Onsen - Day 3
After a nice long sleep and an early rise I went downstairs and was greeted by a delicious Japanese breakfast being served by our hostel hosts. It consisted of a nice sticky salmon rice with a seaweed paper and an "Onsen Egg", which is an egg boiled in the natural hot spring water for 90min. There were some gyozo's (Japanese dumplings) on the side too! I met a group of guys from Australia and was able to tag along with them to go skiing. Japan is super popular with Australian's nowadays because of the number of direct flights, same time zone and awesome snow.
There was a super cool and confident looking guy wearing one of those spiffy 59FIFTY snap back hats in the group. He didn't ask me a lot about myself which made him seem uninviting, and made me feel a bit intimidated. Once we got skiing for a bit, he seemed impressed with my skiing ability and asked me how I got so good. My perception of this guy completely flipped after spending some time with him and a couple of ego boosting comments from him. We caught up with one of his friends near the end of the day and he mentioned that his friend skiied really well, "faster than you". Right away me ego kicked in and as soon as I met his friend I felt like I had something to prove. Looking back at the situation, the whole thing seems really silly and juvenile, but I think that a lot of people have these kinds of reactions and insecurities when they meet new people and are trying to calibrate.
It really got me thinking about how much of my identity in that day was wrapped up around being a strong skiier. Is that all I felt I had to contribute to this group, and if I couldn't be the "good skiier" than I wasn't as worthy of their friendship? There are probably many other social spheres where I've attached myself to some sort of identifying strength or feature. How often does this attachment to an apparent defining feature result in resentments or feelings of shame inadvertently caused by other peoples actions? It would be an interesting activity to list out all my social spheres and proactively identify how I think other people view me.
On a less introspective note, the skiing today was pretty bad. There was supposed to be snow falling during the day, and nothing fell. Since it rained the last night, everything was hard and iced over decently. There was no fresh snow to be found.
I stopped into a place called Neo Bar and tried some steak cubes which were fantastically melt-in-your mouth tender. I didn't realize the "average" beef here would be so good. I also had a delicious fuji apple, and it hit me that those apples are grown here in Japan. Funny how that didn't really click until I was holding the apple in my hand while travelling in Japan.
I met with Liam and Kyle when I checked into my new hotel and it was nice to see some familiar faces and feel welcomed. We went to the onsen in the basement of our hotel which was nice and relaxing after a day of skiing. There was something really comfortable about hanging out naked with some guys relaxing and taking care of personal hygiene. The whole thing felt really organic and familiar in a way. There was no rush, no where to be, and nothing to hide!
I was finally able to try some Ramen noodles for dinner, which were delicious but not spicy enough. The Japanese basil gyozo was fantastic though!
The day was wrapped up with a game of Love Letters and Dominion that Liam brought, which I was very excited about, and then we met a crew of Singaporean's to play a cool Isreali game Kyle taught us called Yaniv.