Monday 19 January 2009

Snowboarding / Army / Damage

My snowboarding now is reaching dangerously extreme levels - just look what I did today:


Kapow! It was, of course, nothing too spectacular, I tried a turn I couldn't make and bent my board too much. It was fun getting a replacement disk though and showing the guys in the snowboarding shops what I'd done. My first blow out.

We went to Fu's today, which isn't great but I like it quite a lot. It's the Sapporo council owned ski slope and as such it's very cheap, is served by a full bus and often full of students. It's also really small and a bit too close to the city to get lots of good snow, but I still quite like the atmosphere there. It's mostly Japanese people, few foreigners and lots of kids who are always funny to be around. We got a lot of gawky stares today for whatever reason.

Also today was SDF ski training day:


Those guys are watching and grading his jump, most of them wiped out. The SDF is the Self Defence Force - that is, the Army. There were loads of them today, a bunch in proper camo like those guys above, and a whole bunch in plain khaki with super-plain standard issue white skis:


Actually, to be honest I'm not convinced that lot were the SDF. They probably were, but they were a less serious bunch than the guys in camo, who were hiking up hills and practicing cross country skiing too. Also the kids were cute, two of them tried to get us to understand their question by spelling out the Japanese word in English phonics which was an insane undertaking and we understood the question in Japanese to begin with.

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