Snowboarding!

That's right, believe your eyes...it's me on a snowboard going down a mountain! A beautiful vision in red.
This weekend I went to Nagano, a mountainous region in Japan with one of the societies at my university and it was brilliant! I was so nervous about going, what with never having snowboarded before and being a little more than retarded at sports but everything turned out to be great.
The weekend started with a rather hellish night bus journey that lasted 8 hours, regardless of Nagano only being a four hour drive away. We spent the night on the bus instead of getting there quickly and having a nice bed. Japan does have it's ways of saving money. After only having one hours sleep we arrived at 7 in the morning and got on to the slopes straight away. I felt like death and wanted nothing more to be in a nice warm bed with a hot water bottle.
So, as I said before, not having any experience in snowboarding when I stood up for the first time and slipped about 1 meter down hill I was on my arse after a good 2 seconds. Not bad for my first try! Luckily for me I had my friend Lauren on hand; without her I don't think I would have had the will to keep trying. She taught me all the basics and by lunch time I was much further than I ever could imagine and was going down the best of the learner slopes (albeit falling over every ten seconds but at least I was getting to the bottom!). Half-way through the day and I was pooped, I really felt like giving up and going back to the hotel to sleep but my friends persuaded me to go up the mountain instead and give it a go. I'm so so so so happy that I did it! I was terrified at first, the slope was so steep but it was such an awesome feeling to get to the bottom.
After the first day my muscles murdered. I actually couldn't comprehend how I could do the second day because everything hurt so much.However, I don't know why but as soon as you stand up on a snowboard and get started you forget all those feelings and just want to bomb it down the mountainside. By the end of the second day, and the trip, I felt like I had achieved a lot (with thanks to all the people I was with who kept me cheerful, on my feet, having a good time and telling me how to do it :-) ), I had got some basic stuff down and was beginning to get to grips with being able to snowboard properly. I never learned how to turn properly but I did manage to slide down a mountain on a piece of plastic without breaking anything. something to be proud of methinks! I even enjoyed falling over all the time; I must say, I did spent about 60% of my time on the floor trying to get up again. Thanks to this trip I'd really love to snowboard again and I'm already planning a trip to France. Hehe!


I haven't blogged for ages now and ,again, I'm really sorry. What have I been doing? I went to Oz and had a surprisingly not so hot Xmas, been dealing with heart-break and trying to be on top of all my work; this month being even worse than the others... and this coming week is the worst yet as I have two exams and three presentations on top of all the usual stuff I have to do. But as is the way, life goes on and things will get better; some through hard work and others through the time. At the moment it can sometimes feel like everything is hard work, like being smiley and cheerful (my usual self I suppose), but I know that'll fix after a while, especially with the help of everyone here and at home. Thank you to those people- you know who you are!!! :-)