Gassan

The flyer for Gassan boasts April to July open months and pictures boarders and skiiers in t-shirts, in a nice glossy colour A3 fold-out. The snow is bright white and the sky, blue. It all suggests a rather lovely little spot- which winter sporter could resist the opportunity for such a novel experience, especially in a country where novelty is gobbled up like

Tugging on the boots, finding your gloves have stiffened and tightened without weekly use, not really bothering with gloves on the hill. Most novel of all, all that life bursting up and through what's usually a barren, white crispening of everything standing or laying. Spiders amble over dirty snow, in between reedy leaves peeking out. The snow shrinks back from clumps of green, the view is rich, not muted in a poor man's palette of blue and black and white and white.

But enough of all that. Skiing on Gassan was like skiing in the Afghan mountains. There are only four lifts, and of those, one is a chair lift. Two others consist of a thick metal rope, run round on a loop only when someone needed to go up, and not any other time. One manned by a single guy sat under a parasol. We hiked further up, into the cloud that shrouded the top. It was still bright, like someone was standing just, just beyond with a searchlight and a mist machine, or like we'd wandered off-set into the blanks between the tape ream stills.

We crossed a grand open bowl, scoring clear white lines with our tracks in the lead grey snow. We went down too far and looked to be heading down the wrong valley, so we hiked some more, and cut back across to the man sat under his parasol and the restaurant building. Inside there, I'd eaten a black pork maan (a doughball). The poster advertising them was hung sideways from the ceiling. I saw them in the hot glass cupboard and wanted one. At the counter, behind the counter, a guy and a girl both young looked on at a croquette in the deep fryer. Poked it a little. Picked it out, dropped it, giggled. 大丈夫？　大丈夫そう。　大丈夫。　Is it ok? I think it's ok. It's ok. they exchanged, before pulling out a tannoy mic held together with black duck tape to announce the food order to the customers, sat one table away from the counter.