Today started like every other, a good hearty breakfast and overcast skies. We didn’t have much fresh snow last night so conditions today were much different to yesterday. Snow had settled a bit with not as much loose powder which made it a bit easier to control my skis. I still consider myself a beginner and continued to improve throughout the day when I went off by myself to practice my techniques. I tried out a few new slopes and continued the day on my favourites. Scott and Denise made it to the summit today and skied the 10 km run to the bottom. They said their thighs were burning after that run mainly because they had already skied for most of the day on a lot of other runs. The weather was variable today, one minute it was fine so we would head further up the mountain, then suddenly conditions would change again and the cloud would come across making visibility quite poor. At least the blizzard type conditions stayed away. I managed to make it to the second highest area today and skied all the way down with a few spectacular falls along the way, and feeling pretty buggered by the end of the run. We finished skiing at about 3:30pm, so we put in a pretty good effort today considering we were on the slopes as the lifts were starting up at 9:00am. When we finished we wandered up the street to our bakery friend for some hot chocolate and chai tea. He continued to teach us some more Japanese and we showed a photo of something we ate last night which we weren’t sure about. After typing it into his translator, it turned out to be a type of egg plant. We thought it may have been something a bit more sinister! Once again we sampled some of his bread and this time we had a spinach and cheese bread and one with chocolate and walnuts. He very obligingly warmed them up for us in his wood fire oven which made them extra “oishii” (delicious). We then returned to our room and prepped for dinner, wondering what interesting bits and pieces we will have tonight. Turned out to be beef and veggies boiled in a soup, plus another handful of courses including fish omelette. Always something different, so not sick of it yet.