New Year, New Blog Post

Well,  I survived.  I made it back home at about 1:30 this morning.  My vacation was a rousing success in the sense that I had a marvelous time.  It was an abject failure in the sense that I now need a second holiday to recover properly from the first!  The whole thing was a great adventure, full of first experiences.  I took my first night bus, saw snow in Japan for the first time, and had my first Onsen experience.  Lets tackle those in order, shall we?

It was still dark when we got there!

First:  night bus.  I met Etsuko at Tsushimmachi (the train station nearest me apartment) at about 8:45 pm to take a train to Nagoya.  Tomo joined us at the next station and we enjoyed a thoroughly uneventful train ride the rest of the way.  We got to Nagoya station around 10:oo pm and went to find our bus, which left from a different part of the station.  We eventually found it and we took off for Nagano at 11:00 or so.  The bus ride was uneventful for the most part.  We stopped a few times on the trip, once to pick up more people and a few times for bathroom breaks and to get snacks and drinks from vending machines.  It was interesting to make the journey at night.  I left Nagoya, where it was cold, snow-less and dark, and arrived in Nagano where it was cold, very snowy and still dark.  I wasn't really able to sleep much on the bus, which doesn't bode well for my upcoming trips to Tokyo, but it is a cool way to travel.  


It made a spectacularly long day though.  I woke up around 8:00 am on the 30th of December, didn't sleep on the bus that night, snowboarded ALL day on the 31st and went to a New Years party on the night of the 31st, getting to bed around 1:00 am on the 1st.  Loooooong day.  

The first day in Nagano was fantastic though.  The weather was absolutely gorgeous.  It was about 35-40 degrees or so, and perfectly sunny.  Flat out gorgeous.  In a way, it was almost nice to get there so early in the morning.  We got our lift tickets at about 7 am and managed to get a few runs in on the freshly groomed trails.  It was quite nice!  At about 10:00 am or so, the bottom of the mountain was so full of people that didn't quite know how to snowboard or ski that it was impossible to make a good run.  So, we went up the mountain!  It was a truly magnificent day.  

Our cabin

We called it a day pretty early in the afternoon and retreated to out cabin down the mountain a bit.  Our cabin was attached to a backpackers hostel.  The hostel had a bar that was hosting a New Years party, with djs, music and lots of booze.  I headed over the bar early because Etsuko and Tomo were sleepy and napping and I was bored.  I played a couple games of pool with a New Zealander named Ben who was going to be dj-ing the dance later.  The bar was owned by an Aussie and his Japanese wife and the clientele was pretty heavy on the gaijin.  They had a lot of foreign beers, including Murphy's Irish Stout on tap and a bunch of Aussie beer in bottles.  I met a ton of new people from all of the world, and most of them even spoke English!  I also met a Russian couple and a bunch of English speaking Nihon-jin.  It was a great night with some pretty cool people.  


It definitely made for a late start the next day though.  We had intended on waking up moderately early.  However, 11:00 am rolled around and we were still in our cabin getting ready.  We finally got back on the mountain at about noon and got in quite a few runs before we had to call it quits.  


That night, we were all feeling pretty sore, so we decided to head to an onsen at a hotel nearby.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept of an onsen, it a public bath.  Onsens are super popular in Japan, and many of them are fed by natural hot springs.  The one went to was had an indoor and outdoor bath.  Before you get any crazy ideas, they are gender separated!  It was a generally enjoyable experience.  The hot water mixed with being outside surrounded by snow was pretty wonderful.  Very relaxing.  Sorry to disappoint, but there are no photos to accompany this paragraph!!

Snow :)

The third day, we actually managed to wake up on time, and in the middle of a snowstorm!  It was fantastic!  At our cabin, it was only lightly snowing, but at the summit, it was really coming down!  We were on the mountain for about 4 hours or so, and I probably saw about 10 inches of accumulation.  It made for some fantastic runs, but absolutely terrible visibility.  We left the mountain around noon and got on a bus headed south back to Mie.  The traffic coming off the mountain was atrocious, and the bus ride that was supposed to return us to Tsu by 10:30 pm didn't arrive until after 1 am.  It was terrible!  But the snow, the boarding, the parties and the trip in general were definitely worth the extended bus ride.  


Happy New Years everybody!!