use the real (beginner) ski hill!! On a snowboard, to use a chairlift, you need to have only one foot strapped in so that you can do a kind of awkward shuffle/slide as you move along the line. That's all well and good, but it also means that when you get to the top of the hill, you need to get your board aimed straight, you need to stand up, and you need to slide away from the chairlift with only one foot actually attached without immediately falling over, because if you do fall the lift operator stops the ski lift and you will be highly embarrassed. I was warned that EVERYONE falls on their first attempt, but actually I managed to succeed and not fall on my first try!! I then proceeded to fall on my second try (and then intermittently afterwards when I occasionally got a monkey on my back). As an aside, my Polish friend once taught me that in Polish there is a phrase that translates roughly as "don't make a village" and means something along the lines of "when you're in the city don't act like a villager and humiliate yourself / the people that you're with." Just speaking generally it is very easy to make a village as a foreigner in Japan, and I personally make a village all the time (e.g. once I tried to give the machine at the subway station my zoo ticket instead of my subway ticket). So all of that to say that I made a village getting off of the ski lift several times. 

I also made a village on my first run down the hill when I managed to basically do a faceplant, but other than that the day went well. I learned how to turn in the other direction and I think that my friend / instructor finally believes me that I am indeed left-footed (aka goofy foot) for snowboarding. The two basic things to learn as a super beginner snowboarder involve, counterintuitively, having your board perpendicular to the direction of the slope (i.e. flat across and sliding on the long side, not barreling down with the nose forward). You need to learn how to slide with your board relatively flat, but leaned either back on your heels or forward on your toes. Back on your heels was fine for me, because the balance is easy to find and if you fall you just fall on your back. But balancing on your toes means actually facing UP the hill and leaning forward, so it's a) hard to even get in that position to find your balance, and b) really easy to do a faceplant or to overcompensate and REALLY fall over backwards. But in any case I can now do both. Huzzah! 

Boy that was a lot of words about snowboarding. I am really having fun learning snowboarding! I'm really happy that I bought my crappy board, because it has served me just fine as a learner board and I probably wouldn't have ever tried if I knew that I needed to rent all of the equipment. This is definitely something that I plan to continue with when I come home (which will be sooner rather than later since my funding didn't get extended). 

I believe I may have mentioned it before but THERE IS A LOT OF SNOW HERE. Especially on the way to the ski park, where we were off of the main city roads, you could really see how much has accumulated. The snowbanks beside the road along the highway are now taller than most cars!! Obviously that's a bit of an overestimation because the height is bumped up by the accumulation from passing snowplows, but even still it is pretty impressive!!

Week 36: Mumpless in Sapporo

Hooray! I am almost certain that I didn't contract the mumps after all! At this point I'm sure I would be all mumpy if I was going to become mumpy at all.

This week was a whirlwind of winter adventures!

On Friday I went snowboarding for real!!! Well, mostly. I went to Ban.K ski park with four other people from the lab. One guy is really an expert, one is maybe intermediate, and the other two are a couple who have only been snowboarding once, so luckily I wasn't entirely on my own in terms of my skill level (and lack thereof).

When we arrived, I demonstrated my skill level by sliding directly into a mesh fence :p As a result, I was relegated to practice for most of the time, because that was fine with me. Even though the hill is considered pretty small, it really put Pakenham to shame, and I probably would have died if I had tried it at the beginning. But I learned a LOT, and now I think that I really am ready to try the big girl (aka super beginner) hill next time!

On Saturday there was another unforecasted blizzard! I didn't expect a random blizzard, so I had the bright idea to go to the store to get some towels and blankets and other bulky items because some of my friends are coming to visit in a few weeks. So I had a very fun walk home with an enormous bag in a huge blizzard. It was bad enough that one person got snowed in at school, and the lab door was stuck in an uncloseable position when I arrived on Sunday morning!

On Sunday we went skating again! My friends are really becoming experts. We have our timing down pat, too: they clean the ice every two hours, so we have worked it out that when we arrive the ice is pristine, and then we skate until they clean it again. 

Week 35: There is really a lot of snow

This week there was a crazy blizzard!! I thought that I knew blizzards, but boy, Hokkaido really puts Ottawa to shame. It blizzarded for about 8 hours straight, with much of that time being total whiteout conditions. I ran to another building to turn on a machine, and in the 2 minutes that I was indoors, my footprints in the snow were completely erased (which was a good thing, because they were embarassing... due to the whiteout, I wandered into a snowbank and almost fell over, so I'm sure that my path made it look like I was drunk). The snow was so heavy that three people slept in the lab overnight! We also got more snow on most of the days that followed; in this week alone we have easily gotten 50 cm, and maybe as much as a metre.

I made a comment to my friend a little while ago that our backyard would probably be a good place to really see how much snow had accumulated, because it's a pretty narrow strip of land between our long building and a strip of woods (and so the snow there can't get blown around too much). She sadi that that would be true if they didn't plow it. I thought she was joking, because why would they plow a backyard? But then they plowed the backyard. RIP snowman that my friend's kid built! So since the plow went by, there is a big buildup of snow outside my window (from the sides of the plow, as well as from the stuff that is always sliding off of the roof), so this isn't REALLY an accurate estimate, but in any case, this is what I saw when I looked out my window on Saturday morning.

And this is what happened when I stepped outside:

This is a VERY NORMAL amount of unforecasted overnight snow!

And this is what the sidewalk on the way to the grocery store looks like:

That's a pretty narrow alley! Later on there was no path at all.

Anyway, in other exciting news, I finally broke down and bought a new computer!! My laptop has been giving me grief of varying sorts pretty much since the day I bought it (I think it was a bit of a Boxing Day lemon). I have been hemming and hawing for a long time, and I nearly bought a new computer before I came to Japan, but today my computer did its effing annoying habit of forgetting that it has a network card, and that was really just the last straw for me.

Buying a computer without being able to communicate very well with the store person was, ironically, much an easier and less patronizing experience than buying a computer in Canada. I usually HATE buying things like that, because I hate the upsell that the salespeople are being forced to give you, and I hate the way that they talk down to you and try to make you consider dumb alternatives. So it was kind of nice for him to pretty much just take me at my word when I said that I knew what I wanted, and I was really lucky that allegedly I got the last one of the exact model that I had been thinking of all along!

It's so purple!

On Sunday I built some snow cats with my neighbours! I only managed to take a picture of the first one because I was frozen solid by the time we finished the second one. I'm sure they will only survive for a day or two before they are bulldozed, but it was fun to play in the snow!

Hm, my phone makes the snow look an awful lot more blue than it really is...

Week 34: Happy New Year!

Happy 2015!!

Considering that this week was a holiday week, I really didn't get up to very much exciting stuff. I got some work done in the lab. I slept in a bit, which was very nice. I read a book and played some video games. I did a bit of snowboarding when the weather was right, but most days were too warm and it was like trying to snowboard through wet oatmeal. 

Part of why the week was quiet is that my friend's kid has the mumps!! Apparently in Japan they don't vaccinate against the mumps at all. There was an outbreak in my friend's kid's class, and even though my friend's kid had been vaccinated, she still caught it. I visited her on the first day of her symptoms (when she had been diagnosed with an ear infection by a doctor who apparently can't recognize the symptoms of mumps...) so maybe I will get the mumps too! Also her parents have been living in close quarters with her (as our rooms are less than 5m x 5m) so they enjoyed a fun week of quarantine, too. That made for a quiet week! I barely saw another soul in the lab during the week, too, despite much rending of garments over our upcoming lab progress meeting and subsequent dramatics about staying in town for the holidays. I think it's good that people are taking time off - nobody should feel like they are being forced to work during a week off!! And I think we all need a break. I am glad that I worked at a pretty lazy pace to get through the things that I couldn't put off.

There is a last gap of holiday-ness in another week, because Monday the 12th is a day off. And now that people will be around again, a few folks in the lab have been talking about a ski / snowboard trip to the small hill here in the city, which will be a fun step up from my little hill!

There is quite a lot of snow on the ground. It's hard to get a good guess of how much has really accumulated, because there are big piles where it has fallen off roofs or been scraped up by plows, but I would conservatively estimate that a metre of snow has fallen, and is probably sitting at a depth of at least half a metre in most places (after squishing down due to melty temperatures). There is a shortcut across a field that I like to use, and if there aren't fresh footprints to step in I can easily go in up to my knee. The other day I made a fresh path through about a foot of new snow, and when I came back the next day I saw that the fox had used my path! I guess he was glad that he didn't need to forge a path in snow up to his chin.