Rusutsu

Went to Rusutsu, a ski resort about an hours drive away from Niseko with Matt, Tim and Luke a couple of day ago. This is the drive there:

Here's the boys on the chair lift:

It was the best day of snowboarding I've had since I got to Japan.

Skiing/snowboarding through the trees is strictly prohibited at this resort, which meant that it was super awesome to go through the trees, as not many people had tracked out the snow before you got there. Usually at Niseko, you get a couple of hours of nice snow in the morning if you're at the lift and lining up at 8:30am when lifts open. At Rusutsu it was awesome fresh snow all day. By about 2pm the weather started getting a bit shit, and we were all pretty exhausted, so we called it a day. Good bloody day though. There was an old rollercoaster/theme park buried in the snow too. Looked so cool. Awesome times.

Luke's backpack got caught on the chairlift. It was relatively funny.

New Years

Yesterday my friend Aiko drove me into the local shrine in Kutchan to make a new years wish.

Here's Aiko and her dog Pa-ke at the front of the shrine.

Up the stairs:

People walking up to the shrine:

I watched what Aiko did first, then copied. She threw a 10 yen coin into this box thing, then rang a bell. Then clapped her hands twice and bowed, with her hands held in front of her, like she was praying. She made her wish, and then moved on. I did the same thing.

We then went to get our fortunes. There was the option to get an english version, but I went for the Japanese option, thought it would be cooler. Didn't get a chance to translate it yet though.

Aiko then took me to the supermarket to help me figure out what the hell I was buying. She then took me to her house and made me a traditional new years drink, made with the left over rice used to make sake. The drink wasn't alcoholic, and tasted a little bit like sake, but was more sweet. It was pretty good.

New Years Eve itself was nothing big, ended up in Lawsons, a convenience store for the countdown, to buy delicious greasy chicken. Mmmm, Lawsons chicken.

Christmas

This was my first Christmas ever where I had to work. Definitely not my favourite. Didn't even feel like Christmas. There's been no Chrismas songs or decorations. This is kind of nice though, back home you have to listen to so many Christmas songs for so long that by the time Christmas comes, you're over it.

Matt and I had Lawsons chicken for Christmas lunch downstairs at work. Usually I'm all about hanging with fam and eating awesome food, wasn't really a possibility though.

After work, got to skype the fam which was awesome. Opened a few gifts from Matt and Dad.

Cat and elephant from Matt:

Earings and necklace from Dad:

Hung out, had some beers, then headed to Jo Jo's, a restaurant in town for a set menu Christmas dinner. None of us really knew what to expect, I thought it was awesome though.

Started with sparkling peach sake and Salmon sashimi:

Not everyone was a fan, so I got to eat heaps.

Then there was a potato soup (I think). Maiyo, from work had a bottle of champagne sent to our table! So nice!

Then the main was roast chicken, with lotus bulb chips, tomato, some sort of root vegetable I wasn't familiar with, and some chargrilled eggplant:

Ended up at the fridge door bar for drinks afterwards. Good way to end the day :-)

My House

Here's a video that Matt and I made. Enjoy!



Or click here to open video.

Onsen

Had my first onsen experience today. An onsen is a public hot spring. Sometimes people don't have showers or baths in their houses, so they have to go to the onsen to get clean. I went with a friend from work this afternoon. We got there and had to buy a ticket at this vending machine. Then we had to hand our ticket over to this guy at a counter not doing anything. Seemed pretty weird.

We then walked into this changing room, where there's heaps of shelves with a basket in each one. You get your naked on, leave your clothes behind and head down these stairs into this super steamy room. On the walls there are these showers with seats. You have to sit on the seat and wash your self really well. My friend Aiko said she spends maybe 10 mins thoroughly cleaning herself before getting into the onsen. The one we went to had an indoor and an outdoor onsen. We started with the inside, and made our way to the outside one. The outside once was better, the air didn't feel too cold at all, it was just nice and fresh after the farty sulphur smell of the indoor one. It was pretty awesome though. The outside one was a circular shape surounded by rocks. The water was probably about 70cm deep. Deep enough to sit and have my shoulders covered. It was a little bit weird having your nudie on with other chicks, would be more weird in a mixed one though. Apparently chicks can wear a towel in the mixed ones. Anyway, I feel super relaxed now. Hoorah!

I didn't take this picture, but it looked pretty much like this:

Japan

Things have been mega busy/crazy. Spent about a week and a half in Tokyo. Saw some really awesome shit, got lost, got frustrated at not being able to figure out where we needed to go.
Went to Disneyland:

Saw some awesome bonsai gardens

Saw some weird shit

Went to the Studio Ghibli Museum. So awesome. Felt like being in some crazy fantasy land for kids.

Bought this drink called "Hoppy" from this restaurant where you order your food on a touch screen at your table. Hoppy ended up being this weird drink that you mix with a shot of some kind of hard liquour on ice. It tasted okay, wasn't what I had in mind though.....

We made it to Niseko okay. Have been working since 28th of November. Company we work for is really shitty, poory run. I've been given hardly any instruction on what I have to do for my job. It's a real shit show. The house we live in is a mouldy shit hole with too many people being crammed in. The people we work with are awesome though, and the snow is great, so it should be an okay season I hope. Matt's banged his head on low doorways about 50 million times since moving in.

The view from the mounain is pretty awesome. Here I am with Mt Yotei, a volcano in the background. Lets hope there's plenty of good snowboarding to come.

East Coast of Australia

Matt and I have been very busy these last few months.
We quit our jobs 2 months ago and went on a 6 week, 7183km road trip up the East coast of Australia. We got as far north as Cape Tribulation. The idea was to get a little sunshine in before our trip to Japan (2nd winter in a row… *sigh*). Highlights of roadtrip:

- Breweries: Townsville Brewery, Blue Sky Brewery – Cairns, Murrays Brewery, just north of Newcastle. Lady at Murrays gave us a free taste of all the beers they had there (in a shot glass). There were so many delicious beers!

- Byron Bay lighthouse walk. Saw shit loads of whales! They were so cool. We saw a mum with her two kids, they got real close to shore, we could hear them breathing. We stayed at this really cool hostel, where the room was more of a canvas tent than anything. Cheap food, and free music.

- Steve Erwin – Australia Zoo. Uncle Ken got Matt and I tickets to the zoo. It was pretty damn good. My fave was the tiger talk, and the random lizards everywhere.

- Glasshouse mountains. Would have been nice to climb up one of them, we were on a tight time schedule though.

- Awesome rainforests, vines, ferns tall trees, general greenery, huge bats, tonnes of birds and wallabies – Daintree NP and Mary Cairncross Park.

- Day long boat trip around the Whitsundays. So good! Beautiful beaches! The most awesome soft white sand I’ve ever come across. (Whitsunday islands 34)

-Following GPS directions

- Walking/bussing around Magnetic Island. There was this old world war two fort which was really cool, some koalas on the walk up, and these tiny brown chocolate bats in the powder keg room. Had a swim at this really nice quite beach.

- We saw a freakin cassowary driving to Wallaman Falls! We saw the cassowary warning road sign, and it ran out on the road right behind the sign, that never happens! Apparently there’s only a little over 1000 left in the wild, we were really lucky to see it.

- Cairns festival, free flea circus!

- Scuba diving the Great Barrier Reef – we did a three day dive trip with Pro Dive. I did a two day learn to dive course, and Matt did a refresher. Matt did 11 open water dives and I did 8 in total. I didn’t really love it all that much, people are meant to be on the surface of the water, not underneath it. Going down the first few times was really awful for me, I got used to it after a while though. I hadn’t been drinking enough water though, and ended up being really dehydrated by the last day of the trip and had to miss out on one of the dives. We did get to see some really freakin’ cool shit though: turtles, reef sharks, seas cucumber, sting ray, giant clams, nemo (aka clown fish), 10 millions types of different fish of all different shapes and sizes. My favourite fish was the unicorn fish, and a massive school of these huge bump fish.

- We also went scuba diving at a 100 year old ship wreck, the S.S.Yongala. Meant to be a great dive, coz all that’s around it is sand, so all the sea life just hangs around this ship covered in coral. We saw some great shit, massive manta rays and eagle rays, leopard shark and a moray eel. The only problem was that the dive company was super dodgy, didn’t give us dive partners, didn’t do buddy checks on our equipment before diving, really old shitty rusted out transport vehicle with no seat belts, didn’t give a shit about the well being of anyone on the boat except the single female. I asked to go up, coz I was cold, and it took the guide 5 mins to scribe a message to the single female to see if she wanted to go up, and another 7 or so mins to get to the surface. The water was super rough and I got really bad sea sickness, voming all over the side of the boat. Really shit waste of 250 bucks. Oh well.


- Cairns, thirty degree weather, good/cheap hostel, hippy shops, delicious Mexican restaurant.

- Scenic Railway and Skyrail. Cool long gondola over a whole bunch of trees, and scenic railway to get you back, few walks/waterfalls on the way. Very nice.

We flew to Canada last week. We're here so Matt can get his working holiday Visa for Japan. Pain in the butt we couldn't get just get it in Australia. We've been saved a lot of the cost for flying all over by the generosity of this wonderful family, who are friends with Matt's mum, who work for air Canada. One member of the family flew all the way to Australia to come and get us so we can get the reduced rates. We're very grateful, such a wonderful/generous thing to have done for us.

We'll fly to Japan in late November. Fingers crossed all goes well.