It's early in the morning for me, my brain is discombobulated, and so my writing style will be frenetic and in point form.
- trip to Myoko Kogen, with a crew of 18 folks. I totally fucked up the bullet train tickets, or rather my agent, being Japan Rail did. When I asked for 18 tickets leaving Tokyo station at 7:30 on Friday, they naturally assumed I meant 07:30am. Oh come ON! I am pretty sure I clarified (even in stilted Japanese) that I said 7:30 EVENING! So of course by the time someone clocks in and figures out that all the tickets leave in the morning, they had all been already distributed to the crew, all over Tokyo, in different offices and environments. I had two days to scramble all over the city and get those tickets to exchange them for the evening train. Not fun - esp when you are on a motorbike in the dead of winter trying to grab as many tickets off people in a city of 30,000,000 people. I.e., Tokyo is a very large city to cross. Anyhow, I made it and the trip was rowdy, rowdy, rowdy.
2. These trips are getting more and more rowdy, with the ass-mooning party element coming to balance out the hardcore snowboarding nd off-piste backcountry silliness parts of it. Who would have thought that by second trip to Nozawa Onsen, we were setting a new standard in obnoxious drunken behaviour? We've been doing this for years, and the crowds have never been this energetic or raunchy! By Myoko, the third trip, we were dancing along with some Japanese punks and geezer salarimen to Michael Jackson being played by some old white-haired bar-owner dude who was groping our women. Oh come on, Wendy. You loved it!
3. The snow is just not that good this year. I hear that Europe has it worse but there are still pockets of powder here and there, mostly where we are looking, thankfully. Recently, there have been some major dumps, but snow levels are not up to their usual face-drowning going-down-the-mountain thigh-high powder conditions of Japan. Instead, the snow is only knee-high powder. Man, I sound spoiled, don't I?
4. Injuries so far this season - two cuts to my leg, a sprained pinky, and a cut on my forehead. The last one was actually from me hitting my head on a hotel door while stumbling around in the dark, semi-hungover.