My second attempt at snow skiing...

Icicles at the rest stop on the way back from Mt. Niseko

Sometimes when traveling, one feels obligated to do things one wouldn't normally do. Case in point, we took a bus to Mt. Niseko to go skiing. This required us getting up at 6 am and shlepping it down to Sapporo station to try to find the ticket booth and catch the right bus at 7:45 with our extremely limited Japanese. Surprisingly enough, this wasn't too difficult.

The bus ride from Sapporo to Niseko was about 3 hours, I think... I fell asleep about twenty minutes into the ride and didn't wake up until we stopped for a bathroom break. When I got off the bus at the rest stop, it was snowing fairly hard and absolutely freezing.

I didn't really start getting nervous until we got to the ski place. Let it be known that I went skiing once, about fifteen years ago. And that was in a place where I spoke the language.

The man at the rental shop didn't speak any English at all. None. B. disappeared for a little while and somehow I managed to tell the man my shoe size. ["ni ju yon to go"] After saying it a couple times, it hit me that I was saying it wrong. It's not "to go" it's "ten go"... He seemed to understand nonetheless. This is where the fun began... All I could remember about the ski boots from fifteen years ago was that they were supposed to be tight on your ankles. We spent about 30 minutes with this poor man trying to figure out how much room our toes were supposed to have. This consisted of a lot of gestures while saying, "Dijobu?" Of course, I wasn't making "Dijobu" into a question... I was just making different gestures and saying, "Okay." It's no wonder it took so long.

So after getting clothes and skis and boots and all that, we headed out. This ski resort didn't have anything resembling, "bunny hills." Apparently we were supposed to learn as we went down the mountain. This is when I got scared.

We managed to get the skis on and were just standing there trying to figure out what to do when we noticed a couple people speaking English near us. Somehow one of the guys noticed the look of desperation I know B. had--and I assume I had, as well--and came over to help. He offered to show us how to ski. He said that he would take us to the top and help us. He was a smarmy guy from Nepal who had obviously been born with skis on, but he was going to show us what to do and this was all that mattered. It was at this point that B. fell down. I'm not sure if she was moving or not when she fell, but we hadn't had the skis on for more than five minutes and if she was moving it couldn't have been far... The Sherpa tried to help her in a much nicer way than I was... [My help consisted of telling her that she needs to remember her common sense... If she falls on her left side, she's got to put the damn poles in her left hand to push up.] After what seemed like 30 minutes, but was probably only 15, B. managed to get up by having the Sherpa take off her skis. After another 10 minutes, she got the skis back on... She moved maybe a foot and fell again. The Sherpa tried to help her again, and again I was giving common sense advice, while she was huddled on the ground saying, "I can't. I can't. I can't..." It was at this point that the Sherpa decided to quit wasting his time and skied off, which is when I started getting pissed.

This scenario replayed itself again and again, minus the Sherpa's help, for another hour. I would alternate between giving common sense advice and being, what I thought was, incredibly patient. Finally, B. gave up and I was left to try to ski on my own. I skied off incredibly pissed.

When I got on the lift, the terror set in. I was afraid not so much of getting down the mountain or breaking anything [I knew I would get off the mountain one way or another, and chances of me breaking something were incredibly small], but that I was going to miss a turn somewhere along the way and end up on the expert course instead of the family course... Luckily I was able to turn at the family course fork and I managed to get down the mountain in one piece, although it took about an hour. I only ran into a group of people once, and I was going very slow and "Sumimasen"-ing my way through. They laughed at me. I fell quite a few times, but only fell on my face once [and slid a little bit]. The snow was so powdery that it didn't hurt at all.

When I got to the bottom, my knees hurt like hell and my ears were cold. I decided if I went again, I probably wouldn't be able to walk the next day. That, and I might miss the bus back to Sapporo. B. was waiting outside the lodge when I got to the bottom. She saw me coming down the mountain and came outside. In the end, I felt kind of bad that she couldn't do it, but really good that I did...