Action Stations

Monday morning. Monday mornings aren’t great at the best of times, but this morning seems to be particularly difficult to get through.

The story begins on Friday night…

I went to my friend’s house in Ina again as on Saturday we were participating in one of four Nagano Prefecture ALT competition events held throughout the year. This one was in Hakuba.

The competition is called NagaYes, a play on the word Nagano as I’m sure you’ve guessed.

The teams are divided geographically and there are four teams each taking a turn to host an event.

Saturday entailed building snow fortresses and battling it out in a big snowball  fight. It was really fun, but it is definitely largely to blame for many of the aches and pains I’m feeling right now.

After that we all stayed in Hakuba in a hostel above a bar – clearly not a good idea.

Our group that stayed the night was adamant to get a day of snowboarding in on the Sunday, so after an excessively late night we managed to rouse each other ridiculously early and make it to the mountain.

I think that it is somewhere at this point that I managed to pick up a pretty rough chest infection.

Soldiering on, we made the best of the day considering how we were feeling, and the fact that the snow was really packed down and icy.

In stopping for a break (i.e. after falling over and not being able to get up), my phone rang. I answered it and it was another friend of ours who was with another group and had managed to break his arm snowboarding.

Action stations indeed. We went to get him and organised for him and his car to be driven home. Poor guy snapped the bone above his elbow clean in half.

So after this, and then a 3 and a half hour drive home, with my infection and illness really taking a hold of my lungs and pretty much every other vital organ, I was ready for bed.

I arrived to school this morning to a phone ringing off the hook. Children and parents were ringing in to inform the school of absences due to the flu going around. Considering there are fifty-something students, having about 15 of them absent makes a big impact.

I have to stay in school as I have two lessons which will be observed by other teachers today. They sure picked a good day…

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