The Years End

Of course it's not the end of the year, that happened some months ago.

But it is nearing the end of the school year here, so I'm soon to be out of work until the new school term ramps up (the contracts are designed to be slightly less than full-time so you can't claim the benefits of full-time work from the company, like rolling holidays, maternity leave and whatnot).

In the meantime I'm going to be off on holiday.  The one I alluded to earlier that made me ill.  I'll be sure to take plenty of pictures and probably more than one or two videos.  I'm somewhat concerned about the battery on my camera, it doesn't last very long these days and being out and about doesn't lend itself to recharging.  However, I will also take a little 35mm film camera which will do in a pinch and requires only watch batteries.  If it requires batteries at all.  (I'll double check later).

Anyway, I'll hopefully have a few pictures to put up in a couple of weeks when (if) I make it back.

So that'll be nice.

Skiing in Pictures

So I went to Hakuba a while ago for some snowboarding.  We went for the weekend, arriving early Saturday morning and staying overnight.  The hotel was, like all Japanese hotels in the mountains, old and grubby, but the town was pretty nice.  It was obviously styled after a european town, but no one managed to get to europe before they did so.  Everything looks like a disney town from the 70's, plastic and glass fibre which is kind of weird, but also fun.

The skiing was okay, but the snow was terrible.

It started raining on the Saturday night and didn't stop on Sunday, so we decided to abort the Sunday skiing and check out the town.

There were a few quite interesting places to visit in the town, including a place to make some glassy stuff (pictures at some point later) that we did.  Walking around with the clouds and the mountains gives a pretty cool (haha!) effect whenever the sun comes out, in that the roads heat up and create great swathes of mist, which form fog, which cool the place back down, which clears the fog, which then let's the sun through and so on.  It happened a few times while we were walking around and enabled a couple of these pictures where everything seems foggy and mysterious.

It was difficult to tell when it was going to stop raining, so when it did we ran around taking pictures and trying not to step in the lakes that had formed about the place.

I'm not sure whether I like this picture, but it has a light and a dark half which is kind of cool.

My favourite snow based machine.  These are everywhere as you might imagine.

See how filthy that snow is?  That's because they hadn't had snow in weeks by the time we got there.  The conditions were downright bad for skiing.  It snowed the day after we left.

End of Term

So the end of term is near.  The third year middle school students had their farewell ceremony thing today, which is an incredibly drawn out affair lasting three hours.

All variety of plays and songs are performed at these things, including a few performances fro the various bands associated with the school.  One performance, by the brass band, took me completely by surprise.  From the second it began I knew exactly what it was, which is weird because I haven't heard it in quite a long time.

Of course you've guessed it by now.  It was this:

Okay, you may not have guessed what it was just from the writing above.  To be honest it took me by surprise.  I wonder if this music is famous in its own right, perhaps an old composition by a famous composer of yore?  Regardless of origin, this music will always be thunderbirds for me.

It sounded surprisingly good, even with a school brass band playing.