Nagano, etc. etc.

Happy New Year everybody. It's the year of the Rabbit and you know what that means? No, really, do you know? I don't. But I like rabbits.

I spent my winter holiday in Kobe and Nagano. The night before I left for Kobe, I had to use all my cash to cover a year end party I organized because they didn't take credit cards, but luckily for me, my buddy Tim was going with me and had the cash to cover my bus ticket, because it left before the ATMs "opened". That's right. 24-hour atms don't work for Japanese banks. Remember that.

Tim playing with his food. Yeah, the restaurant had cotton candy!

Anyway, we took the 4 hour bus to Kobe, which was actually fun with Tim there to chat with, and when we got to Kobe we met up with some friends and grabbed lunch.

Tim took this! Thank you, Tim. ...Thim.

In Kobe I met with like 5 old friends from my study abroad days, which is always amazing since there were 40 of us in total so that's practically a reunion!

My friend Masa who owns a Hawaiian restaurant in Kobe called Oluolu was SO NICE to invite me and Kui (visiting from Hawaii) to his home for a nabe (hotpot) party complete with fresh bought seafood from Okayama!

Me with my left-handed chopsticks

 Then I took off straight to Nagano. The trains from Nagoya to Hakuba (specifically Kamishiro, where I stayed) took FOREVER but the view was incredible the whole way.

 I met up with my buddy Micah, who also lives in Hiroshima and got settled in to our lodge Tabi-tabi (a play on words, cuz "tabi" means journey and "tabitabi" means repeatedly).

 The lodge itself was really awesome and run by a young Japanese guy and his Canadian wife, who were both avid snowboarders. When New Year's Eve came they busted out all these crazy costumes and we all played dress-up. Such innocent, random fun! (Jesus Freak and the dude on the bottom right are the couple that run the place, bottom-middle are a couple from Netherlands, top-middle are a couple, Yellow from England, and Blue from Australia, and Carrot-Bear-Santa is Micah)

You guys know you can click on these pics to see them bigger right?

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The morning after I got there the wife, Jesus Freak (her name is Angela, but i LOVE that shirt) drove Micah and I to Happone, the 1998 Winter Olympic resort, for a full day of snowboarding in the craziest conditions of my life! Micah, whose been doing it more than twice as long as me, also remarked that he had never been in as much deep, heavy powder. It was very hard for me to adjust, but eventually I got to the point where I was able to move around and enjoy it properly. We also found this sweet spot with about a 5 foot drop which Micah attacked and I tried timidly, but twice.

By the end of the day I was exhausted and actually took the next day off to relax and recuperate for boarding another full day at Goryuu (five dragons) with Micah, Warren, Emiko and their friend from Gunma, Takki.

It was insanely cold that afternoon and a wind started blowing that made them shut down a couple lifts and slow down the rest to a crawl. We parted ways to have dinner and get changed, planning to meet back up for the New Year's Eve countdown and fireworks, but the fireworks were canceled due to the wind, Taki's car got stuck in the snow, and we ended up meeting at 12:10 1/1/11. But we took it back to their lodge and had a low key party of potato chips and local wine.

Coming home on the Shinkansen (bullet train), one of my co-workers sat down next to me on the train! How improbable is that! He sat down right next to me, and neither of us even noticed for about 5 minutes! Not only were we both on vacation outside Hiroshima, he wasn't even on his way back! He got off at the next stop to bring some New Year's decorations to his parents' house! You gotta love Japan for those kind of coincidences, which seem to happen much more frequently than in the states.

Anyway, I took the next two days very slowly. Cleaned my apartment, a week's worth of laundry (which already needs doing again), and watched some movies. (I highly recommend Summer Wars, which is coming out in America soon, if not already). Great family movie, like Spirited Away, but at the same time, completely different.

Also, just to warn you, my next post is going to be long, rambly, and have nothing to do with my life per-say, but I want to write out some philosophical stuff I've been mulling for the last few months! Feel free to leave comments! (I've written some other stuff in the past I'm very proud of too, so if you haven't yet and you're bored, take a look at my older posts).

This month will fly.

What am I doing this month? A LOT!
Work:
In addition to my daily work load: I go to two elementary schools this week to give talks about American culture. I will take a group of foreign people who live here in Hiroshima to a small town to learn about the Japanese traditions of making soba, mochi, and shimenawa (pronounced "she-may-gnaw-wa"). I also have to MC an "Exchange Party" for the Hiroshima International Center, which is basically a poorly disguised Christmas party for local people from many different countries. Also, I get to spend all of next week in Shiga Prefecture studying translation and interpreting on the coast of Lake Biwa.

More than all that, I have bounenkai, which are "forget the year" parties. Most people have one or two this month, but I have four. Two are for work - one for my International Affairs office and one for the international center, one is for touch rugby this Saturday (after playing the Saijo team in Kure), and the last one is for my English Lunch group! Of these four, I am actually in charge of planning and hosting two of them, and each one costs about 40 bucks per person! :[

Social:
Then there is the matter of what little free time I have left. I wish I could say "One word: Snowboarding." but the truth is, I have other things like Christmas shopping and boyfriend/girlfriend obligations as well.

All this adds up to no time or money, and when I wake up January 1st, 2010, this month will probably be remembered as a blur, but most likely a very fun blur.

The Tame Article (written for January)

My Hiroshima Winters
By Greg Beck

This marks my fourth winter living in Hiroshima, and being an American raised in the hot, dry, desert, what an evolution I’ve experienced! I’ll never forget when I bought my first sweater. Probably because that happened only four years ago! Tucson, Arizona, where I have spent most of my life, is located in the Sonoran Desert, near the Mexican border. In the winter, after the sun sets, the temperature drops quickly and there is often frost on the windshields and lawns of dead grass. But if you own one jacket and drive everywhere in a car with a heater, you will never notice this nocturnal-only season.
I moved to Ondo, Hiroshima in August 2006, and it was hot, muggy, and beautiful. Fall flew by with amazing island views of deciduous trees, mixed with green pines and grey skies on deep-blue ocean, and jutting, mountainous backdrops. Then, all of the sudden, I was freezing. Not just at night either, the mornings, evenings, even most of the mid-days, I was cold, miserable, and wrapped in the same four or five layers of what warm clothes I bought that month. It wasn’t until late January when my friend came over and showed me my air conditioner had a heater mode that I started thinking positively. Before that, I worried and wondered every day how people can live in these conditions! It was also in January on a chance visit to Uniqlo that I discovered Japanese long-johns. These thin, warm pants and shirts provided me a desperately needed extra layer of warmth that helped me go outside, and stay out later, be more active and social, and all around start loving life again. Of course there were other factors; my friend Brian would drive me with him to Kiyomori Taiko practice, and I bought an electric heater and a kotatsu. I also took a trip to Hokkaido where I learned to snowboard, but that played more of a factor the next year.
My second winter started out completely different. I lived in Kure City. I knew exactly when it would start to get cold and I had my finger ready on the danbou heater button. I also bought clothes and a board for snowboarding so I was actually looking forward to the coming of winter! I was also jogging every night, by then, so the cooler air of fall was a welcome prelude to cold winter nights. Also, if you’ve followed my previous articles, this winter came just after the formation of Kure City’s touch rugby team. With all these things keeping me moving and enjoying my free time, winter quickly went from my worst, to my favorite season! I still needed to wrap myself in a hundred layers before going outside usually, but I happily put those layers on just to peel them off as I exercised.
Last winter was my third, and my first living in Hiroshima City. Surprisingly, it was both better, and worse, in many different ways. My new job here at the International Center meant I was warmer at work, but working weekends meant missing out on half the snowboarding trips I took my second year. We have a lot of fun events in the winter like our upcoming snow-experience in Kita-Hiroshima, as well as the exchange party every December. On the down side, my new neighborhood doesn’t have a track nearby like on Kure, so I stopped jogging, although that is probably just an excuse for being lazy. Lastly, I went home to the desert for Christmas. It was great to go outside again wearing shorts and a t-shirt, but when I came back to Hiroshima for New Years, I got the flu for the first time in my life!
This year, I feel like a winter warrior. I have adjusted my schedule and stayed in Hiroshima. No running away from the cold this year! I have sweaters, jackets, coats, and thermal clothes. I am taking multi-vitamins, working out at home, snowboarding every weekend, and next month my friends and I travel to Nagano for a snowboarding trip! I can’t stress enough how much Japan has helped me learn to love winter. But more importantly, Hiroshima has given me something more, the ability to see the bright side of something I misunderstood for so long.