Nihon ga daisuki desu!

As usual it's been ages since I've blogged. Most recently I've done two major things in my life:

1. Japan
I went to Japan on a snowboarding trip for two-and-a-half weeks with Amanda and eight other friends. It was absolutely unbelievable. The snow was so thick and constant it's like nothing I've ever seen before. It was snowing almost every day and by the time it took you to have lunch there was already 10cm of new snow on the ground.

Strangely there was an Irish pub in Japan.

The powder was like shaving cream, flying everywhere as I rode through it. We were in a small town called Niseko on Hokkaido island (the northernmost island of Japan) which is right at the base of the skifields. I literally snowboarded home most nights.


The first several days me and Amanda were still pulling ourselves together doing the Family Run (absolute beginners) and trying not to injure ourselves as we fell over. After that we took up the more challenging intermediate runs which turned out to be not that bad. It seems that when you're going 30 km/h on a snowboard your body somehow instinctively keeps you upright as a kind of emergency response.

By the end of the trip I'd managed to come down a couple of times from the top of the mountain and Amanda had come down from about 3/4 of the way up. We are both now professional level snowboarders and you can expect to see us in halfpipe comps in the near future.


After the snow we had three days in Tokyo to party and try to come to terms with the impending flight home in a couple of days. It was cold and forbidding in Tokyo but we still managed to make it to some temples and shopping areas.

2. Gold Coast
I've finally moved up to Gold Coast after all the talk. My work has created a Gold Coast office so I can continue to work for them (woohoo!) up here. Two days after coming back from Japan Amanda and I drove up from Sydney to Gold Coast over two days. It's an 11 hour drive all up and there's no way I could've handled that in one go.

Gold Coast is fun and everything's much slower paced than Sydney even though I lived in probably the most relaxed part of Sydney.

So the moral of the story is: come visit me in Gold Coast because we have a spare room with a bed and it only costs $100 to come over from NZ (or so I heard?)

Oh and I've got long hair now for those that didn't know.

Out.