Sukii-wa suki desu ka?

That means "Do you like skiing?" for those of you who don't happen to speak Japanese. Of course, I fall into that category as well, but for a few brief shining moments this weekend, I had many others fooled into believing I didn't.

It goes like this. A co-worker of mine, a young and very cool science teacher named Mishina-sensei, invited me to come on his annual ski trip. He said I could invite my girlfriend, so I did. She in turn invited reinforcements in the form of 2 of her friends. So bottom line, this poor guy got stuck with not 1 but 4 goofy foreigners on his nice little ski trip.

The ladies came out Friday night and I took them to Gandhis, which, as far as I can tell, is still the greatest Indian restaurant in the world, including those in India. Yes, they may be from Nepal, but true talents know no borders.

I cleaned up my flop-pad, because it's not every day a guy gets three reasonably attractive ladies staying at his place. It took me a few hours, but I finally got the place to a state where I wasn't embarassed to have a fellow human being inside it with me. The girls actually thought it was quite homey, which is in marked contrast to my brother's appraisal, which was something along the lines of "This place is depressing" and "I can see my breath when I sleep...that's not normal."

At the crack of 4, we awoke to the soothing sounds of cell phone alarms and got ourselves together just in time to be 5 minutes late to the 4:30 am departure time. Luckily, Mishina lives right below me so we didn't have far to go. Being Japanese people, they were completely ready to go and waiting only on us. "Uh, yeah, ohayo gozaimasu ("good morning"), sorry, sorry, ohayo gozaimasu...OK, Let's Go!"

We piled into Mishina's car and headed to the expressway, which is a bargain at only about $20 an hour. The ladies promptly fell asleep and I stoically remained awake to inspire Mishina to do the same. He was driving, so I felt this was not purely altruistic of me.

We chit-chatted for a while, and eventually he started quizzing me on my Japanese. He is my absolute favorite person to speak Japanese with, because his English is absolutely amazing, so he can explain things to me as he's talking. I always feel right at ease. With some other people, it's far more difficult, and those awkward pauses are AWKWARD pauses. But, no matter.

Our destination was Shiga-kogen in the famed Nagano prefecture. This resort is the biggest ski resort in Japan, and also the site of many of the 1998 Winter Olympic ski events. It was breathtaking in scope. After stopping for brekkie at about 6:30, we pulled into the resort at about 8:30. It was cold and snowy.

I look distinctly Nordic here.

Our hotel was pretty funny, because it was built right on top of volcanic hot springs, so it kind of smelled like someone had cracked open about 30,000 eggs in the lobby and every single room and just never cleaned them up. It took a bit of getting used to. The advantage of this nasty eggey smell was that it was only a short walk downstairs to a nice hot bath.


Hong's and my room. A view over the slopes:

The ladies were mostly trying snowboarding, which they had little to zero experience at, so Mishina pointed them to the bunniest of bunny slopes, and we men were off to the good stuff. With us was Taga-san, the extraordinarily nice man who works in the front office of our school. He is personally important to me as the man who loaned me his bicycle for 3 months when I first came to Japan, and didn't complain when I accidentally left it out in the rain about 10 times. He speaks slightly more English than I do Japanese, and he thought it was about the funniest thing he'd ever heard everytime I put more than 3 words together in a sentence, so we had a grand time communicating in our respective languages. Each wanting to learn the other's language, most of what he said was in English and most of what I said was in Japanese. It would have confused the hell out of anyone if they were paying attention. I'd be like, "Migi-gawa? (Turn Right) and he'd say "Yes, Right." It was great.

Taga and Mishina were both extremely talented skiiers, especially Mishina. I started the day off a bit rusty, but this was my fifth time skiing this season, and so my skills have improved a bit. The guys thought I was very impressive for just going down most runs straight instead of turning. I tried to explain that turning is very hard to me and I prefer to go straight and just ride out the bumps. They thought it was crazy. I taught them how to say "Big Balls" and so everytime we saw a slalom skiier flying down the mountain, Mishina would point and say "He has big balls." By the end of the day, I was feeling up to speed and pretty big balls myself and even trying out some moguls, which I could almost sort of halfway do. I had about one run where I felt like I'd gone down in a straight line. The other ones were crooked or full of crashes.

I think the best part was the camaraderie. We had a great time skiing and riding the lifts and talking. At first, I was a bit nervous to talk, but after a while I got more comfortable talking and saying stupid stuff in Japanese, so it got easier and easier as the day went on. Before this weekend, I was so nervous about communicating in another language. The whole weekend turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

After the day's skiing, we had a super-fancy high cuisine Japanese meal at the hotel. I enjoyed it for the most part, but of course there were a few items I definitely wished were not there. The four of us were at a table with 2 very nice and very quiet teachers from my school, so it made for polite but very restrained conversation. Darn it, though, everyone did valiently at trying to communicate. The one lady would try so hard to think of the English words she would get furrows in her brow. The pain of trying to be right.

After the fancy dinner, we men retired to our room to Drink, with a capital D. Mishina's father owns a liquor store, so he had brought a really good bottle of sake. We were sitting around drinking and watching the world championship of ski jumping. It was a little sedate. The two teachers joined us, and then the 3 Kuraaaazy ones came in, full of genki (energetic) energy. Hong loves card games with a strange intensity, and so resolved to teach the group how to play a card game. I personally love card games, but I'm far too lazy and simple-minded to actually learn any of them, so my contribution was sitting there sipping my beer and demanding that the girls speak more slowly.

While they were ironing out the rules of the games amongst themselves, they were naturally speaking quite fast. Our Japanese hosts couldn't follow whatsoever. I would look over at their horrified faces every few moments and say, "I can't understand either" in sympathy. To be honest, I was a little embarassed of the girls' energetic juggernaut into the social gathering, because it interrupted the rather quietish evening that had been going on prior to that point. But I think that they had a good spirit and that my colleagues enjoyed it in a bemused way. It was definitely something to talk about later, and 2 of them valiently dared to try playing cards with Hong and her friends, though they got the rules explained to them at slightly less than light speed. I was impressed with their will to participate.

After a comfy night's sleep, we skied another half-day, this one absolutely perfect. Perfect powder from the previous day, plus clear perfect blue skies. You couldn't ask for a better day of skiing. We headed home in the afternoon, satisfied.