You wouldn't believe what I was up to if I told you. There are perfect snowscapes and looming mountains and me slowly getting the hang of toe-side on my first day on a board. There are vistas of seas of hills, seen from on high when the blizzards rolling around in the heavens part for short spells. There are schools that have been converted to hostels, where everything is Winnie The Pooh (more Milne than Disney), and you wind up staying in the Eayore room, which--hilariously--translates to "iiyoo" (or, for the un japanified, "it's alright") in Japanese. And these magical little schoolhouse hostels are staffed by kind Japanese couples who will pick you up from the Niseko train station, and truck you to the mountain and back, and truck you to the onsen and back. And when they're not trucking, the wives are whipping up sumptuous, elaborate Japanese meals worth far more than the ¥1260 you paid for them, and the husbands are playing the accordion in the parlour, eyes closed with intensity, beside cast-iron, wood-burning stoves. They set their keys alight with polkas or see-sawing carnie waltzes while you eat your clementines and your cookies, rapt. With their last warbling notes, the husbands slump back into their chairs: marionettes with strings cut or earthen golems with the last archane Warsaw magiks of animation ebbing from their now-inert frames.
I'd tell you these things, but you wouldn't believe them--just as I'd never believe they could happen to me at this afterthought tail ending of my holiday.
Mountain Days 1, 2
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