My first taste of Japanese snow.

A days before Christmas a few friends and I went on a mini road trip to Dynaland, a ski field about an hours drive from here. I was pretty excited and I even got up 30 minutes earlier than I was supposed to, (I read the message wrong). After a bit of complications which included the driver leaving his phone in his car so he didn't wake up, which meant we had to walk to his apartment to wake him up. Luckily the walk wasn't too far.


So after sitting in the car for about an hour and seeing it gradually get more and more white I was greeted with this. I was expecting it to be more covered in snow but my friend told me the season hasn't full started here yet.


This place was pretty big but too bad only 2 lifts were open that day. One that went to the top and one that went half way. I started off with a coupe of runs down the smaller lift which at the bottom had some nice small boxes which I failed on, but I did hit a couple of the smaller jumps without too much hassles.


This has got to be the coolest thing from the day, these were our lift passes. Not like the shitty print out ones that we have to zip tie to our jackets like back home.


Here are the entrances to the lift, they had these machines where you just scan your card and it let you in through the gates like when you enter a carnival or something similar. I found this to be so much more convenient than the whole lift pass checking that I have to go through back home.


Here's what it looked like just before we headed off at about 5pm.


My friends who were kind enough to invite me along. Yuka's in the pink and Mai is in the red.


Here's me all excited after a fun day out snowboarding, my annual snowboard trip was delayed because the seasons are opposite to back home so I was really happy I finally got to snowboard.


On the way back I mostly slept then when I woke up we were at some famous ramen place. I was so out of it since I just woke up that I didn't really ask why it was famous but I managed to order this and it tasted pretty good.


This was the view after getting off the higher of the two lifts. All in all it was a really fun day with some great friends. I would have been happy if I had my board and boots with me, especially my boots since the ones I rented were complete shit and made my feet sore half way through the day. But I still had an awesome time and this was just the warm up session for the bigger ski trip I've got planned next weekend.

PS. All photos are courtesy of my iPhone 4, I'm pretty surprised with how well they turned out.