What to do…

…in a ski town when you hadn’t really planned to do any skiing. Go for a bush walk and find a quiet place to build a snow sculpture. Or at least a pillar as tall as you can!

We did hire some snow gear just for the warmth – the hire guy asked what size i was – i said don’t know… ookii gaijin! (large foreigner) and he chuckled

We also wandered down to one of the ski resorts and had a look around. At the big hotel there we got our first taste of Haagen Darz ice-creams! We’ve been nomming them each trip since.

Back then i was still taking heaps of pics of all the funny japan-glish signs we saw :p

We wandered round the town and back streets just admiring the snow – when you’ve grown up in a country that has very little snow (or even none in most states of AU) it really is a novelty just walking around in it.

We could just here the constant background music being blared from loud speakers on the ski slopes – we came to learn that there is usually *some* music or noise/chime/alert all over the place in Japan.

Also, this was our first experience staying in a room with tatami and futon. And first time being woken in the night by a loud sliding/scraping noise outside followed by several loud thuds. We woke to see the window covered by snow sliding off the roof!

Last trip i got nasty heyfever when ever were in a tatami room but i don’t this was the case on the first trip.

Second day in a foreign land

On our second day ever we used our JR Pass and took our first shinkansen ever up to Echigo Yuzawa then jumped on our first japanese bus ever (bus timetables/routes can still sometimes be very confusing to me even on our 4th trip so i’m amazed we figured it out on our first trip lol – i think we must have relied heavily on the tourist info centre) to get to Naeba – a little skiing town. We’d never gone skiing before, and hadn’t made any plan to go skiing here – just wanted to get to snow country! We’d been to Melbourne once before to see snow, but this was everywhere, we’d never seen so much snow!

It was the afternoon by the time we got to the hotel so after checking in we just wandered up the main street in the snow. Saw a ramen shop and went in for an early dinner – got some unknown huffs and grumbles from the guy behind the counter and quite a blatant stare of ‘get out of here’ so we left. Someone at the only occupied table at the back of the restaurant shouted something as we left – guess i’ll never know what it was 😛