Day 5 of Holiday.
We both woke up this morning feeling a little more human, so got up and went downstairs for breakfast. While eating breakfast, Alex checked her phone and we discovered that Chelsea beat Man Utd 3 v 1 last night, so that put a huge grin on our faces I can tell you! Shame we didn’t get to watch the match, but the result is what matters. And hopefully we’ll be able to watch the West Ham game in Tokyo next week.
After breaky we headed up to Japan Powder to get fitted out for skis and ski boots and poles. While there, we made a discovery that made us both laugh. Apparently we’d got our days wrong, and it turns out that tomorrow isn’t our last day after all, it’s actually the day after that! To be fair to us though, it’s a bit like that when you’re on holiday. You tend to live in a bubble and time loses all its meaning (which is what holidays are for!).
After getting kitted out we got picked up by the shuttle bus and driven to Iimori again for our level 1 ski lessons.
It was during this short 10 minute journey that we discovered that neither of our sets of ski boots fitted properly. We’d both been unsure of how they felt when we tried them on, but we were running a bit late and the shuttle bus was due, so after trying on a couple of different pairs, we just assumed that ‘tight’ was good.
I’m sure tight is actually good when it comes to ski boots, but not to the point when it cuts off circulation! (Mine more than Alex’s) Still, we were at the ski resort by the time we realized how tight they actually were, so there was nothing to be done but grin and bear it.
The skiing lesson was taken by a nice English bloke named Matt (a Stoke fan as it turned out) and there were four other people plus us in it. Alex took to skiing like a fish to water and had got the hang of stopping and changing directions better than all the rest of us put together in no time at all. I’ve never been the quickest study, but when I ‘get’ something – especially something sporty - I tend to be able to get very good, very quickly, thereafter. But with skiing I just couldn’t get it together at all. After about an hour and forty five minutes I’d sort of managed to work out how to stop (sort of), but could not for love nor money change f*cking direction! OMG it was so frustrating! It got the point where I had a right old dummy spit (with myself) and tossed my skis and poles to the ground and said (to myself), ‘Right, that’s it. I’m done. I just can’t do it’. Alex saw this and skied over (expertly!) and tried to show me how to change direction and talk me into trying one more time to master it. But I said no. Then Matt came over and they both tag-teamed me to have ‘just one more go’. So, against my better judgement I did.
Matt came up the slope with me this time to show me one on one how to do it, and as we made our way up the slope he said, ‘You’re a very competitive person aren’t you?’ And I said (sarcastically), ‘What gave it away?’. He smiled and said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I completely get that. I’m the same. You don’t care so much that you can’t do it properly, just that Alex is one of the people who are obviously a natural at the sport and can do it really well, really quickly’. I replied. ‘Well, yeah, there is that. But I hate it when I just don’t ‘get’ something that really isn’t that hard. I mean, I know it’s not ‘easy’, but I’m probably in the bottom percentile of people you’ve taught, which really gives me the sh*ts’. He laughed at this and said, ‘Are you kidding me, I regularly have people who can’t even stand up on their skis after the lesson is over, so don’t be so hard on yourself!’.
Anyway, all of that made me feel a bit better, so...once more unto the breech dear friends...
This time Matt skied in front of me and changed direction left then right, and I went down the slope after him and tried to copy him. And, wouldn’t you know it, but I did it! No idea why (or why now) but something seemed to just ‘click’. I couldn’t tell you why I couldn’t do it before and I couldn’t tell you why I could (sort of) do it afterwards. But for what little it’s worth, I at least managed to do it in the end.
By that time the 2 hour lesson was over and Matt had to head off. After the lesson Alex wanted to go up in the chair lift to the top of the run (the run we’d snowboarded down a couple of days ago) and I and another guy (who was about my ‘standard’) from our beginner group agreed to go with her. But I won’t lie, I shouldn’t have. I felt completely unprepared. At least when we went up for the snowboarding I had a little bit of (false!) confidence about the process.
So the three of us went up the chair lift. And, as appears to be my ‘calling card’ when it comes to such things, I completely stuffed up the dismount from the ski lift and fell over and barely managed getting clubbed on the back of the head by the next chair. I also pulled the exact same muscle as I fell off it (behind the right shoulder blade) that I pulled when I fell off the chair lift while snowboarding two days ago.
Say what you will about me, but I am nothing if not consistent!
This time at least the guy who was coming up with us fell too, and worse than I did (so Alex told me – I didn’t see it myself as I was on the chair / ground in front of him and was going through my own crash while he was). So at least it’s not just me who has trouble with this then!
After recovering a modicum of composure, the other guy, I and Alex fronted up at the top of the slope. And boy did it look daunting. Still, there was nothing to be done now and so off we went. Alex naturally zoomed off in front of the two of us (the guy and I remember where of a similar standard), but within about 30 seconds Alex fell over (she hadn’t fallen over once during practice, not even stumbled). I was the first to her and asked if she was okay (she was), after which I proceeded to ski down the slope. And not half bad! I was zooming along turning left and turning right at will, and slowing myself down ‘snow-plough style’ whenever it looked like I was picking up too much speed. And, just like with snowboarding, I ended up being the first down the mountain. After being crappy in practice, as soon as the ‘race’ is on, I just come into my own. It’s just like high-school all over again. I never gave a rat’s about practice, it was always about the ‘race’ or the ‘event’ or the ‘game’. That’s when I always seem to come alive.
Now don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying I skied well, or that I’d suddenly mastered skiing. Far, (far!) from it. But if you’d seen the difference between how I was skiing in the practice and how I skied when we went down the mountain, you’d have thought it was two different people.
By this stage Alex and I were well shagged. My ski boots particularly were hurting like crazy (and were really hard to walk in, unlike the snowboarding boots we had before) and our legs were sore from all the walking up and down the slope with skis on. So we decided to grab a drink and call it a day. But, after sitting down in the nearby food hall and reviewing the pics we’d taken today, we discovered that there wasn’t another bus to take us back to the hotel for another two hours. So, rather than just sit there, we thought we should at least have one more attempt at skiing. This time we went up a different ski lift (just for the fun of it). This run was for an intermediate level (far too hard for us) and had a very steep dismount off the chair lift at the top of the run. But, ironically, I got off this one just fine (after Alex explained what I should do). Go figure!
Anyway, once up the top of the run we skied sideways and down across a section of an advanced run (dangerous!) to get to the top of the run we’d done earlier in the day (a lot of runs seem interconnected at certain points in the mountain). That was very nerve racking for a couple of reasons. One, because the slope was steep and we were skiing down, and diagonally across it. And two, because advanced skiers and snowboarders were hurtling down the mountain at cracking rate of knots around us!
Still, we got to the top of the other, more modest slope in one piece. But both Alex and I were feeling really, really tired by this stage, and our leg muscles were twitching of their own accord, so neither of us were in particularly good shape to ski down the slope. Unfortunately we really didn’t have any other choice so...
Alex was, this time, taking it really slowly (just to be on the safe side), but I, over confident and over tired, went down faster than I should. And within about 15 seconds I’d crossed the front end of both my skis (while trying to slow down, ‘Mr Plough’ style) and - while trying to uncross them – I got my left pole caught under my left ski. While madly pulling that out the crossed skis got worse and I went down like a ton of bricks. Again though, while the angle I fell at could’ve seriously damaged my left knee (it twisted like crazy), God was smiling on me as the boot popped out of the left ski a fraction before the twisted knee got to a critical angle and I came out with nothing more hurt than my pride.
Needless to say I was super careful on the way down from that point on (as was Alex). At the bottom we decided that enough was enough so we went back into the food place and had some pasta and waited for the shuttle bus to arrive at 3.15 pm.
Back at our hotel Alex chilled in the room for a bit while I went down to reception (where they have wireless remember) to check my emails and post yesterday’s travel blog. Unfortunately I discovered that there were a few grumpy emails from clients that needed to be attended to, and went up to the room to tell Alex about it. She said she’d come down too, and so we spend about an hour and half or maybe two hours there, me putting out client fires (and checking some of the Chelsea v Man Utd match reports!) and Alex emailing her family and doing some research for things to see and do in Tokyo.
Around 7 pm we went off through yet another dazzlingly beautiful and mysterious night with snow falling all around us, and had some really good Mexican food at a place called ArribaArriba. Then we headed back to our hotel around 8.30 pm because we had a...wait for it wait for it...onsen booked for 9 pm to 9.30 pm!
Onsens are, for those of you who don’t know, giant hot wooden baths, which you soak in after a long day on the slopes. They’re a feature of Japanese ski resorts and every hotel has at least one. Our hotel has three. The two downstairs in the basement level of the hotel are male only and female only (and neither of us have a great desire to bathe but nekid in a tub with other but nekid men / women!). But the big one outside, and to the side of the building, can be privately booked by couples. And this is the one we were going to.
There’s a ritual to attending these things which I won’t bore you with, but it ends up with you dressed in your undies (which you lose when you get to the onsen) and a traditional Japanese robe, and small slip-on slippers.
So attired, we ventured outside and braved – 5 degrees temperatures and deep snow dressed in a robe that was thinner than a T-shirt and made our way to an adjacent building around the side of the hotel.
The onsen is very impressive when you see it for yourself. It’s like a giant round wooden hot tub that’s about 6 feet tall (deep) and about 10 feet in diameter. So we get there and strip off and I lower myself into the piping hot onsen to sooth my weary limbs. But unfortunately Alex, despite 15 minutes of trying, couldn’t get into it because it was just too hot for her (she’s very temperature sensitive).
After I got out, we made our way back to the hotel’s main entrance, and it occurred to me that I wanted to ditch the traditional slippers and walk bare feet through the snow (having never done it before). Ten seconds later I realized the error of my ways when my feet turned into blocks of ice and dozens of icy daggers seemed to pierce my feet down to the sub-atomic level! OMG!
When we were back in the room I realized it was not so much that the snow was super cold (though at – 5 degrees it was) it was more the fact that my poor tootsies had just come out of a piping hot onsen AND THEN been plunged into – 5 degree snow!!!
Still, ya live and ya learn don’t you? ;)
We both woke up this morning feeling a little more human, so got up and went downstairs for breakfast. While eating breakfast, Alex checked her phone and we discovered that Chelsea beat Man Utd 3 v 1 last night, so that put a huge grin on our faces I can tell you! Shame we didn’t get to watch the match, but the result is what matters. And hopefully we’ll be able to watch the West Ham game in Tokyo next week.
After breaky we headed up to Japan Powder to get fitted out for skis and ski boots and poles. While there, we made a discovery that made us both laugh. Apparently we’d got our days wrong, and it turns out that tomorrow isn’t our last day after all, it’s actually the day after that! To be fair to us though, it’s a bit like that when you’re on holiday. You tend to live in a bubble and time loses all its meaning (which is what holidays are for!).
After getting kitted out we got picked up by the shuttle bus and driven to Iimori again for our level 1 ski lessons.
It was during this short 10 minute journey that we discovered that neither of our sets of ski boots fitted properly. We’d both been unsure of how they felt when we tried them on, but we were running a bit late and the shuttle bus was due, so after trying on a couple of different pairs, we just assumed that ‘tight’ was good.
I’m sure tight is actually good when it comes to ski boots, but not to the point when it cuts off circulation! (Mine more than Alex’s) Still, we were at the ski resort by the time we realized how tight they actually were, so there was nothing to be done but grin and bear it.
The skiing lesson was taken by a nice English bloke named Matt (a Stoke fan as it turned out) and there were four other people plus us in it. Alex took to skiing like a fish to water and had got the hang of stopping and changing directions better than all the rest of us put together in no time at all. I’ve never been the quickest study, but when I ‘get’ something – especially something sporty - I tend to be able to get very good, very quickly, thereafter. But with skiing I just couldn’t get it together at all. After about an hour and forty five minutes I’d sort of managed to work out how to stop (sort of), but could not for love nor money change f*cking direction! OMG it was so frustrating! It got the point where I had a right old dummy spit (with myself) and tossed my skis and poles to the ground and said (to myself), ‘Right, that’s it. I’m done. I just can’t do it’. Alex saw this and skied over (expertly!) and tried to show me how to change direction and talk me into trying one more time to master it. But I said no. Then Matt came over and they both tag-teamed me to have ‘just one more go’. So, against my better judgement I did.
Matt came up the slope with me this time to show me one on one how to do it, and as we made our way up the slope he said, ‘You’re a very competitive person aren’t you?’ And I said (sarcastically), ‘What gave it away?’. He smiled and said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I completely get that. I’m the same. You don’t care so much that you can’t do it properly, just that Alex is one of the people who are obviously a natural at the sport and can do it really well, really quickly’. I replied. ‘Well, yeah, there is that. But I hate it when I just don’t ‘get’ something that really isn’t that hard. I mean, I know it’s not ‘easy’, but I’m probably in the bottom percentile of people you’ve taught, which really gives me the sh*ts’. He laughed at this and said, ‘Are you kidding me, I regularly have people who can’t even stand up on their skis after the lesson is over, so don’t be so hard on yourself!’.
Anyway, all of that made me feel a bit better, so...once more unto the breech dear friends...
This time Matt skied in front of me and changed direction left then right, and I went down the slope after him and tried to copy him. And, wouldn’t you know it, but I did it! No idea why (or why now) but something seemed to just ‘click’. I couldn’t tell you why I couldn’t do it before and I couldn’t tell you why I could (sort of) do it afterwards. But for what little it’s worth, I at least managed to do it in the end.
By that time the 2 hour lesson was over and Matt had to head off. After the lesson Alex wanted to go up in the chair lift to the top of the run (the run we’d snowboarded down a couple of days ago) and I and another guy (who was about my ‘standard’) from our beginner group agreed to go with her. But I won’t lie, I shouldn’t have. I felt completely unprepared. At least when we went up for the snowboarding I had a little bit of (false!) confidence about the process.
So the three of us went up the chair lift. And, as appears to be my ‘calling card’ when it comes to such things, I completely stuffed up the dismount from the ski lift and fell over and barely managed getting clubbed on the back of the head by the next chair. I also pulled the exact same muscle as I fell off it (behind the right shoulder blade) that I pulled when I fell off the chair lift while snowboarding two days ago.
Say what you will about me, but I am nothing if not consistent!
This time at least the guy who was coming up with us fell too, and worse than I did (so Alex told me – I didn’t see it myself as I was on the chair / ground in front of him and was going through my own crash while he was). So at least it’s not just me who has trouble with this then!
After recovering a modicum of composure, the other guy, I and Alex fronted up at the top of the slope. And boy did it look daunting. Still, there was nothing to be done now and so off we went. Alex naturally zoomed off in front of the two of us (the guy and I remember where of a similar standard), but within about 30 seconds Alex fell over (she hadn’t fallen over once during practice, not even stumbled). I was the first to her and asked if she was okay (she was), after which I proceeded to ski down the slope. And not half bad! I was zooming along turning left and turning right at will, and slowing myself down ‘snow-plough style’ whenever it looked like I was picking up too much speed. And, just like with snowboarding, I ended up being the first down the mountain. After being crappy in practice, as soon as the ‘race’ is on, I just come into my own. It’s just like high-school all over again. I never gave a rat’s about practice, it was always about the ‘race’ or the ‘event’ or the ‘game’. That’s when I always seem to come alive.
Now don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying I skied well, or that I’d suddenly mastered skiing. Far, (far!) from it. But if you’d seen the difference between how I was skiing in the practice and how I skied when we went down the mountain, you’d have thought it was two different people.
By this stage Alex and I were well shagged. My ski boots particularly were hurting like crazy (and were really hard to walk in, unlike the snowboarding boots we had before) and our legs were sore from all the walking up and down the slope with skis on. So we decided to grab a drink and call it a day. But, after sitting down in the nearby food hall and reviewing the pics we’d taken today, we discovered that there wasn’t another bus to take us back to the hotel for another two hours. So, rather than just sit there, we thought we should at least have one more attempt at skiing. This time we went up a different ski lift (just for the fun of it). This run was for an intermediate level (far too hard for us) and had a very steep dismount off the chair lift at the top of the run. But, ironically, I got off this one just fine (after Alex explained what I should do). Go figure!
Anyway, once up the top of the run we skied sideways and down across a section of an advanced run (dangerous!) to get to the top of the run we’d done earlier in the day (a lot of runs seem interconnected at certain points in the mountain). That was very nerve racking for a couple of reasons. One, because the slope was steep and we were skiing down, and diagonally across it. And two, because advanced skiers and snowboarders were hurtling down the mountain at cracking rate of knots around us!
Still, we got to the top of the other, more modest slope in one piece. But both Alex and I were feeling really, really tired by this stage, and our leg muscles were twitching of their own accord, so neither of us were in particularly good shape to ski down the slope. Unfortunately we really didn’t have any other choice so...
Alex was, this time, taking it really slowly (just to be on the safe side), but I, over confident and over tired, went down faster than I should. And within about 15 seconds I’d crossed the front end of both my skis (while trying to slow down, ‘Mr Plough’ style) and - while trying to uncross them – I got my left pole caught under my left ski. While madly pulling that out the crossed skis got worse and I went down like a ton of bricks. Again though, while the angle I fell at could’ve seriously damaged my left knee (it twisted like crazy), God was smiling on me as the boot popped out of the left ski a fraction before the twisted knee got to a critical angle and I came out with nothing more hurt than my pride.
Needless to say I was super careful on the way down from that point on (as was Alex). At the bottom we decided that enough was enough so we went back into the food place and had some pasta and waited for the shuttle bus to arrive at 3.15 pm.
Back at our hotel Alex chilled in the room for a bit while I went down to reception (where they have wireless remember) to check my emails and post yesterday’s travel blog. Unfortunately I discovered that there were a few grumpy emails from clients that needed to be attended to, and went up to the room to tell Alex about it. She said she’d come down too, and so we spend about an hour and half or maybe two hours there, me putting out client fires (and checking some of the Chelsea v Man Utd match reports!) and Alex emailing her family and doing some research for things to see and do in Tokyo.
Around 7 pm we went off through yet another dazzlingly beautiful and mysterious night with snow falling all around us, and had some really good Mexican food at a place called ArribaArriba. Then we headed back to our hotel around 8.30 pm because we had a...wait for it wait for it...onsen booked for 9 pm to 9.30 pm!
Onsens are, for those of you who don’t know, giant hot wooden baths, which you soak in after a long day on the slopes. They’re a feature of Japanese ski resorts and every hotel has at least one. Our hotel has three. The two downstairs in the basement level of the hotel are male only and female only (and neither of us have a great desire to bathe but nekid in a tub with other but nekid men / women!). But the big one outside, and to the side of the building, can be privately booked by couples. And this is the one we were going to.
There’s a ritual to attending these things which I won’t bore you with, but it ends up with you dressed in your undies (which you lose when you get to the onsen) and a traditional Japanese robe, and small slip-on slippers.
So attired, we ventured outside and braved – 5 degrees temperatures and deep snow dressed in a robe that was thinner than a T-shirt and made our way to an adjacent building around the side of the hotel.
The onsen is very impressive when you see it for yourself. It’s like a giant round wooden hot tub that’s about 6 feet tall (deep) and about 10 feet in diameter. So we get there and strip off and I lower myself into the piping hot onsen to sooth my weary limbs. But unfortunately Alex, despite 15 minutes of trying, couldn’t get into it because it was just too hot for her (she’s very temperature sensitive).
After I got out, we made our way back to the hotel’s main entrance, and it occurred to me that I wanted to ditch the traditional slippers and walk bare feet through the snow (having never done it before). Ten seconds later I realized the error of my ways when my feet turned into blocks of ice and dozens of icy daggers seemed to pierce my feet down to the sub-atomic level! OMG!
When we were back in the room I realized it was not so much that the snow was super cold (though at – 5 degrees it was) it was more the fact that my poor tootsies had just come out of a piping hot onsen AND THEN been plunged into – 5 degree snow!!!
Still, ya live and ya learn don’t you? ;)
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