POTW: Framed

Becca has got me onto a Facebook initiative she's started. It's a group she made with photographer friends to encourage them to post their photos somewhere other can see them. There are no rules or categories: just the idea that you should post a photo a week: one that you think is the best you've done. I have further limited myself to chose a photo I actually took that week. As I've been neglecting the blog of late, I thought it might be the kind of thing I should post up here.


This week, it was a two-way tie between the photos below, each of which were taken in Sapporo this past weekend as I was hanging out with Perry, Lindsay, Max, Mark, and various other folk like Nick Small. 


Then, out of nowhere, I realized that neither of them compared to the sexy focus of the following picture of Perry seated in the window of Kyosuke's Hookah Bar, located on the second floor of a restaurant, right where Tanuki Koji 6 turns into Tanuki Koji 7 in downtown Sapporo.

Soran! Soran!

Last week at this time, half the ALT population of Hokkaido was descending on Sapporo to take in the Yosakoi/Soran Matsuri(festival). The whole thing started out with a dance: Yosakoi...or was it Soran? Regardless, it was a dance developed down south in Japan meant to draw from the motions of fishermen hauling in nets and the chants that they used to keep time. But that's a bit like saying that Glee was developed from Christmas carollers. Yosakoi/Soran has grown so far beyond its beginnings that it is now little more than a vague musical/gesticular pattern within which the Japanese LOSE THEIR SHIT.

Season Opener: Teine

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

Yosakoi is

Yosakoi is madness.

Yosakoi is forward motion.

Yosakoi is colour and music and light.

Yosakoi is a thing with a life of its own: a synergetic, Frankensteinian abomination of the fishing-inspired dance that birthed it. Yosakoi is the void that was filled by the surface-shy, but deep-down-explosive Japanese soul. Yosakoi is one voice expressing itself in a multitude of languages and dialects and idioms. Yosakoi is a rough framework for imaginations that express themselves best in rhythm. Yosakoi is the Will-To-Performance of a people.

Yosakoi is your visual definition for “genki.”

Yosakoi is energy uninhibited.

Yosakoi is fire.

Golden Week, Post Mortem

Despite having seven days off between April 29^th and May 5^th for Golden Week (Japan's version of March Break...sort of), I didn’t get up to any great adventuring as the cost of my plane tickets home this summer convinced me to stay closer to home.

I did manage to make it out to Heather’s neck of the Inaka for a couple of excellent days inside (thanks to the rain).

I also put up a fellow Canadian JET/ALT who what biking roughly 600km across Hokkaido in 8 or 9 days, and I took him out to see Kamui Misaki, one of the prettiest (and on that Monday, windiest) parts of my corner of Hokkaido.

On the Tuesday, I went on to bike from Furubira to Lindsay’s town of Ishikari, on the outskirts of Sapporo, with him. We did the 65 kilometer ride in one day, and it was easily the furthest I’ve ever biked. There were also a fair few more mountains between here and there than we’d both expected, which was…fun. The weather was good to us, though, and I wound up with my first sunburn of the season at the end of the day.

Despite the burn, there is still snow on Teine, and Heather's friends from the UK proved that Niseko was still skiable on that same day that we were biking and getting sunburnt.

The following day was spent biking around Sapporo for the first time with Heather, talking in the mad people in Maruyama park who were drinking and barbequing to celebrate the as-of-yet non-existant sakura (cherry blossoms).

This girl was my hero.

Also, there was spontaneous madness afoot.

Teine

The Teine Mountains are located about an hour from downtown Sapporo by train/bus. If you had a car on you, you’d find them significantly closer; perhaps closer than you’d think a mountain of such substance had any right to be to a metropolis like Sapporo. It was this proximity that was part of the reason Sapporo/Teine was awarded the 1972 winter Olympics, and it was this proximity that had Lindsay, Mark, Heather, and me so excited to get out to Teine for the first time over the weekend. Sapporo is, in case you haven’t noticed, our main urban base of operations, and to have a quality mountain so close now that we were all well into snowboarding would be, well, prime.

So the weekend was spent at Teine during the days and in Sapporo at night with Heather and, alternatively, with Mark and Lindsay. The two adoptive siblings of mine seeming to be in a polkaroo-ish relationship as Mark missed Saturday due to what was likely full-blown alcohol poisoning, and Lindsay reactivated her UGG-related (god, how I want to burn those ‘boots’) ankle injury by taking a particularly bad spill on the hills, assuring she’d miss Sunday.

Lindsay, all smiles before our first run down the mountain.

Our jackets really shouldn't be allowed that close to one another

Lindsay, down and lost in a cloud on the Confidence Builder.

Waiting.

Apologies; these would have been more awesome were they not taken on an iPhone

Lindsay almost taking out a dude

View of Teine, from Teine, at the close of day 1

Storms blew in and out both days as the elevation of the mountains guarded us from the slippery melt going on in Sapporo Proper. The best one struck in the wee hours of Saturday night, continuing on into Sunday morning. It dumped down powder so fine that it elicited expletives from Heather, who was nursing her tailbone and practicing her toe-side in the low-lying Olympic zone.

Further up in the Highland zone, Mark and I were just as happy with Sunday’s conditions. We discovered a run I’d avoided on Saturday and dubbed it “Columbia’s Finest” for the way it seemed to gather the powder into piles for us. And then there was the run beside it, which I Nicknamed “The Confidence Builder”: a course that switched back and forth across the face of the mountain.

It was only a green run, but its mix of well-groomed flats and sharp turns inspired something in me, and I took to bombing down it ever quicker, keeping my board straight and tucking down close to the ground until I could hear nothing but the wind in my ears. I’m pretty sure it’s the fastest I’ve ever gone on a board, and though the course couldn’t be described as challenging, I feel like taking it at speed developed something within me, building my confidence until I would crouch so low on the board during the straight-aways as to be able to skim my glove across the snow.

Mountain Days 7, 8

P.S. I'm behind the times. This should have been posted immediately following the weekend of March 6-7th, when we went to Teine.