"yuki-sukashi"

What is "yuki-sukashi" you ask?
Well, it's pronounced more like "yoo-kee skashee" and it's Japanese for shoveling snow. That's all we have been doing this last few weeks, and I'm not exaggerating!

icicles hanging off the straggly little shrub outside our front door

There has been a stupid amount of snowfall over the last few weeks. Liz wrote about the snow over New Years, but it just hasn't really lifted up since that! In fact, it's almost worse in some ways. They don't have "snow days" here. No matter how much snow there is, everyone still has to drive through it to get to work. There ARE snow plows out on the roads, but there aren't enough of them, and they don't do a fantastic job either. If you need to be at work by 8:30am, and the snow plows don't get to those roads before 9am, then you just have to drive through the snow. Yes, there are many accidents.
Poor Liz has to drive the winding narrow roads to Amino every morning. What would ordinarily take 40 minutes, sometimes takes her an hour and a half in the snow!! It's not so bad for me, because I can walk to work, but it's not an easy walk in the blizzard through knee-deep snow! haha. Of course, it's not like that every day, but much more often than we would like!

So, getting back to "yuki-sukashi" (clearing snow), that's what we have been doing almost every morning and evening. Today we had about a foot of fresh snow, so I went out and dug a path from our front door, and then I dug out the car. We have a severe snow warning in place, AGAIN, and it's set to snow all night and all day tomorrow, too!!

making progress on my path to the front door

neighbour's car which hasn't been dug out!

This is why we haven't been up to much, and we haven't been updating the blog much lately. Sorry about that. When you find yourself wondering what we're up to, just picture us with a show shovel in hand, digging out the car, and you're probably spot on!

Happy New Year!

Happy 2011, everyone!

In true Tango-style, we are about two feet deep in snow for the new year. It started snowing in the early hours on the 31st, and continued falling steadily all day and all night. Although Bryn and I would usually choose to stay home and enjoy the snow, we braved the conditions to go out to lunch with Yoko, Junko, Ippei and Yohei (sort of a wedding reunion!). The roads were treacherous, so I was glad that Ippei offered to give us a ride into Mineyama for the occasion (if there's one thing I hate, it's driving in the snow!!!).


We had lunch at Sprout, a funky little Italian/French restaurant (it specialized in pasta and pizza, but it's desserts often revolve around crepes...). The food was nice, but the company was better (especially since the others decided to order a pizza margherita and a seafood and tomato gratin for the table before remembering those dishes are anything but Bryn and Liz friendly!)



After lunch we moved onto phase two of the afternoon - bowling. Bryn and I were not terribly thrilled when the idea was announced to us, but went with it anyways. The bowling alley is definitely Japanese seeing as you rent shoes from vending machines (better know your size!).

What size am I?!

Insert money...

Shoes come flying out!

Now I am probably the world's worst bowler. However everyone there might have thought otherwise when I got a freak-strike on the very first turn! However I reclaimed my title as world's worst by throwing gutter ball after gutter ball for the duration of the day. (See why bowling isn't a very thrilling idea for me?!?) It was fun anyways!

Bowling is a VERY serious game.

Balls!

Group picture courtesy of Yohei and Facebook :)

The drive home took ages since the roads were so bad, so it was nice to get inside and warmed up. We made ourselves year-end soba for dinner, and spent the evening watching Japanese New Year's programming on TV.


We woke up in 2011 to sunny skies, but loads of snow! My poor little car was buried! After the postman had delivered our meager stack of nengajo (new year's greeting cards), we bundled up and set out for a walk to take some pictures. It was a nice walk - not too cold since the sun was really bright - and I think we got some nice pictures!

Before clearing the snow off.

It looks like a fluffy quilt!

Now that we are back and Bryn has broken the snow shovel (not his fault - who knows how old it was!) we are planning on spending the rest of the day chilling out (or warming up!) and doing nothing.

Hope everyone had a great New Year and keep reading in 2011!!