Best Field Trip EVER!

If you can imagine 16 passenger buses plowing through a heavy snowstorm and loaded with almost 700 laughing, yelling, excited high schoolers, then you would have a good vision of how my day began today as we headed out on the all-school ski trip!!  Yes, it's true, an ALL-school SKI trip (minus the 3rd years, who are finished with classes, of course)...my high school trips to the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center just really cannot compare with what these kids get to partake in!

We traveled almost two hours to Kiroro Ski Resort where, to my delight, they actually had a ski-lift for the bunny hill...

...which was actually a brief pleasure as, thanks to some private lessons, I can FINALLY "ski!"  Well, enough to get down half of the mountain anyway.  It's amazing how much fun it is without all of the whiplash and bruises!

And here we get a glimpse of my private ski instructor, aka Nakamaru-sensei (one of the teachers I work with at school), in all of his radioactive-green-ski-machine glory (and by "glory" I mean "grory"):

The bare peace-sign knows no weather...it knows no storm:

Although we were chased back to school by some crazy horizontal snow and winds, this pretty much was the best field trip ever.  Along with fresh milk, beer, onions, and algae balls, I guess it's just another one of those perks of living up in Hokkaido!