It's been almost half a year since I last blogged. I didn't even finish chronicling my North American adventures. Shameful. Here's a refresher course for that, which I hope to keep somewhat brief:
I felt dreadful all throughout my stay in Boston and missed out on seeing much of the city. It was Bologna all over again. Fortunately, I started to get better as soon as I got into Toronto (you rock, Canada!) and managed to catch up with Janna for a session of night boarding at Blue Mountain, which wasn't all that spectacular (you suck, Blue!).
Catching up with people was a recurring theme throughout the entire trip. When I got to Banff, I met up with Martyn from high school, James again - he was there for a mini vacation before he headed home - and Amanda, who I knew from online. Next stop was Panorama, where I caught up with Shelley and Anj (and missed Brad completely due to poor planning) and then Revelstoke where a whole bunch of the old Pano crew were living and/or working.
Vancouver provided a nice reprieve from the near-constant snowboarding. The snow on the mountains surrounding the city was sub-par (and I hear did not really get much better until after the Winter Olympics had finished) so I took it as a chance to kick back and relax for a few days. I watched a couple of Canucks games at the pub with Shaun (ex-Pano) and chanced a meeting with Ben, a Vancouverite I met when I was backpacking in St. John's - he was living and studying in Cork, Ireland at the time, but happened to be back in town at the same time I was there. I cannot finish a paragraph about Vancouver without mentioning the sushi, which was as delicious and ludicrously cheap as ever. It's one of the reasons I keep going back to the city.
Catching up continued back into the USA when I stayed in Seattle with Lee (from LISA '08) and boarded Stevens Pass with Jon (a tutor I had in uni). I spent New Year's there before flying to Colorado to spend some more time with my parents in Winter Park. I did a bit of snowboarding - not too much because slopes of Winter Park were notorious for their moguls and traverses - and we went dog-sledding on one of the days, which was a definite highlight of the entire trip.
The other highlight came in another part of Colorado. I went to Albuquerque to meet up with Dylan and Angela, loose acquaintances that I met briefly in Sydney, who were involved in organising a trip to Silverton, which was essentially a backcountry ski area with one lift that took you high enough to get started. There hadn't been some new snow so it was rough in parts, but there were some really sweet spots and for my final ski run of the entire trip I decided I'd go for a heli drop since it was one of the cheapest places I'd seen it offered. The sensation of the helicopter taking off, flying into the valley, and then rising up and finally landing on the top of the run was worth the price of admission so the powder the run had to offer was simply icing on the cake. It was the perfect end to the trip.
Hmm, that wasn't a short refresher after all. Oh well.
Hmmmm, it seems I was comment spammed when I wasn't paying attention to this blog. I think I shall turn on word verification...
I'm in Boston. I met up earlier today with my mum and dad. We're staying with a good friend of my mum and her husband. After a hectic first three days of my trip, I've accumulated ten hours of transit delays and some kind of sore-throat-related infection. It's been a rough start to the holidays, but I'm hoping to fight through it.
Everything started off well enough. I was very impressed with V Australia. Firstly, automatic points for providing USB ports for charging (and, supposedly, for media playing, though I don't think iPhone/iPod was supported, not that it mattered). Secondly, great (free) on-demand movie selection on a decent-sized widescreen LCD monitor on the back of each seat. Thirdly... well, no thirdly. The food sucked as usual. But two out of three ain't bad. I watched a few movies and caught a few hours of sleep before making it into LAX.
After some unnecessary shenanigans at the Virgin America check-in at the airport, I made it to my gate early - very early. It turned out that the flight had been delayed due to fog at SFO, and the one-hour delay turned into two and then two and a half. I ended up getting to SFO almost three hours later than expected, and I missed my next connection.
I stayed at my aunt's place in San Francisco and booked an early morning flight to DC. When I got back to the airport I checked in and found out at the gate that, yes, my flight had been delayed once more. I did some scrambling around and made sure my connecting flight in Philadelphia was easier to catch and landed at a better airport in Washington (Ronald Reagan instead of Baltimore) and hoped the delay would not be too bad. I caught a break - the plane was helped by strong tail winds and got to Philadelphia earlier than expecting. I ended up getting into Ronald Reagan around six or so hours later than I had planned, and met up with James.
A short rest at James's later and we commenced the tour of the city. James gave me a tour of the Capitol. I got to see bits the building that was not normally covered in tours, which was pretty neat. And the fact that there was nobody else around there (i.e. no tourists) made all the statues and paintings and architecture much better/easier to look at. Afterwards, we headed to RFD's, a bar that had local and international beers, where we met up with a group of James's friends to bid him farewell as he's leaving for Australia soon. We had some beers and some good conversations and then made our way home.
"If it's anything the Americans can do well, it's making monuments." -James
I woke up with a sore throat - probably a result of all the stress of trying to make flights combined with going out straight after getting into DC - and noticed that it was raining outside. James and I were planning to do a Segway Tour of the city, but they had cancelled tours for the day because of the weather. We decided we'd walk instead.
We first got some food and then started to make our way from the Capitol down the National Mall to the Lincoln Memorial. James was right - the Americans did know how to do their monuments. The workmanship that must have gone into the monuments and memorials is impressive. It was a shame that the sun wasn't out because it would have made for some good photos.
We headed back home via the White House and relaxed for the rest of the day with poker, Japanese, and Sunday Night Football.
"We apologise for any inconvenience." -Airline staff
James and I woke up (actually, James woke up, I was awake from an interrupted sleep) at about 3:30 this morning to wait for the shuttle to pick me up and take me to Dulles airport. It was a foggy morning but everything was on time until about five or ten minutes before boarding time when the flight was suddenly announced as delayed. The plane that was coming in supposedly had some mechanical problems. The initial delay was one and a half hours. This became two. And then three and a half. At that point it would have made more sense for me to catch a bus or a train.
The airport had free wireless during the holiday season so that kept me occupied for a while, and one positive from the experience was that I discovered Five Guys - a burger chain that did really bloody good (and pretty affordable) burgers.
When I finally made it to Boston, my sore throat had taken a turn for the worse and my left eye was also hurting - I'm guessing a result of wearing nearly-expired contacts while sick. All we really saw of Boston today was Quincy Mall. After that, I was feeling too average to go on.
I'm meant to go snowboarding at Blue with Janna on Friday after I get into Toronto, so I'm going to sacrifice any sightseeing in Boston until I feel better. I'm hoping that my condition improves over the next few days. Although one thing I will do is see the Blue Man Group - our hosts have bought us tickets to the show tomorrow night and there's no way I can skip that.
I'm sleep deprived and on a caffeine high, so forgive me if this comes off as incoherent rambling, but this is probably the best state in which to write this particular post. See: Title. Let's call it a running theme.
This post is indredibly long and likely contains a lot of spelling and grammatical mistakes. You've been warned.
I haven't updated this blog in what seems like ages. I look at the date on the last post and it reads March 10, 2009. Yup, that was when I got back from Japan. Since then I've been to the Melbourne Comedy Festival for the third time, Europe for the second time (including the Edinburgh Fringe, which was incredible - I'll get onto that later), and am in the latter stages of planning (yet another) trip to the USA and Canada. I've been blaming a lot of this on my "busy schedule" but, really, I'm not actually that busy. I realise that the reason I probably haven't done any of this blogging stuff for so long is because I'm over-thinking it.
I look at the last draft that I saved and it had two very short paragraphs in it. I can remember what I was thinking at the time I started writing it, and I can remember clearly why I didn't post it - because I wasn't sure how to structure it to make it more readable. I was planning too much and not doing enough. (Again, this will be a recurring theme.) Even the start of this post was pre-planned. I hate that I do it so often.
Instead of thinking about what I'm going to say, I decided to look back at why I began blogging in the first place - because I liked writing about the things I do. Not necessarily because I think people will like reading what I write, but because I enjoy reading what I write as much as I enjoy the process of writing it.
So, without further ado (except for this particular ado), I present somewhat condensed versions of what I should have been blogging regularly about in the past few months.
Melbourne (again)
I... actually can't remember a whole lot about Melbourne. It was so far back and I didn't really keep close track of who I saw. I suspect I'll look at the ticket stubs one day and say to myself "oh yeah, that was pretty good".
I do remember that some of the highlights: Mark Watson and Jamie Kilstein to name a couple of the standout acts (and a lot of other funny-but-not-as-funny-as-those-two acts), seeing Wicked and Billy Elliot on stage, and hanging out with Matt, Bron, and a few of the locals. (Oh yeah, that was another thing that's happened since March - Matt and Bron got married. Congratulations! I was co-best-man. It was a fantastic wedding.)
A low-light was finding out through text message that an online friend of mine who I played video games with had committed suicide. That had me depressed for a few days. It's good to have a comedy festival around you when something like that happens. It's never, ever, a good thing to have happen, but comedy is an obvious way to try to make yourself feel better.
Europe (again)
The second trip to Europe (or Europe II as I've been calling it) was shorter than the first (three countries in two weeks as opposed to seven in six) but I won't dare say it was less enjoyable. Like the last, I went with Dave P again, and the whole thing spawned from a conversation one night at trivia.
Dave mentioned that Faith No More were reuniting to tour Europe. I half-jokingly suggested that we should go to see them. Dave half-jokingly agreed. The more that we thought about it the more it made sense. We had been talking up a beer-centric trip to Belgium for the longest time, and this was just the catalyst we needed to get us off our asses and plan it. I looked at the Faith No More tour dates on the Internet. One date stood out: headlining Pukkelpop, a music festival in Belgium. I fired off an email to Dave. Dave shot one back. Just like that, the trip was on.
To sweeten the deal, the proposed trip was to happen in August, while the Edinburgh Fringe was on. I'd always wanted to go and decided I had to work it into the plans. More things fell into place as the trip got closer. Scottie was in the UK the same time as us - he was there to visit relatives in Scotland and check out the Military Tattoo at Edinburgh. Marcus, working in Barcelona at the time, had friends in Edinburgh and decided to meet up with us there. Finally, Dave's then-soon-to-be-former-workmate and fellow beer lover, Mark, was also going to be floating about in Europe with his girlfriend, Helen. He ultimately became the designated driver for our Belgian beer trip.
We started off the trip in London. It was the cheapest place in Europe for us to fly into, and I wanted to see Les Misérables at the West End anyway (it was fantastic, and we spotted Shane Watson outside after the show (The Ashes was on at the time (we're glad we didn't stick around England for the final game, where Australia played horrendously))). Scottie had flown in before us and met us at the hotel. We decided to see some sights we missed the last time we were in England. In particular, we did a tour of Lord's, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, and went up Tower Bridge. We had originally planned to see the Tower of London as well as we hadn't seen it last time, but overambitious planning for the day led to us missing it once more.
The next leg kicked off with a Eurostar train ride to Brussels. We met up with Mark and Helen and I ended up overdoing the Belgian beers a little bit on the first night there. Dave and I took a brief detour the next day to Kiewit, Hasselt for Pukkelpop. Unfortunately, we took the wrong train and ended up in a town named Asse (which we found amusing because we are easily amused). We had to catch the train back to Brussels and try again.
By the time we got there the later acts were starting off - Deftones were already on the main stage - and a fierce storm was brewing in the horizon. We managed to find cover before the horrible began, and drank overpriced and fairly stock standard Belgian beers while we waited for the rain to pass. It was good timing, actually, because the rain stopped with just enough spare time for us to get to the front of the side stage where Opeth were about to play. One thing we noticed about this particular European crowd was that there was not as much fanatical pushing towards the front as I've seen at gigs in Australia and North America. (On our way to Opeth we saw a small bit of Them Crooked Vultures, a superband consisting of Dave Grohl, Josh Homme, and John Paul Jones. I mistook them for the Queens of the Stone Age because they played in a slot listed as "surprise act".)
Next up was Faith No More on the main stage. Once again, the front section of the crowd wasn't too densely packed. We ended up pretty close up, a little to the side. This ended up being a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, we were really close to the action. On the other hand, whenever a really good bass riff started our we'd get destroyed by our closeness to the speaker system that we were in front of. The set itself was epic (pun intended?) and I already have tickets to see them again when they play the Hordern in February. There was a particularly freaky incident near the end of the set where a fan stage dived in the middle of Midlife Crisis, fell a bit short, and smashed his head on the barriers. The band stopped playing and Mike Patton, visibly shaken by the incident, went down to see if the fan was ok. He apparently ended up with a lot of lost teeth and a big scar on his face. Ouch.
The night ended somewhat annoyingly. We decided to leave a few songs into the My Bloody Valentine set (I was majorly disappointed that their live show didn't live up to the beauty of their studio work - perhaps it was just me but there was far too much emphasis on raw noise). The main problem with leaving early was that the trains back to Brussels from Hasselt didn't start for another several hours, which is why most people camped at the festival grounds. (Side note: Speaking of the festival grounds, have these guys not heard of rubbish bins? Easily the dirtiest festival I've ever been to.) We caught some uncomfortable sleep at the station and ended up having to pay for the train trip back to Brussels when we woke up because we hadn't redeemed our tickets properly to get the free ride. We got little sleep in preparation for the road trip ahead.
Driving duties ended up being a lot simpler than we had intended. In the lead-up to the trip, we planned to take non-drinking shifts as we went counter-clockwise around the country in search of beer landmarks (mostly the beer-brewing Trappist monasteries). When we got to the rental car place, the options were: manual. Mark was the only one who could drive manual, so he became the designated driver. This was good for Dave and I because we didn't have to worry about not drinking, but it was obviously a little unfair for Mark. Regardless, there was no pulling out of the trip now. Armed with a foldout road map recommended to us by Andy from Bier Mania and lots of printed out Google Maps directions, we pushed on.
The round trip started from Brussels and went past the monasteries/beer cafes at Chimay, Orval, Westmalle, and Westvleteren (the latter reputed to brew the best beer in the world - the Westvleteren 12) with stops at Bouillon, Antwerp, and Bruges along the way. The road map ended up complementing the directions perfectly as we changed course a few times. Dave was a gun navigator so all I did was sit in the back of the car and listen to Australia lose the Ashes on long wave radio broadcast. I think Helen slept most of the time.
In terms of beauty, Bouillon was no doubt the one place I'd go to again. The town was nestled in the mountains near the French border (we had to go through France for about an hour to get there) and the hostel where we stayed was in a perfect location. The hostel even served Belgian beer! (And probably the best Orval I've ever had.) However, the highlight of the road trip came from something not overly planned (see, told you, recurring theme).
In my research for the road trip through Belgium, I read about two different beer cafes that a beer lover must visit: Delirium in Brussels and Kulminator in Antwerp. I had read a lot about Delirium (and we visited it on our first night in Brussels) mainly because it had its own website and was in the Guinness Book of World Records for having 2,004 beers available for sale in 2004. For some reason I had neglected to read much about Kulminator other than the fact that some rated it as the best beer bar in the world - most claimed that Delirium had nothing on Kulminator. Those claims couldn't be more right.
The bar was about a 15-minute walk away from where we were staying. The main problem was that streets weren't too clearly marked in a lot of places in Belgium, so it was easy to get lost. And we did, several times. We had arrived in Antwerp exhausted from the day's travels, and Dave and Mark were understandably reluctant to keep looking for the place, instead wanting to opt for a club of some sort. I was almost on the same boat. (Helen was sick and stayed back at the hostel.) However, the stubborn side of me kept us going.
We finally stumbled upon the place and at first glance it was a dive. Everywhere else nearby was closed and this place seemed like it was about to close as well. It was small and didn't exactly convey liveliness. I urged the boys to at least go in for one beer since we had already gone so far to get there. The first sign I got that this place was indeed the place it was hyped up to be was when I saw an empty bottle of 1999 Chimay Grande Reserve behind the bar. Impressive, I thought, but I was still trying to figure out just what was so special about the place.
We all found out when an old lady - who turned out to be Leem who, along with her partner, Dirk, had started the place 30 or so years ago - handed us the special beer menu. Our jaws didn't so much drop to the ground as gradually sink there as we slowly realised that we had hit the jackpot. I casually flicked through the list and was not overly impressed (hint: I suck at skim reading) until one item at the back stuck out - a La Trappe Amber from 1975. "Wait? What?!" I flicked back through the menu and was gobsmacked. This thing was jam packed full of old vintage beers that you would be hard pressed to find anywhere else.
27 Euros bought the three of us a 750mL bottle of Gouden Carolus Cuvee Van De Keizer from 1999, one of the best beers I have ever tasted. We later found out that this was the first year they ever brewed this gem of a drop. 29 Euros bought me a bottle of 350mL bottle of Chimay Blue from... wait for it... 1982. Yes, I drank a beer two years older than me. Dave had the Blue from '84 and Mark had one from '85. They were so old that they were dusty and the bottle caps were covered in rust. The beer itself tasted amazing.
For beer lovers, no pilgrimage to Belgium would be complete without a visit to Kulminator. It truly is beer heaven.
I'll try not to drone on too much about Edinburgh other than to say that it can truly claim to hold the biggest and best arts festival in the world. We didn't end up seeing many shows because we wanted to see the city while we were there, but just being out on the streets during the festival was an experience in itself. Nowhere had I ever felt such a vibrant festival atmosphere. It was like being in Melbourne during the Comedy Festival but magnified by at least ten. The streets were littered with free performances and people dressed up in a wide variety of costumes vying for people's attentions as they promoted their shows. It's yet another thing from the trip that I'd love to see again.
We met up with Scottie and Marcus in Edinburgh and hung out a bit. We spent one of the days driving to Stirling to see the monument dedicated to William Wallace and that day spent on the road made me realise just what a beautiful place Scotland was. I was sad to leave after staying for such a short amount of time.
USA/Canada (again)
I'll keep this bit short so I actually have something to write about when I get back.
For what seems like the umpteenth time, I'm off to the USA and Canada at the end of the year. Outside of Australia and the Philippines, those two countries are where I've spent most of my life. "Adrian, why don't you go anywhere else?" is a common question I get asked. Answer: I have lots of friends and family I like to visit. That and there are lots of places I still want to see in that part of the world.
In fact, I've only had to book two hostel stays for the entire trip so far. Not counting the conference trip to San Diego last year, I think that's a record for me in any major trip. The down side is that visiting so many places in the space of a month (hint: I can't count all the stops using my fingers) costs a lot of money from all the transportation. The lots of snowboarding planned will also hurt the wallet. It's gearing up to be one of my most expensive odysseys yet, but at the same time I'm very much looking forward to it.
NaNoWriMo (again)
I'll save this one for last because it's actually the most relevant. I'm doing NaNoWriMo for the third year on the trot (side note: the performance of the website this year rocks). If you didn't know already, this is a month-long writing exercise that challenges would-be authors to complete at least 50,000 words of prose fiction.
I finished the first two times and one of the important lessons of the whole month is that if you think about your story too much instead of just writing what comes to your head then you will struggle. This happened to me the last two years and it's happening again to me now. I get too worried about what happens next that I actually end up writing very little at certain periods.
I'm confident of reaching the 50k milestone again this year, though. Just like I'm confident I can stop thinking too much about the other aspects of life, I predict that I will eventually put my faith in the story's ability to carry itself. (Wow, that came off as really corny.)
Final thought
Phew.
So there you go, some mildly refined not-overly-planned thoughts. For a while I was afraid of not being able to stick to a consistent structure in my blog posts. Oddly enough, thinking too much about it has led me to realise that I've been thinking too much about it. There need not be any structure. (As you may have noticed, there was some semblance of structure here, but not as much as the me of a few months ago would have liked. He can go to hell.)
I shall conclude this whole "I'm over-thinking it" babble by resolving to process my photos from Europe and post them up before I leave for the USA. I'll post them up when I have them done.
(Ironically, I probably won't blog much while overseas. I'll be bringing an iPhone (which I get next week) and doing any long form of blogging on a touch screen will drive me batty. I'll probably just tweet.)
We left off with me and Dave being stuck in a bus station for an hour. Snow still steadily falling on the way down to Yamagata, we eventually made it with time to spare for the Shinkansen back to Tokyo. There was a guy at Yamagata station selling bento boxes by chanting, in a very low voice, "BENTOOOOOOOOOOO!!" It was almost hypnotic. Dave decided to buy a box for the train trip.
We met up with Luke at the airport and headed to Sapporo. The flight was, at times, bumpy, and a contingent of passengers actually clapped when we landed in Sapporo surrounded by snow. It's a bit amusing having people clap at planes landing safely - they don't clap when buses park safely or when trains stop. (Mind you, this was shortly after that well-covered emergency landing on the Hudson River in New York.) But anyway, we were safe and sound at cold Sapporo.
It started to snow hard soon after we checked in at our hotel and we ended up freezing at the Sapporo Snow Festival. The festival itself was great to see at night because of all the lit-up ice sculptures that were on show - and there were some impressive ones. At one of the larger sculptures there was a woman in a large bubble playing music while the multi-coloured lights kept up with the beat.
When we'd had enough of the cold, we went looking for a place to drink and ended up at a place called Rad Sisters. It looked a bit suspect going by the name, but the place was actually a decent hangout. That, and they had all you can drink until close (6am) for 2000 Yen (roughly the equivalent of 40 Australian dollars at the time). Dave made sure he got his money's worth, which came back to bite him in the ass - I woke up and found him sleeping on the floor of our hotel room. Evidently, he made it as far as the room and decided he couldn't go any further onto his bed at the far side of the room.
We had a late start because of the night before, but we made good progress thanks to the clear skies that welcomed us outside. We went ice skating near the Sapporo TV Tower then had a look at the Snow Festival sculptures in the sunlight. I was briefly separated from Luke and Dave when I went around taking photos but we eventually ran into each other again and went on to do some cross-country skiing at a very short loop designed to give people a trial of the sport.
After it started snowing again, we walked around looking for things to do and eventually ended up at a shopping mall. We at at this place called Pepper Lunch where you order your meal from a vending machine (though the meal doesn't actually come from the vending machine - just a ticket) and they chuck the ingredients onto a hotplate for you to cook. It was good, although the hotplate's heat dissipated perhaps a bit too quickly.
There was a big air jump at the Snow Festival area that Luke and Dave went to check out but they either missed it or it wasn't on. Instead, they ran into some impromptu dancing in the streets. I, for one, was glad that I stayed back at the hotel instead of freezing to death for a second night in a row. Besides, the next day was Niseko.
Niseko - Japan's Australia
I'd heard that Niseko was a resort full of Australians. It wasn't surprising to hear, really - a lot of resorts I've been to around the world have been full of Australians (and foreigners in general) either working or visiting. Still, it was a bit disappointing to see that it was true. Because it was a popular resort, the hills were full of people and any new powder was ripped up by early afternoon. Despite that, it was a decent collection of ski hills (Niseko United consisted of four interconnected ski areas) and I got my money's worth for the time we were there.
The fog was a lot more prominent in Niseko than it was in our previous week of snowboarding and even when it cleared up for a small moment, it came back with a vengeance later on. A good example of this was on our third day. I decided to climb up to the peak of Niseko in search of some fresh lines. It was clear when I began the climb but as soon as I reached the peak a thick cover of fog rolled in. There was a little hut at the peak - empty but for a few benches and the ice building up on its walls - where all of the pilgrims of the peak huddled together and waited out the fog. Eventually, I tagged along with a group of other people (I didn't want to brave the bad visibility alone) and headed down. The climb, it turned out, was well worth it, but it was still not as untracked near the bottom as I would have hoped.
I went snowboarding at night for the first time at Annupuri, one of the ski areas, and it was an interesting experience. On the one hand, you had a lot of space to move around because of the lack of other people on the hill. On the other hand, your face froze because of the cold (and your eyes, too, if you wanted to see better and had your goggles off). It was a decent area to do night boarding due to its easy tree runs, but I had no desire to keep going for too long as the area that was lit up was repetitive.
Dave and Luke kept going until late and we ended up eating at a place (that was about to close) called Paul's that served good food and Belgian beers. It was sad that it was the best place we ate at in a Japanese town (in my opinion - Dave apparently had some good sushi at some other place the night before). The first place we ate at was an okonomiyaki place that was run by Australians (and didn't have very good amounts of batter), and the last place we ate was a steak place that charged too much.
We didn't really get a good taste of the night life, either. Because of the snowboarding and because of our hostel's lockout time of midnight, the most we experienced of Niseko's night life was watching the Australia vs Japan World Cup Qualifier at a bar two doors down from the hostel. (It was a match that Japan should have won but ended in a draw.) That, and random people outside in the early hours of the morning waking us up by yelling things like, "DO A BACKFLIP!"
Rusutsu
We had a spare day at Niseko and, because of money and weather concerns, we ended up forgoing plans to do cat skiing in favour of heading to Rusutsu, a resort roughly an hour away.
Stepping into the lobby of the building (which looked like a hotel) at the base of the resort was like stepping back in time. It was the '80s again. The first thing we saw was a merry-go-round that reminded me of a scene from American Gods. Nearby was a giant fake tree that resembled a face and talked when you pressed a button under it. There was also a penny arcade in the area and a frozen-over theme park outside. It was really bizarre. The resort even used paper lift tickets and actual ticket checkers instead of the magnetic cards and gates that we had gotten used to.
The resort had three ski areas (and three peaks) and a fairly reasonable amount of terrain. The mountain at the entrance seemed pretty bland and was filled with learners and competitors of some sort but the other two were pretty good. Despite the flat light, windy conditions, fog, and the rain at the end of the day, I had what was one of the best days of snowboarding of the trip. You could still find a good amount of powder if you went deep enough into the trees, and that's where I stayed for most of the day.
The day was topped off by going on the merry-go-round (for free) and seeing a crazy lady yelling at random people in the lobby as we waited for our bus back to Niseko.
Finale...?
Friday the 13th was interpreted as the bringer of doom and catalyst of bad luck. On that day, which was our day in Rusutsu, Luke almost broke his hand. The next day, Dave lost his camera. The day after that, our flight got cancelled. Bad things come in threes, after all. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
The night of that Friday was a night that was much warmer than all the others that we had spent in the snow. When we woke up the next day, it was raining at Niseko. People went out to ski or snowboard but came back within an hour or two after realising that the conditions were atrocious. We went out for a short walk and Dave stepped into a cold puddle. I took that as a sign to go back and relax at the hostel while we waited for the bus to the airport.
Halfway through the bus ride, Dave realised that he didn't have his camera with him. He scrambled through his things but couldn't find it. He eventually conceded that he may have lost it at the hostel or it was stolen at the welcome centre where we waited for the bus, and did his best at filing a police report at the airport.
We landed in Tokyo and went to Roppongi for our last night out. We stayed out until about 5:30, mostly because it was when the clubs closed and when the trains began to run again. Luke and I went back to the hostel afterwards while Dave stumbled on and eventually got back at around 8, two hours before check-out time.
Our last day in Japan was spent taking random photos at the Imperial Palace, looking for souvenir samurai swords, revisiting Harajuku, and getting our flight cancelled.
We got to the airport after an hour or so of train travel only to find out that we needed to go back from whence we came (i.e. Tokyo station) to catch a Shinkansen to Osaka because our delayed flight had been redirected to Kansai airport thanks to Narita's curfew. On the plus side, the bus transfers were free, we will be (supposedly) refunded for our Shinkansen tickets, and the Shinkansen we rode on was the fastest one they made. It was pretty sweet speeding past sleeping towns on the way to Osaka. Alas, we didn't get a chance to see Osaka as we headed straight to the airport to catch our plane.
When we got to Cairns, we were told that we'd been put on the next Qantas flight to Sydney. Unfortunately, when we got to the Qantas counter, we were told that they hadn't been sent our names and that it was too late to put us on the flight. Angry at this, we decided to spend some time in Cairns instead of waiting around at the airport for a few hours to catch the next flight.
After more than 24 hours of being in transit, we eventually made it back to Sydney 8 hours later than we were meant to get back. It was a very long Friday the 13th.
Japan (part 3) overview
Days spent: Almost 9 Mountains climbed: 1 Cameras lost: 1 Planes missed: 3
Yes, I'm back in Australia now. Have been for a week. Why haven't I posted parts 2 and 3 of my Japan report? Well, first of all, I'm lazy. You all know that. Secondly, Net access in Japan was a bit odd. The first hostel we stayed at had some not-so-cheap Internet terminals, which I mainly used for e-mail checking. We tried looking for an Internet cafe, but all we could find in the cities (namely Tokyo and Sapporo) were these places that charged per person, not per computer. They also had showers. It all seemed a bit suspect, so we stepped slowly away from these places and decided to make do without Internet for a few days. Other than that, a couple of the hotels we stayed at had really old laptops in the lobby. It's what I used to post my first Japan update, and I wasn't in the mood to do it a second time.
Here's part 2.
Disclaimer: This place is too good
I'd like to preface this part by saying that I will not directly name this ski resort that we visited for this leg of the journey (I will elaborate on the why later) but if you pay enough attention and do a small bit of research you can figure out where it is quite easily.
We got up too early. We only found this out when we got to the subway station at Asakusa on the morning of the first leg. We got to the entrance to the subway, and the shutters were still closed. We walked around a bit more and eventually found an entrance that was open, although it is equally likely that we simply walked around for long enough and the gates had opened by the time we got to that particular entrance.
Anyway, the important thing was that we caught the train we were meant to catch and we got to Ueno station with time to spare. We used this time to buy some onigiri (the stuff I incorrectly referred to as "rice buns" in the previous post) and other snacks for the Shinkansen ride to Yamagata. One of the items I purchased was a Kit Kat of unknown flavour. I couldn't really figure out what it was meant to taste like, nor could I figure out what the picture was meant to be on the package. All I know is that I was disappointed not to find any of the fabled soy sauce flavoured Kit Kats.
The snow cover got thicker and deeper as we traveled north. The Shinkansen split up when we got to Fukushima as the line forked. The train climbed through the mountains and I began to get genuinely excited for the week ahead. We caught a bus up from Yamagata to the ski resort and walked over to the hotel to check in. What we found out days later (when we were checking out) was that we could have rung ahead and gotten the hotel to pick us up from the bus station. This is what the language barrier does - it separates the normal people from the idiots (us). It was refreshing, though. Sure, there were language issues in Tokyo, but it was mostly manageable. Once we got far enough away it was truly a foreign experience.
Since we got there early, we had to leave our bags in the lobby (and get changed in the lobby) so that we could go snowboarding. I really liked the lift pass system in a lot of the places in Japan. It's similar to the one I saw in Innsbruck - you buy your pass and you get given a magnetic card. You use this card to get past gates, and since it's a proximity card you don't need to take it out every time. When you're done with it, you slip it into a machine and you get your card deposit back. It's a lot more convenient than having to show a lift pass to ticket checkers at the bottom of every lift. What's more is that you can buy cards that have points instead of hours or days. Each lift is worth a certain amount of points (usually 2 or 1) and you get that amount of points deducted from your card every time you pass the gate for that lift. It's a great alternative for those who perhaps plan to do backcountry and don't need to pass many lift gates, or for those who only plan to do a limited amount of runs.
The resort itself was amazing. I can confidently say that it's one of the best I've ever been to. We caught two gondolas up to the peak and watched as the trees got whiter and whiter until they were completely covered with snow and ice. Understandably, the top was full of Japanese tourists who were there not to ski or snowboard but to marvel at the beauty of these ice-covered trees. It certainly explained a lot of the traffic we saw at the first gondola, because the amount of people on the ski hill was pretty reasonable. Certainly more reasonable than an Australian resort.
What I was thrilled to discover was that barely any of the people who were actually on the ski hill had ridden anything in the trees. For some reason that I forget at the moment (I think it's some sort of cultural or religious belief), the Japanese seem to avoid the tree line as much as possible. This, compounded with the fact that barely any westerners visited this particular resort, meant that there was a lot of fresh powder to be ridden in the resort despite the fact that the last snowfall was half a week before we got there. It's almost surreal looking down from a chairlift and seeing only two tracks in the easily accessible trees - and they're both yours! This is the main reason I didn't want to name this resort. It's supposedly set to become a more popular international tourist destination in the coming years, but I do not want to contribute to its popularity. It's selfish, I know, but it's rare to find something this good and I'd like to come back some time in the next few years and experience something similar.
So I did a bit more of that then went back to the hotel to check in. The first thing we noticed was that the hotel room stank of cigarette smoke. I assumed this was from the air conditioning unit circulating air from other areas of the hotel where people were smoking - indeed, it was ok to smoke anywhere in the hotel, as is common in Japan. Other than that, it was a pretty good room. In the drawers were Japanese robes, which a lot of the guests wore all around the hotel. Dave and I tried them on but I don't think we wore them more than once. They looked cool, though.
We watched random programs on the television (some utterly baffling, others bafflingly hilarious) then headed off to find some dinner. On my way down, I ran into a Japanese couple who asked where I was from (in English - their English was better than my Japanese). I told them I was from Australia and their eyes lit up. "What's the weather there like at the moment?" one of them asked. "Around 40 degrees," I said. "40? That's great!" was the reply. I smiled and nodded. I didn't want to shatter their dreams and tell them that 40 is too bloody hot, thank you very much. I like my temperatures nice and cold.
Places seemed to close fairly early at this resort. We later found out that other places opened late. It was bizarre. We wanted to find a place to eat and could only find one that was open at the time. As we were walking home, we saw another place about to open. This was the place we ended up eating at for the next 3 nights. They served food and alcohol and the guy serving us overpoured the sake we ordered on purpose, telling us that it's ok to drink the overflow that went on the little glass holder (it was tasty sake, too).
The next few days on the hill were similar to the first. I went off and looked for some good tree runs while Dave slowly but surely improved on the easier runs (and sometimes, by accident, on the really hard runs). I fell a lot while practising my switch (and got really sore doing so) and on the third day almost fell into a tree. Yes, you heard right. It was bad visibility at the top of the mountain but it was good enough at where I wanted to go. Dave handed me his camera to film some footage, which I did for a while. The camera handling distracted me and I ended up going too slow. I went close to a tree and stopped, and some of the snow less than half a metre in front of me fell down towards the bottom of the tree (that's how deep the snow was). It was powder where I was sitting, and it took me a couple of minutes to get out of there. After this, I decided it was a good time to put away the camera and focus on the riding. It was a shame, too, because the rest of the run would have made for really good footage.
Après-ski?
The other thing we discovered about the more "traditional" Japanese ski resorts is that après-ski activities were a bit different. For one, we couldn't find any places resembling a pub or club anywhere on the resort (this could be partly because we couldn't read any of the signs). We ended up getting beer and sake from the convenience store and drinking at the hotel while watching wacky TV on most nights. One particular night we cracked open a local sake that was wrapped in newspaper. It tasted really good, and Dave got a bit too drunk from it. So drunk, in fact, that he couldn't pour himself any water afterwards.
One thing I found out much later from a random English-language publication advertising things to do in Japan was that après-ski in Japan was different to other places around the world. For example, going to an onsen is more common in traditional resorts than going out to a bar. This would probably explain why I was the only person at the hotel's nearby onsen when I decided to check it out. The natural hot spring baths are split up into male and female sections, and you go into them clothesless (in uncommon cases, onsens are mixed-sex and allow the use of towels in the bath). Onsens often have different naturally occurring minerals or chemicals that they claim to have medical benefits. This particular one was a sulphur onsen. I can't speak for the medical benefits, but I can say that this onsen certainly smelled like sulphur, and it was very very hot. Still, it was nice and relaxing. I smelled like a used matchstick afterwards.
The T
In our hotel room when we checked in was, amongst other things, a puzzle. It was a wooden shape puzzle called The T, and we had no idea what we were actually meant to do with it since the instructions were in Japanese. We theorised that we needed to make the shapes shown on the packaging out of the four shapes they gave us. However, it seemed impossible to do so thanks to the irregular shapes. I suggested that perhaps we only needed to make one of the shapes and the other ones were distractions. On the second day, I managed to get one of those shapes and declared victory over David for having solved the puzzle. Still, it bothered me why all these other shapes were there on the box. On the last night, we were packing and since I felt lazy and didn't want to pack yet, I decided to give the puzzle one last chance. After a few minutes a got one shape and gloated some more to Dave. So he had a look and told me to move a few pieces, which led to another shape. And another. And another. And another. A few more minutes later, we had made all the shapes that were displayed on the puzzle's packaging. It was one of the most fulfilling moments of our time away from the ski hill on that leg of the trip.
The next morning we got up and went to the lobby to check out. The lights were out and reception was empty. After ringing the bell for a while a guy eventually came out and checked us out. He asked if we were going to the bus station, and he took us there. This is when we found out they did free pick-ups and drop-offs (d'oh!). When we got there he talked to the station agent for a moment and then he told us that since it was a Sunday, the first bus of the day that headed down to Yamagata wasn't running, which meant we had to wait an hour at the station for our bus. We got up too early.
Japan (part 2) overview
Days spent: 4 Consecutive nights at the same restaurant: 3 Best vending machine location: Mid-mountain on the side of a run Westerners spotted: 7
I'm currently sitting at a hotel lobby's laptop that's probably not meant to be for long use, but I can't understand what the signs say, so I'll use it anyway. I'll split up the Japan updates into three, one for each leg of the trip. We're currently on the eve of the third leg but this is the first time I've actually had time to sit down at a computer and write something comprehensive.
Bright lights, big city
It was raining when we arrived in Tokyo. The trip from Sydney was long as we had a layover of a few hours in Cairns where we met up with Luke's friend, Brendan. We also ran into a friend of Dave P's on the flight to Cairns - coincidentally taking the same route to Japan, and spending some time snowboarding while in the country.
After a long but uneventful line-up at customs and quarantine, we were met by a massive map of Tokyo's transit system and had no idea which buttons to press. Some kind Japanese girls helped us out and it turned out that it was actually quite easy to understand the whole ticket system. We briefly split up with Luke and Brendan because they decided to use the first day of the JR Pass and had to take a different line to Asakusa. I was quite impressed by Tokyo's trains. Not only were they impossibly efficient but they also had warm seats! Obviously the latter was important considering the weather.
From Asakusa station we made our way to our hostel through the rain and the seemingly lifeless streets - it turned out a lot of places close early in Asakusa even on a Friday. The room we got was tiny, which meant that we hung out at the lobby most of the time, drinking and socialising with the other backpackers. For dinner, we had food at some random 24 hour Japanese diner. I had some sort of katsu dish.
We had to take care of some formalities the next day, namely to pick up our JR East Pass and train reservations from the service centre in Ueno. It was still raining outside, and it was quite amusing seeing people riding bikes around with umbrellas.
We spent most of the day hanging around Akihabara. I was hunting down some Nintendo DS games and Dave was looking for an elusive Olympus camera. We had food at a yakitori place and inadvertently ordered some food we didn't particularly desire to eat. I had chicken gizzards and Dave had a chicken breast cooked rare. Dave looked far more uncomfortable eating raw chicken than I did eating chicken guts.
On my search for a games store that sold the games I was looking for, we came across many shops selling entertainment of a questionable nature. I wasn't surprised about the availability but at how openly they were displayed. Ironically, we went to a Maid Cafe, which we thought would be dodgy, but ended up being rather innocent (albeit expensive). After finding what we had been looking for, we had a snack at Mos Burger, a Japanese burger chain that had a few items that used rice instead of bread as buns.
After dinner at a sushi train (where we made quite a good mess of some green tea), we headed to Roppongi for a night out. Despite telling him that the Hard Rock Cafe was mostly a restaurant that happened to have a bar, Dave insisted we make that our first stop. After an expensive drink, we went to the Gas Panic, a bar that made sure you had a drink in your hand at all times. We met some Aussies and Kiwis there, and went with them to another bar, though we split suddenly to catch the last train back (trains stop running at about midnight). We made it as far as Ueno, but the connecting line had stopped running trains, so we had to walk from there to Asakusa.
Castle on a cloud
We had a flexible 4-day pass for JR East, two of which would be used to get to Yamagata and back. This meant that we would have two extra days of free rides on any JR East line. We decided to use the first of those to hop on the Shinkansen and head towards Aizu-Wakamatsu, whereupon we would find an old Japanese castle.
This was our first trip on a Shinkansen and it was very impressive. The trip was smooth and fast. We got off at Kōriyama to transfer to a conventional line. This leg of the trip was much shorter than the Shinkansen leg, but took a few minutes longer. The differences between the two types of trains was obvious.
The snow cover began to get thicker as we approached our final destination and we even passed a mini blizzard. Aizu-Wakamatsu was much colder than Tokyo, and I regretted not wearing my thermals. We decided to walk to the castle instead of catching the bus service, which was quite a bad idea due to the weather and the distance. My legs were killing me by the time we got there.
The castle was quite impressive, though perhaps not worth the walk. It was surrounded by a moat, and stood majestically atop a tiny incline of stone walls. It was surrounded by a few shrines and looked great with the thin scattering of clouds above it.
We got momentarily lost on the way back to the train station, and had to wait an hour and a bit for the next train. By this time we just wanted to get to the Shinkansen and have a rest. We missed the first train from Kōriyama and ended up staying at the station watching Shinkansen go past at crazy speeds. One thing I noticed on the Shinkansen was that they had normal toilets and male-only toilets. The male-only ones had a urinal, no lock on the door, and a little window on the door to see if there's anybody in there.
We had dinner at a ninja-themed restaurant in Akasaka, which I would equate to dinner theatre. The meals were expensive but it was worth trying it once for the experience. After speaking to the receptionist a ninja would come out of a trap-door wall and show you through a series of corridors with secret passageways. During dinner, a ninja would come along and do some magic tricks for you. It was entertaining but as I said, it's something I would not want to try again due to the cost.
Fish!
We woke up early the next morning to check out the fish market at Tsukiji. It took us a while to find it but once we got there we were greeted by a slew of trolleys driven with abandon by people looking to transport goods around. It was amazing how aware everybody was considering the lack of road rules in the fish market area. There certainly would have been many accidents had the drivers (and the pedestrians) not been on the ball.
Amongst fish and weird-looking seafood of many shapes and sizes, we managed to find a whale vendor. The kind man sliced us a piece to sample. It was kind of fatty. Instead of eating a proper meal at one of the restaurants at the market, we made the silly decision of getting grilled eel from a street vendor. It was cold and still had some bone in it (a bit of which was stuck to my mouth for most of the day).
The next stop was Harajuku, fad capital of Tokyo. One particular street, Takeshita Sreet, was lined with shops catering to every fashion fad you could think of. We bought novelty tees while we were there. Nearby was Yoyogi Park, but we were too tired from the early start and the constant walking to bother going through all of it.
Dave went on to the Tokyo Tower, an Eiffel Tower style commications tower (that's slightly taller), while I looked for a bank to exchange some money. I found one but it was pretty extortionate. Not only did they want to charge me a ridiculous exchange rate, but they said that they couldn't change one of my notes due to the series of the serial number. I ended up not getting any money changed since taking money out from the ATM was more economical. We finally headed back to the hostel afterwards, ending 12 hours of exploring the city.
We had okonomiyaki for dinner, a Japanese type of pancake cooked on a hot plate at the table. We had no idea how to cook the things because we weren't given any instructions. Fortunately, the Japanese couple sitting next to us gave us some pointers.
We headed to Odaiba the next day, an artificial island off Tokyo Bay. It was very hazy, which we first thought was pollution, but which may have been related to the volcano that erupted elsewhere in the mainland.
Some highlights of the island was the miniature Statue of Liberty replica, the architecture of the Fuji TV building, and a shopping complex that copied the faux Roman atmosphere of the Forum Shops at Caesars in Las Vegas almost to a T. After checking out free exhibits by Toyota and Panasonic, we grabbed some rice buns and headed back to the port. The rice buns - filling covered in rice wrapped in seaweed - were incredible and inexpensive.
We hung out at the hostel lobby until 1 in the morning sharing photos and stories with other backpackers, perhaps a bit too late for our early morning start to head to Yamagata the next day.
Japan (part 1) overview
Days spent: 5 Maid Cafes visited: 1 Most outrageous food eaten: Chicken gizzards on a stick Vending machines: Too many to count
Things really creep up on you. I can still remember dreaming of a trip to Japan to go snowboarding all those months ago when the exchange rate was so attractive, and I remember being in disbelief at the fact that the trip we were planning had suddenly become almost a thousand dollars more expensive (and deciding to go through with it anyway). Now it's mid-way through the first month of a new year, and less than two weeks until we leave for Japan, and I still haven't given a lot of thought as to what I should be doing in preparation.
The best thing I can think of right now is making sure our bags are under the specified (and quite restrictive) weight limits for our flights. After that we need to triple check that all of our documents are in order and that we know exactly what to do when we get to the airports and train stations and hotels. Closer to the trip (which is a funny thing to say, because it's really close now, and we should probably already be worry about it) we'll also have to consider barriers of culture and language.
The process of preparation is something I've deliberately been avoiding so that I can have time to do other things like read books or play video games but it's time that I start forcing myself to do these things so that I won't have such a hard time during the trip. It'll be interesting, at least, brushing up on aspects of Japanese culture that I haven't bothered thinking about since doing Japanese in high school. I hope that I'm worrying over nothing.
The last couple of days in San Francisco was pretty cool. I had a chance to ride along the waterfront again, this time taking some photos, which I will upload soon enough. The flight was relatively smooth - I even managed to get some sleep. The only problem I had was after the flight, when I found out that the baggage handlers had left my skateboard at SFO. I had to wait until the next day to get it back, and it had some chips on the side. Fortunately, there wasn't any structural damage so it still performed the same.
I've also finished my NaNo novel since getting back. I managed to finish pass the 50,000 word mark just before midnight on November 20, and I finished the story after midnight. This means that I reached the target in two thirds of the allotted time, which is pretty satisfying. I'm thinking about setting a higher word count target for next year to keep things challenging but for the time being, I shall bask in my winnery goodness.
I just had the best day I've had this month, perhaps even this year.
But I'd like to fill in a few gaps.
I slowly got better and better as LISA went on, but I never fully recovered, and by the end of the conference I was resigned to my fate of being sick upon landing in San Francisco.
Despite that, I did have a great time at the conference. It was a huge learning experience hearing from experts in my particular profession, and I've taken a lot out of it. It was also good to meet different people in similar positions.
I arrived in San Francisco late on Friday and was picked up from the airport by my cousin Mike. After having some awesome chicken wings that I had experienced the pleasure of tasting the last time I was in San Francisco, we went out and partied all night.
I didn't sleep until 4am, which was not ideal for...
The Night of Writing Dangerously
It started off with a huge headache at 8am, woken up by the roadworks outside. I knew that things could only get better. (And they did.)
The day was unusually warm for this time of year. San Francisco must have known that I was coming. I decided to take advantage of this fact by skateboarding along the waterfront with my new longboard from San Diego. I made it all the way to the Bay Bridge before turning back. It was sweet.
After I got home, I prepared for the impending write-a-thon and then began the short (ok, 20 minutes, so not that short) walk over to the SomArts Center where the event was being held.
I was immediately impressed by the fact that Chris Baty, the man responsible for starting all of this insanity, greeted everybody at the door as they entered. I was a bit starstruck and fumbled my words, but managed to say a quick hi before grabbing my raffle tickets for the night.
The tables started filling (I had one person on my table with over 73000 words already) and the liquids (some alcoholic) started flowing, and people began writing.
Eventually it came time for Chris's speech about the history of NaNoWriMo and how it had come so far from being a small project between friends to being an international phenomenon. I did my hardest to hold back the tears. I'm such a softie when it comes to emotional or inspiration speeches, and this was both. Chris Baty is one of my heroes.
After Chris was done with his speech, everybody got back to writing. Prizes were drawn and photos were taken (mine were particularly awesome), and eventually it was time for the event to draw to a close. It was a sad moment because it was one of those things I felt I could have enjoyed had it gone for the whole day. Alas, it was not to be.
We all packed up and said our goodbyes to the new friends that we met, and I went and talked to Chris to say thanks to him for being crazy enough to start NaNoWriMo. He was a bit amazed that I was from Australia, but probably not as amazed as I was at being there.
That was it for the Night of Writing Dangerously. It was my first, and I sure hope it's not my last. I doubt I'll be able to go every year, but it's something that I'd love to do again some time in the future.
In terms of word count, I passed the 40k mark during the write-a-thon, which was a nice milestone to reach during such a cool event.
Time to put this thing on cruise control until the finish line. 50k is so close that I can taste it.
So I'm in San Diego, and I still haven't entirely shaken off the jetlag from the flight. I wasn't able to get as much sleep as I usually do on international flights, and I got to LAX feeling pretty lousy. The flight to San Diego was in a small EMB120 plane, and it was loud; the engines could be heard above everything else. It was so loud, in fact, that they should provide anybody who flies in them with earmuffs for OHS reasons.
Much of my first half-day in San Diego was spent checking out the nearby Mission Valley shopping centre. I forgot how massive American malls are. They're more or less department stores the size of Australian malls spread out across a stretch of land. You almost want a car to get in between shops. Despite that, I didn't find anything I was looking for, and ended up going back to my hotel room and working on my NaNoWriMo novel (currently over 26,000 words!).
Sleep was very interrupted, and I woke up at 3:30 in the morning, surrendering to jetlag. I wrote some more shaky prose then had a greasy breakfast and some coffee before setting off on the day's adventures.
My first full day involved getting lost, much like my first day in most foreign cities. I started off with a very short stop of Old Town, which I found boring. I immediately went back to the light rail station and caught a connecting service to downtown San Diego, which seemed pretty dead for a Saturday. It was nowhere near as busy as the Sydney CBD would be late on a Saturday morning. I caught another connecting eastbound train and, after getting off at two stations I didn't mean to get off at, I ended up deciding to find a bus. I grossly underestimated the scale of transit maps I had briefly looked at, and ended up walking a long way until I eventually found one that would take me to North Park, where there was meant to be a couple of skate shops.
The first shop dealt mostly in standard skateboards and fashion, but I finally got around to purchasing a longboard at the second shop, Route 44. The guy there was really helpful and even gave me a discount because I bought a complete board as well as new shoes. It ended up costing me just over US$185 for both, which I thought was a pretty sweet deal. I tried it out later in the night and it seemed to go pretty smoothly. I still need to get used to the act of skateboarding, though.
A series of miscommunications regarding the billing of the room ended up spoiling my mood, but I'm hoping to have all of that resolved momentarily.
The first day of the conference was a struggle. The tutorial session itself was very interesting - it was about computer forensics - but I wasn't feeling the best, which wasn't helped by a lack of sleep the previous night. I skipped any attempt at socialising that night and decided to write a bit then go to sleep.
Right now I'm sitting in a workshop still feeling sick because the closest pharmacy is two train stops away. Yay!
I'm fairly clueless about the economy, but I'm even more clueless about exchange rates. Today the Australian dollar dropped to about 72 US cents, and it looks like it may drop even more. Apparently this has to do with Australia and commodities or something like that. All I know is that it's not looking good for my two trips.
In the red corner (ok, they're not really competing with each other, so it's a terrible analogy, but I digress): USA trip for the LISA conference. I wanted to buy some things that would be cheaper to buy in the USA. While it may still be cheaper now (and when I get there), I kind of regret not ordering a few weeks ago when the dollar was a bit more reasonable. Could have saved a good 50-100 dollars (depending on how many things I end up getting). Oh well. The hard decision now is whether to cut my losses and order things now, or wait it out and hope the dollar improves closer to my travel date.
And in the blue corner: Japan. Should I have started booking hotels a lot earlier? Probably. Did I? No. Sapporo ended up being rather expensive, and now that the Aussie dollar is dropping, the others may end up hurting us more than we would have liked too.
The good news is that the USA trip is all booked, and flights to Japan were dirt cheap. I guess it could be worse.
(EDIT: And yes, I did make a mistake in that initial post. I said "less clueless". I should've said "more clueless". This is now corrected. The universe is safe once more.)
So, thanks to a variety of favourable factors, I've found myself making arrangements to attend a conference called LISA '08. It's the short name for the 22nd Large Installation System Administration Conference, which sounds more geeky than impressive, but there's a lot of interesting stuff going on, and it's in the USA, which is always cool to visit. I also get to put this on my blog which is incredibly geeky.
Anyway, I'm off to the conference (and hence the USA) on the 7th of November, and I land in San Diego (via LAX) about 2 hours before I leave, which is pretty sweet. The down side, of course, is that it takes a day and a half to get back to Sydney. Oh well. I'll be doing two or so days in San Francisco after the conference before flying back, which should be nice. I'm hoping to get some cheap shopping done because, despite the recent drop in the Australian dollar, it is still cheaper to get many things there than here.
Turning Japanese
Speaking of travel plans, it's looking like I'll also be going to Japan early next year. There are rough plans for doing a couple of weeks in Japan, and I'm hoping leave arrangements work in my favour to give me as much days off as I can get. However, I'd be more than happy with two weeks - a week and a bit snowboarding, and the rest sightseeing. More as it develops.
So, I caved and went to the snow again. I couldn't help it.
It was a weekend trip down to the NSW slopes with Phil and her friend, and Dave B and it was quite possibly the best time I've had in the snow in Australia. Sure, the snow wasn't as good compared to a couple of powder days in the past, but it just happened to be the first time I had spent in the snow when I could actually do blacks and off-piste with a moderate amount of competency. This meant that the whole mountain is opened up instead of just a select few runs. In fact, I think I rode mostly runs that I hadn't been to before, which was a definite plus.
It began late on Friday night when Phil picked me up and we embarked on a long journey (picking up more people on the way) to Berridale. The trip was (thankfully) incident-free, and we ended up getting to the room at around 1:30 in the morning. Sadly, the remote was missing from the room and so we couldn't get the snowboard DVDs that Dave had recently bought to play on the DVD player. We ended up watching a bit of the Olympics then sleeping.
We got to Thredbo a bit late the next day because we stopped at Jindabyne for breakfast and ended up being stuck in slow traffic going past a mobile RBT. The snow seemed very good at the start of the day (due to some overnight falls) but I didn't get a chance to ride anything new until after lunch since Dave's bindings broke and he had to buy some new ones. After lunch, we all went over to the top of Karel's and headed towards the Golf Course Bowl, where much fun was had. It was the first time I rode pretty comfortably along trees, possibly because it was pretty flat (but still lots of fun). What was not fun was the traverse out, complete with stumps sticking out from the ground. We went through some more trees at the end of the day before meeting up with Dave (who we lost during one of the runs) and heading back to the apartment.
The most notable thing about that night was that we had Bits & Pizzas. I love that place.
The second day we spent at Perisher Blue where the snow was significantly less nice than the previous day. The weather was really warm, so I rode without a jacket all day and ended up getting minor sunburn on my neck. It was, however, a very enjoyable day. The first thing we figured out was that anything off-piste was not worth doing in the morning, so we did some groomers and had lunch while waiting for the snow to melt a bit. We then proceeded to have an awesome time (or a bad one if you went with Phil) at the double-black area of the mountain called Double Trouble. It wasn't as menacing as it sounded, and was really only a hard blue or a black. It was probably made a double black due to the amount of trees that was in there, but I didn't have any trouble navigating my way through the area (I can't say the same for my friends). We followed that up with some more off-piste in Guthega, where we accidentally ended up out of bounds and headed towards the road. We had to walk back to Guthega at the end of it, but a good time was had by all (even David, who ended up further down the road than any of us). Sadly, the long way back to Smiggins (where we parked) meant that we didn't have time to do much else at the end of the day.
The drive back to Sydney was eventful, and involved stops at KFC and McDonald's, as well as some interesting overtaking, and a kangaroo in the middle of the road. I somehow managed to lose my phone (left it with Dave) AND my bag (left it with Phil) in the process, which was quite impressive, even by my standards.
Skydiving didn't eventuate. Dave and Luke were far too tired to bother with any type of exciting activity on the morning of our flight, and it was too cloudy (and slightly rainy) to do anything anyway. We ended up playing some giant chess at Cathedral Square. I was giving Dave some bad advice and his black side lost quite spectacularly to Luke's red side.
Afterwards, we caught the free bus around town because we had nothing else to do. Dave and I stopped at a sushi train for a quick lunch before heading to the airport. To my delight, there was a Timezone in the airport with some really old arcade machines. Dave and I played Sega Rally and I won a couple of times before we boarded our flight.
It was cloudy all the way to Sydney, and the weather conditions were almost as bad as the in-flight movie (21) when we approached the airport for landing. Being the thrill-seekers that we were, we were really excited when we went below the clouds and the plane was still shaky as it approached the ground. Some of the other passengers looked a bit worried, but despite everything the plane landed safely with the help of the reverse thrusters. It was really cool.
Sydney was warm compared to NZ, and it was nice to be able to complain about temperatures above 10 Celsius as being cold again.
New Zealand overview
Days spent: 9 Temperature: Cold Days on the ski hill: 5 Crashes that would have looked very amusing to other people (but really hurt): 2
So yes, the Internet cafes in Queenstown wasn't that great. It was 1 NZD per 15 minutes and damn slow, so I wasn't inclined to spend a lot of time on it. Back to the story...
The rest of the week brought some more bad visibility. We all woke up late on Thursday – on Wednesday night Dave and Luke went out on a pub crawl, while I stayed up to watch the final big mountain stage of Le Tour de France – so we caught the late bus to the Remarkables on Thursday. It was more or less the same experience as the previous day.
In contrast, we woke up really early on Friday so that we could catch the bus heading to Treble Cone. The day got off to an interesting start when we ended up at different places due to Dave and Luke taking the wrong fork (the resort's runs weren't clearly marked at all). We eventually all met up again at the cafe when visibility went down to almost zero (the worst we experienced all week). It was interesting getting back down when you were a few feet from a ledge and couldn't see more than a foot in front of you. Anyway, it eventually cleared up later in the day and we had a great time boarding for a few hours before heading back to the hotel.
Our last day on the snow was Saturday and we decided to catch the early bus once more. It was back to the Remarkables, in time for the opening of the new board park called the Burton Stash. I actually managed to get in there before it was officially open by accident. It was a very nicely set up park, but I wasn't game enough to try any of the features. The powder in between sections was nice, though not long enough to really count. I think we all managed to hurt ourselves, too. For me it was the old bailing out of a funbox routine. I tried to slow down too late and caught an edge on the box then fell off at the end landing on my back on the moderately hard landing. The only thing bruised was my ego (and my back). The weather eventually turned bad again and we ended up heading back to the hotel early.
Dave and I bought a book each for the 8-hour bus trip to Christchurch the next day (I had finished American Gods the previous day – one of the best books I have ever read) then we all had some dinner and watched the Bledisloe Cup match at a bar. We headed home at halftime and slowly packed for the trip the next day. I stayed up to watch the penultimate stage of Le Tour de France and was slightly disappointed that Cadel Evans couldn't get the Yellow Jersey back.
The bus we paid for to get from Queenstown to Christchurch today was cheap, and we got what we paid for. It was rickety at best, and Dave didn't have any room to move his legs. Luckily, it was a mostly empty bus, and we were able to take up as much room as we needed. I started reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and I lent Dave American Gods to read, but most of the trip was taken up by us trying to catch up on some sleep.
We're now in Christchurch on our last night in New Zealand. I've decided to stay in while the boys are going to try to have a big night out. Our plans for tomorrow still aren't clear. Our flight leaves at 3:40pm, so we have time to do some sort of adventure activity, but we have yet to decide what to do. We're contemplating some skydiving, or perhaps some paragliding.
My best guess is that the next update will come from back home.
It was a long two days leading up to and leaving for my New Zealand trip. The night before involved Dave B haggling up a bouncer, as well as paying ludicrous amounts of money for cab rides (thanks, World Youth Day organizers!). Not having gotten much sleep that night, I groggily stuffed all my things into my snowboard bag and managed to get to the airport pretty early, though it was soon after the pope's speech at Randwick Racecourse so there were lots of people at the airport lining up to leave the country (and you could tell that they were there for World Youth Day because of their bags with the horrendous bright orange and yellow colour scheme. Anyway, we spent a lot of time lounging around in the airport waiting for our flight (which was slightly late).
After what was the shortest I have ever been on (and which had the best airline meal ever), we arrived in Christchurch late on Sunday night and managed to steal some sleep at the Base Backpackers hostel in the middle of town before heading back to the airport once more to fly to Queenstown. I was still half asleep during the flight but managed to catch the great landing, which was where the plane went through a narrow mountain range and put on the brakes really hard to land it in the short amount of runway.
Our first day in Queenstown was spent sorting out rentals for Dave and Luke, and buying our lift tickets. We finished a bit early, had a famous Fergburger, then went off to do our own separate adventure tourism activity. Luke did a bungy jump and Dave did a canyon swing, while I chose to do something a little less voluntary and went on the Shotover Jet - a high speed speedboat tour of the Shotover Canyon. I had a grin on my face the whole way through, partly because it was a hell of a lot of fun, and partly because the wind blowing on my face kind of forced it. My face only defrosted at around the time I made it back to town.
The long white cloud
Either we chose a bad time to come to Queenstown, or it's always really cloud here, because our first two days on the snow involved very poor visibility. The first day, at Coronet Peak, had fog at the top of the mountain and ice at the bottom. We eventually found the groomed runs after the fog cleared slightly, but even then it wasn't that exciting repeating that over and over again. After biting the ice a few times, Dave decided he needed to buy a helmet. Almost concurrently, I lost my gloves, and I had been meaning to buy a new pair anyway (my previous pair were horribly torn up) so Dave and I went shopping later that afternoon. Ironically enough, Dave managed to somehow injure his wrist the next day.
We were disappointed with Coronet Peak so we decided to check out The Remarkables for our second day, and for a moment, we thought we may have had a chance to get some decent runs in. Unfortunately, the sun disappeared above the clouds, which quickly came in a few hours after lifts opened. Flat light made runs very not-fun-at-all, and after Dave injured his wrist, we checked out the snow tubing - going down a short run with massive rubber doughnuts. That was enjoyable enough, but didn't provide enough entertainment, so Luke and I checked out the beginner terrain park while Dave nursed his injury.
(I would like to note that more things have happened since, but is being bogged down by slow and expensive Internet. I will attempt to update once more when we get back to Christchurch.)
The Sydney Film Festival has come and gone, and I haven't even gotten around to posting about it (I've noticed that I've only been updating once a month this year, but I digress), so consider this the obligatory film festival report.
Much to my disappointment, I was told that the Sydney Film Festival was not as huge as the other festivals I've been to in the past (namely Berlin, Toronto, and Vancouver), and didn't have the usual Q&A fare at the end of each session (with the exception of some of the competition movies as well as the gala movies). However, this did not take away from the quality (or lack thereof) of the films. I saw nine, and my reviews of the films can be read here.
My pick of the ones that I saw was The Square, which, to my surprise, was actually a red carpet world premiere. Anyway, it was a thoroughly enjoyable Australian noir that I could find very little wrong with. There was also the added bonus of having the cast and crew on hand to answer questions.
Apart from the film festival, not a whole lot has happened, though I suppose being at work full-time gives that perception whether there were things to do or not. Off the top of my head, I can remember that there was a party at David B's house where I caught up with a few people, I went and saw Mixmaster Mike, who has inhuman mixing/scratching skills, and I saw Holly Throsby and her band at the Factory theatre, where I was just as impressed with her stage presence as I was with her music.
I guess that's it for now. The next update will probably be a post-New Zealand report. All the details are finally sorted out, so now all I have to do is wait, and pray for snow.
Hmm, been a while since the last update, so I suppose I'll do a post.
What has been happening, you ask? Well "not much" always seems to come to mind. Apart from not much, here's a quick summary of things that has happened since last update:
Dave from England came to Sydney and we got perhaps a little too intoxicated for his birthday.
Saw Salmonella Dub at the Metro. Was good.
Saw Iron Man on opening day. A damn fine movie, in the same league as Batman Begins as far as superhero movies go.
I completed a (pretty bad) script for Script Frenzy.
Bought some hardbacks and got a lot of free stuff from Kings Comics on Free Comic Book Day.
I got The Absolute Sandman vol. 1 signed by Neil Gaiman, complete with a sketch of Morpheus.
(Somewhere in there, I also managed to get a better grip on my accuracy at the driving range. I still suck, but considerably less so now.)
Oh, and a ski trip to New Zealand is a go. Gonna be in Queenstown from July 21 to 28. Still gotta book the car, but apart from that it should be a blast.
A few weeks ago, during the Easter long weekend, I headed over to Melbourne to attend some gigs at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival as well as catch up with a few friends. Little did I know that when I left I was carrying the seeds of a potentially deadly illness. The sniffles that annoyed fellow passengers on the plane to Melbourne soon turned into a raging flu that put me out of action for much of the first couple of days of my stay. After trying various remedies for cold and flu, I eventually turned to laughter, the so-called "best medicine". So, how did I fare?
My first dose of laughter came in the form of Heath Franklin as Chopper Read. In Making Deadshits History, the satirical alter-ego of Chopper Read outlined in hilarious fashion what made people stupid and how we could eliminate these people from the world. I laughed hard, but I also coughed a whole lot, so this laughter technique didn't seem to be working.
I was feeling marginally better on day two, and after meeting some friends and consulting with a few Guitar Heroes, I continued with this potentially volatile experiment. That night we saw Arj Barker serve up some humour as only he could. I still wasn't feeling the best after the gig, but I was a bit more optimistic when I went to bed trying to cough my lungs out.
I looked less like a zombie the next morning and felt that this day may be the turning point in this illness. Perhaps the laughter was working after all. Kristen Schaal provided some incredibly awkward laughs and a ludicrously catchy tune, and it began to purge the sickness from my body. However, it was not enough. I needed just one more laugh-filled show.
This came in the form of comedy troupe called The Hound of the Baskervilles presenting Every Film Ever Made. It was easily the best show I saw in the entire festival, and was notable not only for the fact that it was consistently funny throughout the whole show, in which the trio performed famous scenes from as many films as they could think of, but also for the fact that there was a woman in the crowd who was laughing so hard you could swear she was on the brink of having a seizure. After the show, I felt revitalised. So much so that I decided to stay out and check out some comedians at the Hi-Fi Bar.
Sadly, most of the acts that went on stage were average to poor any my illness threatened to fight its way back. It was saved by the very last act, Canada's Glenn Wool, who made some clever quips about alcohol and religion. We also met some cool comedians who were just hanging around.
You would generally want to keep treating illnesses like this for a while after it has gone away to avoid it recurring, so I decided to continue my doses of laughter for the rest of my stay. On Easter Monday, we saw Mark Butler do a gig about Body Language, which was as entertaining as it was informative (infotainment, so to speak), and on my last day we saw Jason Byrne, who was worth seeing for the fact that he made fun of one of our friends.
All in all, I can report that I am now feeling (mostly) fine, and the flu has not come back to cause any further annoyance since the experimental treatment. However, is laughter the best medicine? Probably not, but it sure seemed to work for me.
Disclaimer: The author of this article does not endorse trying to use laughter as a cure for anything other than being emo. He especially does not recommend trying laughter to cure the following - AIDS, pancreatic cancer, heart disease, and Tom Cruise.
I went to Tropfest. It rained. But it didn't get rained out like it did in 2005.
I saw Stars, Broken Social Scene, and Feist in the same week. They were incredible.
I had a game of golf. I shot a 74. From 9 holes. On a par 3. (I suck.)
February generally moved along pretty quickly.
Leap years are cool.
Coming up in March:
Session 1 at UNSW gets under way tomorrow.
I go to Melbourne for the Easter long weekend for the Comedy Festival and to meet up with some friends. (This is during the mid-session break, which happens after just two weeks of classes, which is very odd.)
At work, one person is leaving and two people are going part-time, which should generate more work for me.
