A tale of frozen disaster averted

The trip to Nagano did not start out well. One of the old Japanese guys coming on the trip thought it started on Saturday, when really we were leaving Friday night. This meant we started out about an hour behind schedule. Trying to explain to the Japanese guys in the van that no, the director's commentary is NOT the English language track on a DVD was proving difficult, even though my Japanese was correct, it was simply a foreign concept to them. That wasn't nearly so bad as the fact that about an hour later, leaving a PARKING LOT our driver crashed into a ROCK. I kid you not. This rock was large, too, and it completely smashed up the front of the rental van. This apparently messed up the radiator as well, and we had to call the other two vans back from the road and squeeze in. Turns out the other vans had JUST reached the opposite side of a traffic jam we all had to go through again. Several hours late, we finally arrive at the lodge, unpack all our stuff, and then get ready for our first trip to the mountain.

This was my first attempt at any sort of snow sport. I have never skied or snowboarded before. My friend Chiharu got some of her friends to lend us some boards and boots, so I decided to try that out. The guys we went with were A) pretty decent snowboarders and B) less-than-decent teachers. So they take us up to the top of the mountain. The very large mountain. The top where the sign says "for expert". I then had another stroke of bad luck, as the boots I was borrowing broke in the binding before even figured out how to stand up in them. Which meant I could not go down the mountain on the board, but had to instead take the gondola back down. Pretty embarrassing at the time. As I sat in the gondola, just on the edge of starting the decent, it stopped for about ten minutes, blowing me around in a very discomforting way, I started to think this entire trip would be a bust. I would suck at snowboarding and I would hate it and be in a bad mood for the next 3 days.

After shelling out the cash to rent boots and a board, the boys were at the bottom and we had lunch. A few encouraging words and beers were exchanged, and the plan was changed to start work on the kiddy hill. This round went far better. I learned to stand up on the board. I learned to move down the hill. I learned to go side to side. This was starting to actually resemble something one would enjoy doing, rather than just falling down. The next few times going up and back down were even better. I know I was just doing the very simplest basic things, but going down the slightly bigger hills and not falling down felt like a huge accomplishment. Even my bad spills didn't hurt so much.

The next two days were a combination of trying to get better at the basics and just having fun. Snowboarding all day, then drinking and laughing away the portion of the evenings we could all stay awake for. I actually started to get the hang of the snowboarding thing by the time we had to turn in our gear and leave. After the disasterous time I had scuba diving in December, I was kind of afraid I wouldn't like any kind of "risky" sport. I was happily surprised to find myself wrong.

I might have been sad and lonely this Valentine's day had it not been for my adventure in Nagano. Despite the best efforts of all our setbacks, it turned out I loved snowboarding. Who says you have to have a person for Valentine's love, right? I'm hoping to rekindle this relationship next week in the north of Hyogo, as we've only got a little while left to get to know each other before the season will be over.

And on that note, time to get my very sore butt to bed.