you should get getting laid because of all this...girls should love that you're taking care of granny
grandma's helper went back to indonesia for a month. i think she was supposed to quit after 6 years of service, but rumor has it my mom had some word$ with her and she's staying on for another 3 years. i imagine its tough for her to be away from her family for so long, but i can also see how living in a better climate, a more developed country, earning a stronger currency and pretty much having free reign to do anything she wants after covering her job scope. she's all alone in a huge apt with grandma. gets to fly around asia when grandma needs it. and has stints of fatigue when the influx of family comes in, but that's life. but with eric in the house, with my aunt visiting, it gives wati a little freedom from the kitchen, and some freedom to step out the house. and with a month away...grandma panicked about who was to care for her...
the family has its own issues. and there was obvious big tension and prodigal children trying to pass off responsibilities to one another. my cousin, a year older than i, 自身難保，is not the one u need to fall back on with his style of stress control...but that's what it resorted to. the immediate children bypassed their duties and left the grandkids to take over. that's a topic to vent about another day. and so i obediently took the reigns for the first week that i would be around. cooking, cleaning, shopping, hospital visits, church visits, temple visits, octogenarian hygiene caring...all completely out of my league on top of which there was extra chores for chinese new year. with whiskey flowing continually all week, i got through it, prepping extra food for my cousin for the following week.
we got through it. we made the best of it. we got brownie points out of it. after all...this is a family where everything is for 秀。
the night before we had drinks at marquee. and the next day we had lunch. at night the lee's came over and we hung out. the day after we went hiking. and after hiking we had a long long lunch. they're family. so easy and so comfortable. for better and for worse. so of course i always have to think about "it"....poor winton.
hokkaido was absolutely awesome (EVEN THE AIRPORT IS AWESOME!!). so awesome that when i landed with cheesecake i needed to deliver it immediately to not only share the freshness of the amazing dairy product cheesecake from the northern reaches of japan that i bought for tiff and eric, but i also needed to tell people about how awesome hokkaido was. 北海道可以去。。。again, i'm a bit of a snob when it comes to things like this....(food, travel...life)...but i'll say hokkaido far exceeded expectations.
in hokkaido...#itsallaboutthebutter. everything dairy related is absolutely amazing. milk. cream. pudding. yogurt. coffee latte's. cheesecake. desserts. butter. and then there's the seafood out of the northern arctic waters of japan. fresh, sweet, huge. ebi, scallops, crab, sashimi...even the hotel buffet served salmon sashimi that was pretty damn good. and the all u can eat ebi just couldn't be put down until i had eaten two huge plates full. the crab legs took work, but if u sat down to cut and slowly eat, the natural sweetness was well worth the effort and paced eating allowed the proper ingestion of the soft meat to accordingly reach each tastebud receptor across your tongue and fill your entire mouth. disclaimer:: japanese food is very salty
and that's just the food. i haven't even gotten to the #POW! the pow that is soooo incredibly soft that if i were to make a snowball and throw it at your face. it'd disintegrate and poof into a dust before reaching you. i thought i'd be boarding in rockies weather conditions so a helmet and sunglasses would easily have sufficed. but in niseko, where there is no man made snow, and the pow is au natural, it is always snowing soft fluffy cartoon like snow in that neg 10c degree weather. i made it through 4 hours, but eventually gave in and bought robocop goggles only to scratch the lens after half a day.
man i hadn't boarded in ages. it took me 2 days of constant tweaking to shake off the rust and get back into 2004 form. the last year i boarded avidly. if there's any place to regain your confidence...correction, regain your balls...it's boarding in japan. the pow is soo soft you just can't be afraid of testing your limits. a jump, a fall, u're in 4 feet of fluff. an ollie, a grab. a 360...and if you eat it...u eat soft fresh powder. with that being said...on wednesday morning, steve and i got up early to catch the fresh tracks on the other side of the mountain at hirafu. oh awesome. but fresh pow comes with fresh problems. u get stuck, u get screwed. hahahaha. check out the video.
with the ass kissing prose above, niseko was already amazing (barring the fact that it's chock full of australians). the trip could've been fine as is. on top of which the naruwan tour package was 50k NT for 5 days 4 nights flights, hotels, dinners, lift tickets all included. and with me really only knowing steve, i didn't know what kind of social crowd i was getting into. but our group...it worked so well. we hung out at night...eating snacks, drinking booze, talking smack...playing games...getting deep...talking all night...just like all ski trips do...fantastic.
people usually rave about the outdoor jacuzzi which im never that fond of. tho its fun when the group gets naked and hangs in the tub all night drinking. in japan, there's onsen. and pretty cool outdoor onsen. cuz the view is magnificent. but all dudes....kind of gross....kind of no thanks. "you are so american". but 不泡白不泡.
there's a romantic side to this trip too. our little group included kevin and rosa. the couple that showed up late to the airport with kevin forgetting his passport at home and basically wasn't going to make the flight. they were also frighting and on the brink of breaking up. which made day 1 very awkward for everyone else. steve and i thought we had gained a third to complete the triumverate. but by that night....all was well...and we edged him to hurry up and propose before things get bad again. so at the top of the mountain...kevin proposed...while steven and i held up the will you marry me banner.
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