Snowboarding

I’m back again. Yesterday I arrived at 5.30 in Umeda, Osaka after a bus trip of 8 hours long and pain everywhere.
At about 6am Friday everyone arrived at the hotel in Nagano. Outside, a snow layer of at least 2 meters. The roads were merely tunnels through the snow. Really impressive, I never saw such a thing. After resting for a while, we went to the rental place to rent some snowboard suits, snowboards, goggles, boots, etc. They even had “O”-size. I don’t know where it stands for (maybe “O” stands for ooki which means big in Japanese), but it fit me. First I wanted to go skiing, but at the last moment I decided to go snowboarding, because almost everyone choose to snowboard.

Soon after changing clothes we went up the mountain to start the practice. Masa started teaching the people who didn’t know how to use a snowboard how to stand up, which was already really difficult. Standing up requires the a special technique otherwise you just slide away while standing up. It’s pretty difficult to prevent this. Anyways, after several tries (15 or more maybe?) I could stand up where the next challenge was awaiting for me: Once you stand up, you also have to stand up longer than 2 seconds. Masa told us to practice that before learning other techniques. Keeping balance and “brake” continuously, that’s what I practiced the whole day. I fell more than a thousand times, which resulted in pain everywhere. One fall was so bad that I turned over my head two times. I couldn’t move for a few seconds because of the pain. Later I noticed it also caused a blue eye (barely noticeable though if you don’t look for it). That evening I was just exhausted. I couldn’t even move anymore.

The next morning everyone got up early already to have some breakfast and after that to go uphill again. This time I was planning to practice the turns which are also used to stop gaining speed. Turning is done by leaning to the back or to the front. At the end of the day I managed to teach myself to make a left turn by leaning to the back. I could also turn to the right, but I had to turn the snowboard 180 degrees for that first, which is – of course – not the proper way to do it. It requires balance and you need guts for it. Of course I fell uncountable times again.

I couldn’t manage to learn snowboarding in 2 days, but that’s ok. I had fun falling and getting up all the time (really).
After bringing back the rented stuff we had a dinner and went to an onsen, which was verryyy relaxing after two days of snowboarding. At 9 we took the nightbus back to home.

I had two great days, learned how to use a snowboard. Afterwards I was thinking about the amount of times I fell and how dangerous that actually is…
I didn’t take my camera to the hill, but some others (the ones who had more experience) did. I already have a few, but I’ll get more later. Ow and by the way. The view at the top was magnificent.