Who knew...

...that Hell had so much snow?

I can now say that I've been to Traffic Hell and I've survived.  Barely.  Is
this what happens to people who have bad traffic karma?

I went to Hakuba, Nagano for the weekend to go on a ski/snowboarding trip,
sponsored by the Nagano JET members.  There were 130 of us there, about half
from Nagano and the other half was like me and Susanne, and came in from
other prefectures.

The snowboarding on Saturday was *excellent,* with fresh powder on every
run.  I couldn't have dreamed of better boarding conditions.  I could barrel
down the hill (no crowds due to almost white-out conditions on the mountain)
and carve mean powder turns.  It was almost like surfing!  But powder runs
all day meant that it was snowing all day, right?  Snow all day is good for
the slopes, bad for the roads.

Now, Susanne and I drove to Hakuba.  I took a train to the city of Ena,
which is just over the Aichi border, in Gifu-ken.  It took us 3.5 hours to
drive to Hakuba from Ena, and it was a little slow because the roads were
snowy, and even with Susanne's snow tires (chains in the trunk), we drove
carefully.  It was a nice drive.

On the return to Ena, we left the city of Hakuba (home of the last winter
olympics) at half past noon on Sunday.  We decided that due to the snow, we
shouldn't hit the slopes, and we should just head home.  It took us 23.5
hours in the car to get me back to Ena.  OH. MY. GOD.  Can you believe it?
The expressway was closed due to snow, so we were going to take 19, which is
like a mini-expressway which runs parallel to the actual expressway.  We got
to 19, but it was gridlocked.  So we went around the traffic using smaller
roads, to try and catch 19 further south.  It was a successful manouver (yay
us), but traffic there soon stopped.  Due to TWO avalanches on the road.  It
is now around 5:30 pm and we ain't getting nowhere.

We then turned around to take the even *smaller* 153, and just decide to go
straight to Susanne's town, since 153 travels straight there.  (Using my
handy keitai cell phone, I called work to say I wouldn't be there, since I
was still in Nagano-ken with no chance of even *seeing* Aichi until
morning.)  But around midnight, there was an accident, so 153 closed.

We slept in a convenience store parking lot for 3 hours while the accident
was cleared, before starting off again, now at 4 am.  (I have slept in the
parking lot of a Japanese convenience store.  Could my life get any more
screwy?)  When we finally got back on the road, traffic was stop-for-an-hour
then go-for-1-kilometer, then repeat the process.  We started getting
impatient (REALLY impatient) around 6 am, and we went around some of the
stopped cars.  (This was, like most roads in Japan, one lane in each
direction, but there was NO traffic coming the opposite direction.)  To our
complete, utter, incredulous, insert-your-own-profanity-here disbelief,
traffic was at a standstill because people were SLEEPING IN THEIR CARS ON
THE ROAD AND BLOCKING TRAFFIC.  People here are idiots.  Complete George W.
Bush-level idiots.  We had to sit until the sun came up, and people decided
to awaken and drive.  What?  They can't pull over like we did and sleep in a
parking lot?

So now I've slept in a Japanese convenience store parking lot.  I've brushed
my teeth in the car.  I've driven in Japan.  I've gone to the bathroom in
the middle of a "highway" in deadlocked traffic at 5 am in Nowhere, Nagano.
I learned the Japanese word for "avalanche."  And I've learned that Japanese
people on the road are like lemmings.  Only worse.

It's a good thing Susanne and I like each other, because we were essentially
trapped in her Corolla together for 24 hours.  I feel malnourished due to
all the convenience store food I ate.  By the time I finally got back to
Handa at 4 pm on MONDAY, I was beat.  I took a shower and went to sleep for
13 hours.  I'm sure Nagano is beautiful (and we took lots of pictures since
we were stopped on the road CONSTANTLY and had lots of time to look around),
but it's currently the bane of my existence.  (And since Keesha isn't in
Japan, I had to find a new one somehow.  You UOP people know what I mean.)

Oh, and did I mention that my "natural disaster" clause and my
"transportation breakdown" clause in my contract don't apparently cover
this, so I'm not being paid.  (Oh, and not just me, Susanne too.)  If we'd
known that, we'd have stayed somewhere instead of driving all night.  Hello
and welcome to the Bitter Barn, can I take your order?

But the snowboarding on Saturday was amazing.