Ahh – welcome back to our second home  🇯🇵🇯🇵

After a long old flight and lots of movies we touched down in Tokyo late at night. We just made the last train to our accommodation, 2 stops away.

The next morning we were going to eat ramen at a favourite place but decided we’d be tight on time so headed back to Haneda airport and sorted out Sim cards and found a really nice ramen spot (Japan’s hidden jewel is that places like airports,  circuits,  concerts etc don’t charge much more than normal – come on UK, stop ripping people off).

As we were coming in to land on Hokkaido the view was quite depressing – green fields instead of white !!!!  I had to tell my Eeyore to be quiet as we were a few days earlier than normal  (spoiler alert the snow has been falling since , phew).

We’ve moved apartments,  essentially next door to our old one 🙈 but it’s weird as it’s the mirror image 😅   keep walking into walls 🤪

Staff orientation, a morning skiing to break in the new boots, a visit to town hall and banks and we are back to being locals. We’ve visited a few of our favourite restaurants before they get too busy and they didn’t disappoint 👌

Pete had 1 lesson with a nice family and then our scheduled days off came up, and it dumped down 😎😎 so we’ve had 2 mega mornings snowboarding in the famous Japanese Powder 🤟🤟🤟

I managed to sleep through quite a big earthquake (7.5 om the richter scale) until Janet shook me awake as she wanted me to feel the earth move too.  Apparently our colleague was woken by the quake to then hear snoring and Janet shouting “Pete, Pete, Pete!!!” , my ear plugs were doing a good job it seems…..  Ear plugs are necessary to block out the snow ploughs and diggers clearing the snow in the early hours of the morning though.

The ski school has grown a LOT this season but it’s been great to re-accquaint with the previous peeps 🥰  and now try and remember everyone else’s names……

Back to a week of lessons tomorrow