Winter Fun 2010: Ice Skating and Snowboarding

Let's start with January!

My town creates an outdoor skating rink every winter, and all the kids in the town get to go a couple times a week through school for P.E. class. This year, during one of my Thursday elementary school visit days, I got lucky and had a chance to go with the 3rd and 5th graders at my "far" elementary school, which actually happens to be just a 20 minute walk from the rink. :-)

Bridge to the skating rink.

Ahoy, skating rink!

The prep. What I love about this place is that we just walk into the skate house, a couple of the older students jump behind the counter, and start passing out skates to everyone. A community skating rink in the true sense of the word!

Whee!

The view back towards the skating rink area as we walk back to school. My little slice of heaven.

And, as you probably well know by now, the recreation center in my town organizes 2 ski trips every winter to two different prefectures, one in January to Gunma, and one in February to Nagano. I've participated in these trips 4 years running, and this January I talked my foreign teacher friends, Zach and Sadaf (you'll remember them from the Bungee Jump blog) into joining me for a little snowboarding. Neither Sadaf nor myself had really ever snowboarded before...actually, Sadaf had never been on the slopes before at all, but these town trips are teaching trips, so a great chance to learn some snowboarding skills! My friends, Yumi (the organizer of the trips and recreation center staff), and Hiro (the manager of the convenience store closest to my house, and a member of my town soft volleyball team), ended up being our teachers. :-) Perfect.

And yes, as usual, all the kids in these photos are my students. ALL of them. ;-)

Here's the group! I think we had a record 77 people on the January trip this year. Now you get to play "Where's the foreigners?"

And here's our teacher, Hiro. :-)

Doing our mandatory group stretches. :-) It's really a great idea, but there's something funny to me about the fact that everyone in Japan learns these stretches the minute they walk into a school as a child, and continue to do the same group stretches the rest of their lives.



Here's me taking my opportunity to strike my "snowboarding goddess" pose...cuz I'm pretty sure it'll be the last time I'll even remotely resemble anything like a snowboarding goddess for the rest of the weekend. It's easy to look cool when you're standing still on flat ground. :-)

Here we go! Fundamentals. :-D

Doing a little practice run on the bunny hill...bunny...get our teacher's costume now?! ;-D

This is a pretty common scene...awkwardly walking around, while my 5th grade elementary student, Saitou, makes look sailing down the slope look easy. Jerk. ;-D

The view from higher up.

One of our group members, 5th grade elementary school student (she's tiny!), Miyako.

Another of our group members, 2nd year junior high school student, Saya, in one of her better crash landings. :-)

Here comes the bunny, surfing the powder.

A few from our group, just chillin'.

The foreign contingent, Zach, Sadaf and Mandy, the latter being eerily outnumbered by Canadians...

With Zura, one of my oldest friends in Tokigawa, and Hiro's profound sense of humor.

Sadaf and I ended up in a room with my friends, Keiko and Kaori, and their children, 8 of us in the end! Obviously, the kids had the upperhand. ;-) Junnosuke is Kaori's youngest son, one of my 1st grade elementary school students. I LOVE the pose he strikes in this photo, especially considering he's pounced on his American English teacher. No fear!

Hiro, me and Sadaf at dinner. This pretty much says it all.
Although I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean...

Unfortunately there aren't a lot of action shots of me. I was either taking the photos, or Sadaf and I were too far behind the group trying to get her to stand up to be in others' shots. :-D That was highly entertaining in and of itself, although I guess you had to be there. :-D Good times though! THE best powder snow I've had in 4 years, and in good company to enjoy it all to the max.