Skiing

Japan in a very mountainous country and in the winter the mountains get lots of snow.  The snow stays around fro a long time. This meant we could go Skiing in the spring holidays at the beginning of April. We went to Yuzawa in the Nigata prefecture.A prefecture is like an English county.
We had to get up at 5:00am to catch a train to Tokyo.

Tokyo Station

In Tokyo we got a bullet train called MAX. MAX has 2 floors and is designed for going to snowy places.

Bullet Train MAX

Yuzawa had about 5m of snow when we went there. The weather was sunny. It is surrounded by mountains. To get up the mountains we had to use a gondola type of cable car. Going up on the ski lift we could see a small avalanche had happened.

In Yuzawa we went to a ski school as it was our first time skiing. The ski boots were heavy and stiff. It was OK to go up stairs in them but very hard to go down.

Ski School

We also had to wear weird Sponge Bob vests which we didn't particularly like to do the ski lessons, but despite the fact that we had to wear the vests we got good and so the parts which my dad went slow, we went fast.  The ski teachers weren't that strict, they even let us throw snowballs at them.
We also tried snowboarding but we mostly fell over. There were lots of other people who had fallen over and they were sitting down more than snowboarding. Almost every snowboarder had a wet bottom from sitting in the snow.  From the chair lift we saw a snowboarder in a stretcher.
After 2 ski lessons we could go down a long ski route over 1km. Here is a video of some of the things we learnt.

We could do parallel turns and go into the tuck position for steep hills. Skiing was excellent fun! We saw good views, and has nice weather.

It was also good as we found a restaurant which did cheese fondue which is unusual to have in Japan and one of my favourite foods.