Saturday, April 11, 2009

Another day of snowboarding

Since I came to Japan, as far as I can recall, there are only 3 things on earth that make me wake up in the god-damn-lazy-early morning:
1. Photography - morning lighting or sun rise makes good photo
2. Japanese language classes - I have no choice
3. Snowboarding - as I pay for a whole day lift ticket, and the bus departs in early morning, so...

Today is the 4th time I went snowboarding, mainly for practicing my linking turn.
Well, linking turn means to go from toe edge to heal edge, or vice verse, which is the last technique in the fundamental of snowboarding.
Actually I've learn how to link my very 1st turn during my 2th visit to the snow mountain (thanks to my very good snowboarding instructors, who I never have to pay them any penny... Utube banzai!!!), this time is to try to have more practice in order to make my turn better and smoother.

In order to catch the bus going to Sapporo Kokusai, the ski area, I got to wake up at 7.30 am. Walk to the bus station and take the 8.40 am bus.
It took about an hour and a half to arrived at the ski area, i.e. at about 10.15 am.
A friend told me that I am very lucky, he stay at Tokyo, he have to travel 6 hrs by bus to get to a snow mountain.
Anyway, this is Hokkaido, don't envy please :)
There are even Aussie, Yankee, Hong Kong friends, or people from don't know where taking hours of flight just to come and enjoy the snow mountain here at Hokkaido... Well, thinking it this way make me feel like having to wake up in early morning 7.30 am didn't seems to be that big a deal, at least :)

On top of the snow mountain they build a cafe, where I have my lunch there while enjoying the spactacular view out side of the cafe's mirrow wall (photo below).
Ya the photo quality is really bad as it's from my mobile phone's built-in cam.
At the middle of the photo, the brighter horizontal line above the far mountain is a row of mountain hills that I mean by "spactacular view", too bad you can't really see them in this bad quality photo.
However, they are shown in the picture pasted at the wall in the following photo:
Ya I know, it's still very blurry, but something like that you will enjoy watching, while eating the hot pizza.

This goggle is the most expensive piece I bought for snowboarding, even more expensive than my Burton snowboard... while the mobile phone I am holding is responsible for all the bad quality photos here :|