Boarding Time!

Yesterday, the slopes of Cypress Mountain bowed down to my snowboarding prowess for the first time in 2.5 years.

Okay, I'm really full of crap, since my suckiness has gotten even suckier after not having touched snow for that long. Which is why me and my buddy Michael were glad to be finally doing this. Having sold my snowboarding gear to an Australian buddy when I was in Japan, because it costed more than the equipment to send it back home, I invested in a whole new set of gear.

Unfortunately, the maiden voyage of my snowboard deck hit several icebergs.

The first one happened before I even hit the slopes. Of all the equipment I bought, the one thing I didn't count on investing in were snowboard pants. Since my stomach hasn't gotten any bigger, I assumed that the pants would still fit. Unfortunately, things were not so ceteris paribus; without bragging about my manhood, the only conclusion I could come up with is that my ass got bigger. Fortunately, I'm not a woman, so I didn't think of the end of the world; I just put on the ill-fitting pants anyway and didn't bother to do it up. Instead I held together by a belt, so I spent the whole day snowboarding balls-out. Luckily, my jacket was long enough to keep my kids from being born frostbitten, and me from being arrested.

Once I managed to haul me, my buddy, and my balls to the mountain on only a few hours sleep, we got straight to work. Sadly, the snow base wasn't as high as it was touted to be, and half the mountain and the forest was sticking out of the snow, or worse, lurking under just enough snow to be hidden from view, but not enough snow to protect your board from these harsh elements. The base of my board took a particularly nasty gouge as I cleared a crest on the slope, but couldn't stop in time for this massive fucking stump lurking just below.

Then, me and my buddy shared the lift chair with this nice, albeit a little bit weird couple, who were not that far off from our age. As we were lowering the safety bar, one of the handles attached vertically to the bar went down smack at my crotch, nearly doing a nutcracker on my exposed happy sack. The guy in the couple turns to me and goes:

"Heheheh...It's like you're humping the chairlift...heheheh..."

"That's probably the most action I'm going to get all year."

And then we all had a jolly good laugh at the fact that I'm not going to get any sex, at least not with something living.

We ended the session with my board taking a bigger beating than any brand new board is supposed to take, and with my buddy getting sore overexerting himself in boots with loose heels. Nevertheless, it was productive, as I got the feel of snowboarding back. We were both pretty hungry, so we decided to have dinner Downtown at Kintaro, this nice authentic Japanese ramen noodle house run by Japanese people on Denman St. It's a small place that usually has long lineups to the entrance, but we figured nobody would line up for long in this cold weather. The place reminded me of Tengu, a ramen shop that I always went to when I lived in Japan. In fact, I went to Tengu so often that when I went back to visit a year after moving away from Japan, the family running the establishment still recognized me and asked if I wanted "the usual".

When we arrived at Kintaro, we were correct - there was no lineup, but that was because everyone was packed just inside the entrance waiting. Fortunately, we didn't have to wait too long to be seated, and the noodles really hit the spot when you're about to succumb to the cold. The Japanese waitress was really cute and I spoke Japanese to her, but she insisted on speaking English to me. I feel so shot down.

I guess humping the chairlift really is all the action I'm going to get.