I've been in Japan for almost four months now this is usually around the time that home-sickness kicks in. What better way is there to cure home-sickness than having a little piece of home with you? (Not that I am suffering from home-sickness...just saying...) This piece of home I'm talking about is a sport that Canada has adopted and DOMINATED over the past 40 years - so much so that it's now essentially associated with Canada. I'm talking about.. Curling!

Way out here in the middle of nowhere, Hokkaido is actually home to one of the largest curling centres in all of Japan. In the small town of Tokoro, nestled along the north-eastern coast where winter reigns for most of the year, is where curling took hold. The curling hall in Tokoro and has actually spawned quite a few olympic class curlers who have competed internationally in the Olympics. Pretty good for a town of 5000 people!

My friend Caroline - a 2nd year JET who is also conveniently Canadian - lives in Tokoro and was naturally drawn to the sport as well. She used to play back home so it was no wonder that she'd be taking up the sport here as well (and even brought her curling shoes from home o_O). Last year she made up a curling team with some other JET's in the area (mostly Alaskans.. but they're basically Canadian) and competed in a few tournaments that were held throughout the winter. They were called 'Team English'. Quite a few of those JET's had left for home this year so the team was basically down to one person - herself. When the new batch of genki JET's came in early September, she quickly went to work and started recruiting for her curling team. Once I heard that she was looking for people to make a new curling team, I told her I was definitely in. I'm no newbie to curling believe it or not. By the end of her recruitment spree we had a new team of six people, three of us being Canadians (the highest concentration of Canadians on the team to date) with the others being an Alaskan, a New Zealander and an Irish. [Insert Joke Here]

Once the reality of winter hit and the snow began to fall, the curling season officially started. Caroline entered our brand-new Team English into a round-robin tournament that's held every year. This was no small tournament either - in a town of 5000 people there were 37 teams competing! Just like the Futsal tournament however, there were four leagues depending on level of competitiveness. We were in the fun, "Smiley", D-League. Our "first" official game was actually a few weeks ago but, due to scheduling problems for most of us, we weren't able to make that game and had to take an automatic forfeit. Our second official game (but actual first game for us) was last night. We were scheduled for two back-to-back games with the first game pitting us against a vicious pack of little Junior High School girls and our second game against a team of teachers from the same school. Our game started at 7:00pm so we arrived a little early to get ready. With Caroline being the only surviving member of last year's Team English (and the most experienced), she was skip, I was vice-skip, Chris was second and the Alaskan, Sean, was first. We started off the match by seeing who would go first using the method that settles absolutely any and every dispute in Japan - by Rock, Paper, Scissors. Their 'Rock' beat our 'Scissors' so we were the first team to throw.

I won't bore you with the details... but we smoked those girls 9-4! They were playing really well but with a few lucky throws and strikes, we won two 'ends' with four rocks in the house which put us way in the lead. I took a picture of our rocks (we were red) during one of our ends (a round of curling is called an end). For our second game we rotated players and Caroline opted out so I became skip while the other two moved up and our new player, June, became the first. This game didn't go quite as well as our first game and we lost 6-2. We were playing on a different rink than our first game so the ice was a bit different and a lot of our throws were too strong (yeah I know.. excuses, excuses ;) It may have been a good thing that we didn't win because if we did, we would've had to go back there tonight to play in the semi-finals. After playing for a solid three hours, we were Curling'd out!

Our next game is sometime next month before Christmas and we're hoping to get some team hoodies made so we look more official. I think between Curling, Futsal, and now that snowboarding season has started, I'll have enough to do to keep me busy throughout the winter!