big holiday weekend
i have just had a great 5 days off work. got to love public holidays and a few days of time in lieu..
sadly the weather was not as great as it could have been. the wind has been so strong in the kanto area that many of the train have had to stop. seriously, melbourne's ever changing weather is not that bad after all.
on friday i was supposed to go play golf with tom and some friends, but that got cancelled due to the wind and rain. then later that day the weather was a perfect blue sky! how does that work? so we spent the day wandering around mito checking out some new shops and found a bike shop to buy part of my birthday pressie from grandma, a small bag that sits on top of the handlebars to keep lollies in.
saturady tom left early for golf and i took a bus into tokyo to meet up with ben-chan and katie. traffic was hell so i was 40 mins late to meet up with ben, but then we finally foudn each other and went shopping in okachimachi and akihabara.
met up with katie at around 3pm and then headed to ikebukuro for coffee and then out to sakado in saitama to meet up with old host family for some yaki-niku goodness. its become a tradition, everytime i go to sakado we have yakiniku (korean bbq)
the weather was still windy on sunday when katie and i headed out to kawagoe for sightseeing at "koedo" or "little edo", a place that has been restored to its glory of 400 years ago. very cute town. we even too one of those jinricsha rides around the town. i felt like such a tourist but it was fun.
after more delayed trains, we headed off to niigata to meet up with matt. got there about 9pm and met up with him and warrick for dinner.
the next day we were off to the slopes, but the wind was soo strong that the place were matty works, gala, was closed cause its gondala couldnt run. so we went up there to get our ski hire and tickets for cheap/free and then took them all to a different mountain called Joetsu Kokusai.
This place was pretty good too, but not too many beginer runs for katie sadly. they were all a bit narrow and steep to really get any practice in. still we all had fun. katie decided she liked looking at snow more than actually sliding on it and spent the arvo wandering around taking lots of photos.
that night we got dinner up at gala and then met up with matt and warrick again to head to onsen. we went to a hotel called "sporia" cause it had its bath on the 13th floor roof. it was a bit dark so you coulnt see heaps of the mountains but it was still cool. in their foyer they were having a comedy show too and there were people dressed up as pumpkins, tea pots and blow flies for some reason.
the last day, tuesday, was a bit all over the place. cause katie didnt want to snow board, we went in search of "snow tubing". up near gala there was a moutain that has the world record for the longest snow tubing run so we decided that we had to go there. but once we got there we discovered that it only ran between 1-3pm and we had to leave by 12pm to get back to tokyo in time...
so back on the bus to the station and off to anotehr place that had tubing. not world record sizes though.. this place, nakazato, was a lot smaller and designed for kids, but we still had fun. i bought a half day lift pass and snowboarded for a bit and katie had fun on the tubing and the other snowboard-less activities.
finally it was time to head home. 6 hours on the train back to mito... its a long way, but it cost us only $25 so it was worth it. i got in enough snowboarding to make the trip worthwhile and i am happy i went then cause if i left it any later there will be no snow left at all. all the snow that fell on the day we arrived had melted by the day we left and all that was left was hard and sloshy snow that had been there for months.
