This weekend I went skiing with my buddy Kuni. We got up at dawn and drove to Hakusan City, where a bunch of ski slopes are located. We ended up deciding on Sena, which was pretty good as far as size and difficulty are concerned, but there wasn’t a lot of snow and in patches it was already giving way to solid ground beneath.
We started nice and early, and already there were throngs of people getting set up for a day on the slopes. I was able to borrow a lot of equipment from people, but I ended up renting ski boots. I’ve skiied enough in the past, but on Sunday I decided to try short skis, which as the name suggests are pretty short and don’t have poles to go with them. If you ski a lot, you’ll see a lot of kids going straight down ski hills on them.
Anyway, it was my first time on these, and when all’s said and done they weren’t that different from regular skis. It was a bit more leg-intensive, because you didn’t have poles to help out, and it was also a bit more difficult to brake cuz the length of the skis are shorter. You also feel bumps more and end up being pretty susceptible to ice patches, but I didn’t really fall at all and it was super easy to stay on them. It was a bit like skating down the hill. Kuni was snowboarding, which he’d done for 14 years, so he whipped down the hill, but I kept up ok. I think next season I’ll try out snowboarding, just so I can say I’ve done it, but if it takes forever to get the hang of, I’m switching back to regular skis.
Not surprisingly, I bumped into people I knew, despite the ski slope being nowhere near where I live. I met a teacher I work with at one of my elementary schools, and then later a few more teachers from various schools, plus a couple of students, who were of course mortified to have seen me in public. Yesterday at school a little second grader who I’d never spoken to before yelled “Hey, English teacher!” and then proceeded to tell me how she’d seen me skiing on the weekend. Unbelievable how connected everything really is. If I pick my nose in the dark I’m likely to hear about it at school.
During the day, Kuni and I also bumped into some Russian grad students who were doing their theses at a university in Kanazawa. Their level of spoken Japanese was next to perfect, and because it was the language we all had in common we ended up communicating predominantly in Japanese, but it was a little weird talking to white people in Japanese and not English.
In other Kuni-related news, I might be starting a private tutoring gig. Kuni’s English is impressive enough but his daughter’s language skills are shoddy at best, which in Kuni’s mind means there’s a lot of room for improvement. Also, she’s 3 years old. But when you show up in an English-speaking country and can’t open a bank account or book a plane ticket, age alone isn’t going to save you.
So Kuni and I worked it out that if I come over an hour a week or so to play with his daughter and a couple of other toddlers in a purely English environment, they’re bound to pick some of it up pretty quick. Plus I’d get free dinner! So that’s probably going to happen starting in March.
We started nice and early, and already there were throngs of people getting set up for a day on the slopes. I was able to borrow a lot of equipment from people, but I ended up renting ski boots. I’ve skiied enough in the past, but on Sunday I decided to try short skis, which as the name suggests are pretty short and don’t have poles to go with them. If you ski a lot, you’ll see a lot of kids going straight down ski hills on them.
Anyway, it was my first time on these, and when all’s said and done they weren’t that different from regular skis. It was a bit more leg-intensive, because you didn’t have poles to help out, and it was also a bit more difficult to brake cuz the length of the skis are shorter. You also feel bumps more and end up being pretty susceptible to ice patches, but I didn’t really fall at all and it was super easy to stay on them. It was a bit like skating down the hill. Kuni was snowboarding, which he’d done for 14 years, so he whipped down the hill, but I kept up ok. I think next season I’ll try out snowboarding, just so I can say I’ve done it, but if it takes forever to get the hang of, I’m switching back to regular skis.
Not surprisingly, I bumped into people I knew, despite the ski slope being nowhere near where I live. I met a teacher I work with at one of my elementary schools, and then later a few more teachers from various schools, plus a couple of students, who were of course mortified to have seen me in public. Yesterday at school a little second grader who I’d never spoken to before yelled “Hey, English teacher!” and then proceeded to tell me how she’d seen me skiing on the weekend. Unbelievable how connected everything really is. If I pick my nose in the dark I’m likely to hear about it at school.
During the day, Kuni and I also bumped into some Russian grad students who were doing their theses at a university in Kanazawa. Their level of spoken Japanese was next to perfect, and because it was the language we all had in common we ended up communicating predominantly in Japanese, but it was a little weird talking to white people in Japanese and not English.
In other Kuni-related news, I might be starting a private tutoring gig. Kuni’s English is impressive enough but his daughter’s language skills are shoddy at best, which in Kuni’s mind means there’s a lot of room for improvement. Also, she’s 3 years old. But when you show up in an English-speaking country and can’t open a bank account or book a plane ticket, age alone isn’t going to save you.
So Kuni and I worked it out that if I come over an hour a week or so to play with his daughter and a couple of other toddlers in a purely English environment, they’re bound to pick some of it up pretty quick. Plus I’d get free dinner! So that’s probably going to happen starting in March.
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