Engrish around Nagano Station, and a Little Something on the Side

I know, I know, I already posted today, but this is important. Last night I went to pick up two of my buddies from Tokyo at Nagano Station. I noticed as you head towards a more populated area, the concentration of Engrish greatly increases. For those of you not familiar with Engrish, it's basically any hilarious use of English by Japanese people including replacing l's with r's, improper grammer, and bizzare word choice. For hilarious examples, click here. Anyways, I found some great stuff around Nagano station, try to find it if you're ever in the area:

Then let's go to the beach!

Yep.

I hope I never get one of those.

These are my friends Chris and Yui from Tokyo. They're thuggin thuggin thuggin. This picture was taken right before a kickass day of skiiing and boarding that happily ended with Chris fucking up his ankle.

And this is what I had for dinner last night:

That's right, it's a steak donburi. Really awful idea. Really all you have is a mediocre steak and a plain bowl of rice, and then your out 1000 yen. Gotta love Gusto.

And I have one more treat for you, this is a video Yui showed me today when we got back from the mountains. It's basically hilarious. I give you, "Taking Off All of My Clothes Off."

Skiing in Japan: A Struggle

Speaking a foreign language is tiring, so I usually indulge in 10-11 hours of sleep a night, but this morning a mustered my willpower and got out of my fleece-blanketed futon at 9 AM. This gave me enough time to eat one of my host mom's ridiculously large breakfasts: 2 bowls of rice with konbu (kelp), 2 bowls of miso soup, salad, sausages, tamago-yaki (an extra-delicious variant of scrambled eggs), ham, boiled vegetables, and an-pan (bread filled with red bean paste= DELICIOUS!!!). For another take on Japanese breakfast, check this out (Warning: Excessive Profanity).

From there it was off to the slopes with my dad for my first time skiing in 9 years. Because we rented all our skiing equipment earlier, we just had to head straight up to the mountain we chose to ski on. Now being the super-hip-hop cool dude that I am, I decided that it would be SUPERFLY to bring my camera along to take some RIGHTEOUS photos without the help of my MEMORY CARD which I left in the COMPUTER! Yeah, that's why I don't have any photos. Face Todd, face. But, my dad took some killer shots of me learning how to sky, which brings me to our ski-jou (place to ski), Yakebitai-yama (yama means mountain if you aren't familiar with the go).

We proceeded to strap on our gear and head to the Gondola lift. This lift is a Swiss-Made capsule lift, meaning that the cold can't get into your little bubble of warmth, which was pretty nice, I have to say. My dad knows somebody at the lift station, so we were able to "borrow" (Japanese for not pay for) some lift passes for the day. Once we got in the lift we started heading up the mountain. Having only been on a bunny hill before, I began to grow increasingly frightened when the lift kept going higher and higher with no sign of the other lift station. To banish my fear, my dad took some pictures (his camera makes a gunshot noise whenever he takes a picture, it's hilarious). The results were something like this:




When we finally left the lift at the highest point on the mountain, neither of us realized quite how long it would be before we saw the lift again. Now I wouldn't say I was bad at skiing, oh wait, yes I would, I was shit awful. After spending the obligatory 10 minutes to put my skies on, I proceeded to lose control of my speed and fly into a snow embankment on the very first...it wasn't steep enough to call it a hill or a slope, yeah, we'll just say I bit it on the very first inclined plane. From there , it didn't get much better. If I had to describe my skiing style, I'd call it a constant effort to reach the fetal position, but being thwarted by the rigid plastic of my boots. My dad kept trying to get me to put my weight back and keep my back straight but fuck that, I fetal-ed my way down the first half of that mountain and my skies only came off three times. Hell Yeah. This should give you a rough idea:

After that, we came upon a slope that we (successfully) determined was much too dangerous. Which brings me to an undiscovered event I plan to submit to the Winter Olympics, Boot Skiing. It's pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It's just like skiing except without the skees, danger, and potential for FUN:

Unrelated. I know. But there wasn't the actual clip from the show on YouTube, and this is way funnier than any picture montage. But Boot Skiing. Was actually the most fun I had on the first run, because many of the same principle as skiing apply, it's just easier, slower, and falling down is fun rather than a pain in the ass. When we reached the bottom the steep slope, I put on my skees and 15 minutes later I was back to my earlier inadequacy. We had some lunch (Chicken Curry) at the lodge when we reached the bottom, and you know what it tasted like? It tasted like failure:

Yeah, well I don't like failure. So after lunch I insisted we go and do the same slope again. This time I TOOK NO PRISONERS RAWRGGHHRA:




You can almost taste the improvement. But really, I did get a lot better, and we even went a third time. It started to be really fun once I figured out how to slow down and turn at the same time (the key is lowering your shoulder). It ended up being a lot of fun, and I'm really excited to go again this weekend. When we got back home, we were both really pooped, but I had the energy to get my SD from the computer and take this epic picture of my dad sleeping like a rock star:


Laterz.

Renting Skis: An Exercise in Humility

Man, the word 'skis' looks really weird. It looks like it should rhyme with piss rather than cheese. I'm all for changing it to 'skies'. I know, I know, this is what you're thinking: "But Todd, how on Earth will I express more than one of that thing that clouds are in without completely confusing my friends and family?" I know it's hard to trust someone other than you to know what you're saying, but you have to have faith in context. Which brings me to today's story and the word that made me look foolish: mukashi (むかし）.

After a successful morning of watching Japanese dramas to improve my Japanese, I left the house with my host dad to track down some skees (yeah, that's better) for me to use this weekend. We went into a store, which was also the house of the family that ran the place, and I sat down to let my dad do the talking. The last time I went skeeing I was 10, and I never made it past the bunny hill, so renting skees and skeeing equipment would be difficult for me in America. In Japan, knowing none of the relevant vocabulary, I was helpless. I'm normally pretty good at understanding what my dad is saying, but today I just had no idea. They kept talking about something mukashi as well as other things I couldn't understand. I was so bewildered that it took me a while to process simple things the proprietor said to me such as kitemite (着てみて） and kutsu o nuide kudasai (靴を脱いでください）、 meaning "try this on" and "take off your shoes please" respectively. All in all, I performed way under my ability, and I think I embarrassed my dad a bit. I later discovered that mukashi means old, which I've heard before, but in skeeing it refers to the older, picket-fence shaped skees, while the newer ones are more of a figure 8 shape, wider at the ends for ease in turning. My dad later explained to me that the skees he owns are mukashi and therefore, dame (no good).

The lesson you should learn from this is that before you go to buy or rent something, make sure you know all the relevant vocabulary so you can get what you really want. For example, I've been needing a haircut for a little while and I came upon I nice looking hair salon when I was walking around town, but I realized I didn't know important words and phrases like "fade," "comb," and "most stylish boys haircut in Japan right now." I didn't even really know the word for haircut, so I would've gone in asking for a kamikiri (lit: hair cutting) and probably confused everyone. Point is, know your goal and come in prepared, like with this awesome article on how to get a haircut in Japan.

From there we went for a drive up into the Shiga Kogen Heights, to check out the places we'll be skeeing over the weekend. It looks kinda like this:

It's really weird. It snowed a lot yesterday. But the sun was out today so all the snow lower down the mountains where I live is gone. But after a 10 minute drive, it's winter wonderland again. Good one, Japan.