We’re here! Its been a while since our last post because things have been pretty full on and our body clocks are still totally messed up!

We left Houston on Sunday at midnight, and then transited through Beijing and arrived into Sapporo, Japan around 1pm on Tuesday! We totally lost Monday somewhere over the top of the world haha. Arriving into Sapporo was exciting, but we were so tired and over custom officers and passport control and taking shoes off and laptops out of bags and blah blah blah. We just wanted to eat something and sleep!! But instead we had to work out what train we needed to catch to get to Kutchan, our soon to be home for the next few months.

We finally worked out the train situation, bought tickets and went down to the platform to wait. We had our long snowboard bag, a suitcase each, and hand luggage, so it was quite challenging getting on the public train. Safe to say we got a few strange looks, and we think an old man took photos of us on his flip phone (!!). We think because our board bag was half in front of a seat, but there was nothing we could do about it so we turned our heads and took in the breathtaking snowy scenery zooming past our windows.

By 4:30pm the sun was completely down and it was pitch black. After an hour and a bit on the train we got to Otaru station where we had to grab all our gear and change trains. We just made it, but standing room only! So the next hour was long and arduous to say the least. But we did it!!

Ben, from SkiJapan (our employers), met us at the train station and took us to our accommodation – a little apartment in downtown Kutchan. It’s super cute (aka tiny), and Stephen and I are sharing a single bed because we don’t want to sleep separately and we can’t push our beds together because there are poles in the middle of our room!! haha.

There is a supermarket across the road, so we got some food, ate it, had a shower and went to bed – we were both absolutely spent!! Despite being extremely exhausted I had the shittest sleep, waking every hour or so and then not being able to go back to sleep from 4am onwards. Jet lag is a bitch.

The very next morning, Wednesday, we both had to catch the bus into Hirafu to meet our bosses and start training. That day is a bit of a blur now, and we got home Wednesday night not wanting to eat anything and went straight to bed. Thursday was much the same – crappy sleep, awake from 3am, and then training all day, and Stephen actually started work on Wednesday, so he was straight into it!

But, I’m pleased to write, that we both had a much better sleep last night and woke up today feeling much more ourselves (yay!!). It’s time for the adventure to begin!

(We’ve been so busy and zombie like that we haven’t really taken many photos yet, but here are a few. It’s about 0 degrees celsius during the day, we’ve had snow and rain since we got here, and it’s all pretty amazing).

M & S.