Second essay from class; the first was really craptacular morass of ungrammatical kanji soup, so not posting that one. This one's passable, maybe. It got turned in about a week and a half ago, so no corrections are necessary; I'll get those from the teachers, and at this point I don't even really have time to look at it anymore before moving on to the next thing -- so they really aren't useful.
Everything in this is more or less true, although many of the implications are not (for one, I don't ski, or even snowboarded in several years). I'm getting a little more verbose in Japanese these days.