Asama 2000

Last weekend I went with my friends Jason and Mark to a ski resort in Nagano Prefecture called Asama 2000, due to its two thousand meter elevation.

Check out the photo gallery here: Asama 2000 Gallery

We stayed in a Japanese style, onsen hotel called Takemine, located on the top of the ski resort. The only way to get there was to take a snow-cat from the parking lot or ski in. After we arrived, everyone changed into the comfortable yukatta's provided for us, and we went to eat dinner in the dining hall.

The hotel served Japanese carp in a variety of different ways. I'd never eaten carp before, and I was shocked at how good it was.

After dinner, we returned to our room for a three-dimensional sound experiment. We played the Flaming Lips' Zaireeka album using two iPods, each connected to an iFusion speaker setup, and two iBooks, each connected to an external speaker set-up. For one night, we had the best stereo on the planet!

The next day we woke up, put our iPods in our pockets, walked out into a blizzard, and went cross-country skiing across a 3km cat track. At the end of the cat track, we strapped on a pair of snowshoes and went trooping through the woods like the March of the Rotten Vegetables.

Eventually, we decided to dig a snow cave. We managed to hollow out a deep snowdrift that provided us shelter for lunch. After eating, we went back outside and noticed all our tracks were snowed over. It took us some time to find our way back to the cat track, but we did it.

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped off in front of a mirror to have some fun with our cameras.



Pure silliness. Believe it or not, that was the music I was listening to at the time.

All jokes aside, that night I ate one of the best meals of my life; carp sashimi, carp in a kind of sweet miso soup, nabe, tsukemono, fish paste served with a shiso leaf, and a few bottles of atsukan.

Our last day, we woke up to beautiful sunshine and went snowboarding all morning before catching a 3pm snow-cat back down the mountain.

At the end, I concluded that any time Jason, Mark, and I get together hilarity ensues.