Woke up a bit stiff on Monday morning and with a little pain in my a*se too……and that can only be because I spent a long weekend on the slopes of Hakuba 47 and Hakuba Goryu. An all night bus took myself and Ethan up into the mountains of Nagano last Thursday night/Friday morning for three days of snowboarding, drinking, repetitive conversations and cr*ppy juvenile jokes.

This was my first snowboarding adventure for the season but I picked up where I left off last year and with some peer group pressure from Ethan i was able to carve through the snow rather than just constantly continuing with my unorthodox side to side style (always facing down the slope and switching my front foot each time).

However, my carving style was more restricted to the cross country style courses which i much preferred to the more straightforward slopes where I was too chicken to carve too much as I inevitably went too fast, got scared, lost control and fell over.

     

Following our first days boarding we had a much needed nap in our slopeside condominium before getting on with the more important matter of drinking which we did at a few local hotspots which were all pretty quiet despite the hyped up flyers for the places. Saturday night didn’t fare much better for us either as we ended up getting an expensive taxi and countless Genki-Go buses to areas which were supposed to be better places to go out but we didn’t think so as they too were dead so we returned to a place we went the night before and saw a live band among a few more people.