After an extended period of laziness, it's back to updating this piece of crap. Lucky you. For the first time I was on the very last plane out of Melbourne airport, weird feeling hanging out in an almost deserted airport. In another first, I flew Cathay Pacific and got to ride in the most uncomfortable cattle class seat I'd been in for a while. My ass was asleep before we even got in the air, but by some miracle I didn't get diarhhea and even managed to sleep a few hours and woke up in not too bad a humour for my Hong Kong stopover. It was only to be under 2 hours until I took off again, so a bearable amount of time in a new airport. We loaded the second plane and waited. And waited. And waited. After 27 hours (at least) of sitting in the same spot with my ass asleep again, the replacement flux capacitator wouldn't mesh with the synchros and so we deboarded and went back to waiting inside the airport. After a couple more hours they threw us on another plane with flux jigga intact and we were airborne again.
As usual, all things airport were smooth as silk on the Japan side and it wasn't long before I was rolling on the rapid train towards Sapporo. Having spent a couple months going to and from Sapporo last winter, it was more a home-coming feeling than an arrival. A good feeling. My good buddy Aki met me at Teine station and is putting me up in his appartment, complete with snowboard shop on the ground floor. Aki is a shop rider and manager for Trial, a surf/skate/snow shop based in Osaka. In 2007 Aki convinced the boss that Hokkaido needed a store and that he was just the man to set it up and run it.
Not content with being at the base of a quality snowboarding hill and within a short drive from the surf, Aki smashed out the floor of the underground room and built (possibly) the world's smallest concrete bowl, complete with plaster vert trannies. It took almost a year to complete, almost all done after work hours, shovelling dirt and old floor out of the small window at the back and learning all the joys of working with concrete. Complete with in-wall-mounted cd player, the finished product is a sight to behold, pretty impressive for a (mostly) one man job with no prior experience in houeshold concrete bowl construction.
There's supposed to be a storm of mammoth proportions on its way here, ready to unload acres of fresh siberian pow all over the place, so I should be heading to Niseko - 'cause everyone knows there's nowhere else to ride in Japan - on the weekend to make the most of it come Monday. I'm supposed to be crashing with McCarthy and his cronies, but after seeing some photos of the hijinx going on at that place on FaceCrack, I am a little nervous. If those young fuckers don't kill me with booze, I'll try and put some more pretty colours and meaningful words on here in the not-too-distant future. Laters.
