Winter Vacation (feat. Elio)

A few days after Christmas my dad had a trip to Tokyo and somehow Elio managed to hide himself in the luggage. I met with them after making my way there on the bullet train. We hung out for a bit and they gave me some Christmas presents, including an awesome grey overcoat that I wore constantly through March, then walked around the neighborhood for a bit until the jetlag set in and my companions went to bed.

Elio and I wandered around Tokyo for two days, seeing things like the Tokyo Skytree and the Shibuya crossing. We met up with our friend Hiroto, who was an exchange student at our high school for a year, after seeing Meiji Shrine and he took us to a cool little conveyor belt sushi place. Apparently I can’t upload videos to this blog, so you’ll just have to imagine the Skytree view through the lens of a shaky handheld camera panning over the bright orange and yellow lights of sprawling skyscrapers and tiny cars scurrying along a web of roads, all stretching into the horizon in the mass of humanity and steel that is night time Tokyo. And then finish your scene with a quick look through the transparent floor of glass to the dark concrete a thousand feet below.

Here’s a lower view of (part of) Tokyo’s skyline:

On the afternoon of December 31st, after saying goodbye to Hiroto, we made our way out of Tokyo and inland to Nagano, land of mountains and snow. We were on our way to try out Japan’s famous ski slopes. There had been only one snowstorm so far, about two weeks beforehand, and they had just opened some of the runs in the last few days so we were a little worried about the conditions on the mountain. But, on my way to Tokyo I did confirm that there was at least some snow, and that night it was supposed to snow more so we were cautiously optimistic. Elio is a real mountain menace as we all know, but for me this would be my first time in over ten years, as well as the first time putting so much stress on my knee since I hurt it in high school, so I was also feeling a little nervous. These worries were soon eclipsed by more serious ones the next day though…

Once we arrived that evening and settled in at our hotel in the ski town of Hakuba, we hit the town for some food and drinks. I was immediately hit with the realization that this town was FILLED with foreign tourists (mainly Australian). Since I’ve been here 99% of the people everywhere have been Japanese (outside of big tourist spots) so the streets filled with loud voices and crowded bars with the patrons all singing in unison as opposed to one person belting out a karaoke tune felt like quite the switch up. Elio and I spent the night wandering around and finally around 11:30 the snow started falling. At first it was just a few shimmering flakes here and there but after a few minutes we looked outside and saw something like the snowy Christmas Eve from It’s a Wonderful Life. We trolled around the base of the mountain, stopping for a bit at a random DJ set, until midnight struck and there were cheers and fireworks (an unusual New Year’s celebration in this part of the world).

We were a bit slow to get up the next morning, making it out of the hotel and to a ski rental store just before noon. We also noticed they had rental slippers “of the King Size (~12 us)” that looked pretty tempting, as the ones at our hotel were a little too small.

After a miserable trudge another half mile or so to the entrance we arrived just in time to get our whole money’s worth for a half day pass. We took the gondola up to the top half of the mountain, technically the only area that was open. First we went down the beginner slope, which was actually quite fun. It was not very steep but it kept things interesting with its neverending switchbacks dropping into a forested ravine below. You could see the whole Hakuba valley stretching out below you as well, with the clear skies above and freshly fallen snow on the ground.

After that we spent the rest of the day on the main blue slope that was open. It took me a couple of runs but about halfway through the whole skiing thing clicked for me again and I was having a blast. No knee issues, but my quads were burning. Elio split from me at some point to go down some of the big boy runs and towards the end of the day his phone was running out of juice. Last I heard from him he was heading down to the base of the mountain on his snowboard, through all of the closed runs without enough snow. He didn’t know that they were closed, despite all the announcements and signs saying so, because well, it was all in a language he doesn’t know.

So Elio got to skip the line waiting for the gondola to the bottom, and was waiting for me at the base where we had celebrated the night before. I on the other hand had to wait in a crawling line for my turn to descend. At this point I’ll mention that Elio had rented our gear, so it was all tagged with his name. But interestingly enough, the helmet of the man in front of me was tagged “Angelo”. What are the chances! I got to talking with him and I didn’t actually catch where he was from but his family is from Hong Kong and he has a normal Chinese surname, but his name is in fact Angelo. We boarded the same gondola and continued talking on the way down. He’s living in Tokyo but has traveled around Japan quite a bit. The conversation moved to Ishikawa and how I live close to the Noto peninsula, where he’s actually spent some time drivi…. JISHIN DESU the gondola’s inhabitants’ phones sirened in unison. After three or four iterations the gondola lurched to halt and we began to sway back and forth, and drop down and up what felt like 50 feet as if we were bungee jumping. Several hundred feet off the ground, we returned to an eery still after maybe a dozen seconds.

Unsure of how strong the earthquake was, having been suspended in midair, we immediately checked our emergency notifications. The epicenter was just north of the Noto, and it was quite a big one. Elio told me later he could see the buildings nearby shaking in an impossible way with their glass warping and shooting out distorted reflections. We were stuck in the gondola for about 30 minutes while they made sure there was no structural damage and it was safe to continue operation, sitting through an aftershock in the meanwhile, and as soon as I got back to the hotel with Elio I got to work checking in and getting checked in on by all manner of people, from Tsubata and abroad. The water mains in Tsubata had been damaged and a lot of people were without water, but there wasn’t much structural damage and no tsunami threat thankfully.

A bit further north and the effects were much worse, and due to the isolation of the peninsula and damage it sustained there are still thousands of people, nearly half a year later, living in shelters or other temporary living conditions. Many people are still without running water, as well. A student from Wajima, the town at the north end of the peninsula that was badly damaged by the quake and subsequent fire, who was temporarily at my elementary school was just able to go back this last week. Things have been pretty normal in Tsubata since a week or two after the earthquake, but it is crazy to think that just a bit to the north it’s still quite a mess.

On our final, full day of skiing I tried out some of the big boy slopes with Elio, but they were a bit much for me, and towards the end of the day my knee was getting a little aggravated. It was a lot of fun, but my worries about how we were going yo get home, and what home would look like, put a damper on the end of our ski trip.

Sorry to end it on a somber note but this one is getting kind of long! I’ll make a second post wrapping up my trip with Elio and some other miscellaneous things that have happened in the (months) I haven’t posted. Stay tuned :)