Last week I headed to Sapporo for the only mandatory, annual meeting that us Hokkaido ALTs have. The days are taken up by a lot of people from the educational ministry and the Hokkaido Board of Education letting us know how we should be doing our jobs, interspersed with presentations from our co-ALTs who hand out tips for better lessons/activities with our students. However, just as the motto of the JET Programme would tell you, Every Situation Is Different, and as we're only allowed to select two sessions out of the 10-12 offered, and even then we might not be granted admission to the one we chose (based on numbers), finding a session that is applicable to your own very unique situation is a bit of a crap shoot.
For me, the real benefit of the Sapporo Mid-Year Conference (MYC) is the way that it brings all of us Hokkaido ALTs back together for two days. The Ministry folks would tell you that all we ALTs are interested in is getting drunk and showing up, hung over, for the conference sessions. I'd tell you differently, though, since it was very much the social interactions at last year's Sapporo MYC that convinced me to recontract and stay around in my town this year. Informational sessions are all well and good on paper, but it was remembering how many utterly fantastic people there were out there who I still had to get to know and get to hang out with that showed me that one year on JET was not enough. And that recontracting decision often seems like the main concern of the Boards of Education that employ us in our towns, so even if some ALTs do wind up hung over after the Thursday night parties of MYC, maybe that's not too high a price to pay for another ALT like me who saves his BOE the price of a plane ticket by deciding to hang around.
Wow. That was a bit of a JETrant. Sorry about that.
The main point of this was meant to be that, though I headed to Sapporo on Thursday and Friday with a suit bag under one arm, I did it with a board bag under the other. Knowing full well how slow in coming this Hokkaido winter has been, conditions were starting to cool, snow was starting to hang around, and Heather and I were DETERMINED to get in the first mountain day of the season. So determined that, even when I-encumbered with aforementioned suit bag, board bag, and a backpack with my laptop in it-slipped on the ice immediately outside my house and went down hard on one knee, there was no question of walking back five feet to leave the board, and all my boarding junk, at home.
I was tired of waiting, and this season was going to start. Now.
It was that same kind of single-mindedness that drove Kyle and I to drive out to Teine from Sapporo on Saturday morning, in 7-degree-celsius rain. Every other hill within a 2-hour drive seemed to be closed due to lack of snow or wind or a combination of the two, and Teine could only offer us one lift operating on its most bunniest of hills. Heather, being more sound of mind than I, had decided to save her money for boarding at Furano the following weekend, when there was meant to be a lot more snow.
Fortunately Kyle can be just as insanely optimistic as I can when he sets his mind on something, and it was him who was first to bellow "THAT'S SNOW!" while driving us up the mountain to Teine Highland and out of the rain below. By the time we reached the base of the hill, there were definite white, fluffy flakes coming down, but they felt a lot more like rain when we were finally let into the very-packed parking lot. Eventually Lindsay showed up, too, as she is a quick drive from Teine and had been anticipating the coming season as avidly as me, but after about an hour and a half of boarding on the bunny lift, she, Kyle, and I were all pretty soaked.
It had not all been for naught, though, as fairly soon after we'd arrived they started the longer hooded quad lift running, and by the time the three of us turned in for lunch and a chance to warm up/dry off, the long line for that longer lift had started filing through and riding up the mountain.
The after lunch period was a little less wet as the clouds broke up and the wet snow held off. It was also far more wintery at the top of Teine once we were able to get up the quad lift. A glorious return to the mountains it wasn't, but it did well enough in playing the part of a good practice run to help the three of us remember what we were supposed to do on our boards after a long summer off. It was also good to run into similarly-minded folk on the hills, such as Perry, his buddy Wing, and Jess and Brian Lagis.
2010 - 2011 Mountain Day 1
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