Nagano

I’ve been meaning to put up our Nagano pictures. It was an honour to be invited to Nakamura’s (the kangaroo’s colleague) house.

After a simple but delicious meal of grilled beef and veggies, his daughters and wife put up a violin performance.



Here’s us with his two daughters, Akari and Hitomi. They could speak English but were extremely shy so we spoke Japanese to them for one and a half days. Great practice for me.



Naka’s wife tried hard to make conversation. Apparently she was very into beauty products so we compared notes on what we used. She even brought out a women’s magazine so I could flip through it. I could see Naka and the kangaroo sliding into snooze mode so Naka whipped out his new teeny Sony laptop for the kangaroo to play with. Different toys for boys and girls, eh?

We weren’t sure if we had to make the first move to say goodnight so we waited. Naka’s wife yawned and said she was going to take a bath. But she took ages. As it drew close to midnight, I wanted to keel over from all the sake. Also, everyone took turns to take a shower. Usually, the Japanese wash themselves in the evening, so the kangaroo reluctantly took a shower. He wearily said he didn’t want to breach some invisible rule about hygiene. I laughed: “Yeah, you don’t want them to think you’re a smelly ang moh, right?”



This is the view from the black run. I actually forgot to bring my camera so all images here are courtesy of Mr. D. Beautiful, eh? It rained miserably but that meant it was snowing on the slopes in Nagano. I had soft powder to snowboard on but it hardened when the sun came out in full force after noon. Falling was incredibly ouch.



Here’s Naka having a snooze in the playground area. Two little girls can sure make a grown man exhausted. The kangaroo was amazed how much they needed to eat and how often they had to go to the bathroom.

In all, it was a fab trip. We zoomed off to an onsen to ease our sore muscles from seven hours of snowboarding. It’s only been a week but it feels like a fuzzy dream I had a long time ago.