And not a creature was stirring...

Dave was commenting on the lack of blogger activity, and looking back on my own blog (that'd be that one you're reading now) I haven't really put much in lately myself. A couple of links to movies I wanna see hardly counts. So I'll write a little something else about what's been happening.

The ski trip to Nukabira in Hokkaido went pretty well, but failed to equal last year's. Although there was snow, it didn't snow while I was there (snowed everyday last year). And this year I'd wanted to try more variety of courses. Last year's field had only 3 courses, of which I used only the beginner's course. So apart from price the big reason for choosing Nukabira was its 8 courses (3 beginner / 2 intermediate / 3 expert). However due to the lack of snow only 3 courses - 2 beginner / 1 intermediate - were open. In fact, on the first day there were only 2 courses. And when the 3rd course opened it was so iced up I skied it only twice and returned to the other courses.

But the biggest problem was the slopes had to be shared with several high school and university ski teams who were slalom training. Now this wouldn't have been such a problem if there had been any supervision of these teams, but there was none and they were left to do whatever they wanted. They had booked the fields until 10am, after which they were supposed to share them with the public. This required them to remove their slalom poles from half of each slope so that the public could ski down one half of a slope. And for safety there were poles placed down the slopes to demarcate their area from ours. But this "system" just didn't work.

The problems were numerous.

The ski fields had just opened for the season, and so there weren't many members of the public there. And so there was no real show of numbers for the ski teams to remove the poles. There were times when we were the only members of the public skiing.

And so after 10am every morning they had not removed the poles from the "public" side, and continued to ski down there. And after we complained every time to the management to have them remove the poles, they then often used the demarcation poles as just another slalom run! Thus there were another series of complaints. Now this didn't happen just once, but for 3 of the 4 days.

There was no hands on supervision of the teams from the ski field's management, so on the slope the teams could do whatever they wanted. This was especially apparent at the top of the slope where there was no direction of the public for where they could ski. Twice we had to "negotiate" with the coach on the top of the slope just to be "allowed" to ski down the public side. He acted like he was doing us a special favor to let us ski down just this once!

Someone in management was obviously siding with the ski teams. Once we were stopped from getting on the lift by the lift officer because he'd heard from the coach that it would be "better for our safety if we used the other slope" (the iced up one we didn't want to ski on). Unbelievable! Suddenly a member of management jumped out from nowhere and confirmed this. We complained and he immediately relented (knowing full well that they'd been advertising that the public could use half the slope after 10am), but then told the lift officer that no other members of the public could use this lift. Especially kids.

So basically what happened was that the ski teams ran riot, and every morning we had to fight and complain to get what had been advertised. This tended to make the mornings a running battle, but the afternoons were very enjoyable. I however won't be recommending the ski field to others.

Since then Mari and I went to Mari's folk's place in Shuzenji to see in the New Year. And as this year is the Year of the Boar, what better way to celebrate than a trip to Wild Boar Town. Who can forget the jumping boar, or the wild boar ramen, or even the wild boar race? Yes, the height of culture can be yours by the expenditure of a mere 700 yen and an hour and a half of your time. We spent about 2 hours there, but that was only because we arrived just after the wild boar race had finished, and so we had to wait for the next one. No queuing, no delays! Act now!

Links to YouTube seem to be all the Rage, so here's a little more Die Hard Xmas magic to tide you over until July 4th. Thanks to Cinephobia for pointing it out.