T A B L E_T A L K Travel by motorcycle: Riders rev their engines in Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Après moi, de luge By Gary Kamiya Getting a half-second high from the sport that gives a whole new meaning to the expression "balls out" (02/10/98) Higher! Faster! Wetter! By Gary Kamiya Our half-Japanese man in Japan reports on the thrill of victory -- and the agony of Nagano (02/09/98) Mondo Weirdo By Sarah Schmelling Why I loved being lonely and sick and far from home (02/06/98) Soba, so good By Koji Yoshii Savoring Nagano's specialty food (02/05/98) The big steamy? By Courtney Weaver Searching for sex in New Orleans (02/04/98) Browse the Feature archives		___S T O N E D__O N__I C E _____ OUR MAN IN JAPAN LEARNS TO LOVE CURLING, THE MONTY PYTHON OF SPECTATOR SPORTS. Top: Akiko Katoh of Japan encourages her stone during the curling competition at Kazakoshi Park Arena during the 1998 Winter Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY GARY KAMIYA NAGANO, Japan -- It snowed heavily all night. All the power lines and concrete and vacant lots are covered in soft white blankets, trees are crystalline silhouettes. The place has gone from an urban wasteland to a Hokusai woodblock in 12 hours. We left our surreal nowheresville burg Saku -- which I have been abusing so much, I really want to explore it sometime if I ever get my finger out of the Olympic socket -- and took the 9:32 Shinkansen train for the set-your-watch-by-it 23-minute ride to Nagano. We were planning to make the long trip up the mountain to see the downhill part of the men's combined race. First, however, we made our usual cheesy visit to a swanky hotel right next to the station, called Tokyo Metropolitan or something. The place is a godsend. Our routine is to walk in -- I keep waiting for hotel security to kick us out, but so far they haven't -- check out their bulletin board to see if events have been canceled, use their luxurious bathroom, lounge on their comfortable sofas, look at the figure skating on their ridiculously high-resolution TV and read the papers to see what is happening in the Olympics. I have no idea -- I'm here in Nagano and I have seen much less of these Games than I have of the last four. It's all I can do to make it to at least part of the two or three far-flung events I have tickets for, hastily slurping a bowl of everlasting noodles (Japanese culinary conservatism makes the Italians look adventurous and cosmopolitan), try to remember what "icing" is in hockey and look at my train schedule 30 times a day. There are some rather major logistical problems here. The most serious is transportation -- just how serious I found out after the downhill was canceled Saturday and I stood in the snow with more than a thousand other people for close to three hours waiting for shuttle buses. "There's no transportation problem here," said a big guy from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., with what sounded like a South African accent, whom we met waiting for a taxi outside the Aqua Ring arena after the second period of the U.S.-China women's hockey game. The guy was one of those battle-scarred Olympic junkies you see frequently here, wearing hats loaded with dozens of Olympic pins from past Games. "It's simple -- there's no transportation! No problem!" He and his friend had to leave the game early because otherwise they'd miss the bus up to Hakuba, the scene of my downhill debacle. "Look -- Hakuba is a major event site. There are a lot of people staying there. And there are no buses. I've never seen it like this at any other Olympics." For our part, we left the game early because otherwise we'd miss the last bullet train to Saku, and there's no other way to get there short of an hour-and-a-half local bus or taxi that would probably cost $200. Taxis here are the most expensive I've ever seen anywhere in the world, double the price in San Francisco. The drop charge is a cool $5.50; the ride from Nagano Station to the Big Hat hockey arena, an easy 20-minute walk, costs $12. Since Saku is about 35 miles away, this doesn't seem like an option. Miss the last Shinkansen to Saku by 10 seconds, spend the night on a bench -- in Nagano, it's the law. And don't try to find a hotel room, either. The city fathers handed most of them over months ago to -- who else but the media, those seigneurs with the laminated passes dangling in phallic ostentation from their necks who are probably sampling the fleshpots of Nagano even as I write these words. Another guy I met had a different complaint: money. "They charge for everything. I'm from Atlanta, and when we had the Games, if you had a ticket to an event, all the transportation was free. When we went up to the downhill, they charged us for the chair lift -- then charged us again for the next chair lift!" Actually, with the exception of the downhill fiasco, and the last-train problem (the Shinkansen is not allowed to run after midnight because of its noise), we don't have that many complaints: You just have to budget plenty of time to get where you want to go. A lot of the problem is simply that the events are so far away from each other. N E X T+P A G E+| Curl, baby, curl! PHOTOGRAPH BY DOUG PENSINGER/ALLSPORT Archived images are provided by Allsport Photography USA, Inc. all rights reserved, any redistribution, resale, re-print or other use is strictly prohibited without written consent from Allsport Photography USA, Inc. directly.