Skiing - Monday

Traveling on your own there is always quite a bit of time to yourself. That's my excuse for blogging and I'm going to stick to it. I'm going to take my camera with me tomorrow and get some shots of the Alps. They're very cool, hopefully I can get a few widescreen shots to use as backgrounds. Besides, it allows me to get in more sideway then up and down, and that's good.

Ok, so today was my first skiing ever. So as part of that I had to get to the ski school first and then learn to ski. Luckily there were 2 other people from the same hotel who are complete beginners, so that was good. So I've learnt the duck waddle (moving on the flat, much like roller blades) and the snow plough. I'm not leaning far enough forward, but that (hopefully) is just practice. There are 10 of us all up in the group, and I think most of the people there are English. 1 I know is Dutch and I can't place another girls accent. It sounds European, but I might be wrong. I am one of the very few people traveling on my own in the whole resort who has never skied before though, as everyone else in the group is traveling with partners. Of course, their partners can already ski so they're there learning to ski.

Anyway, the instructors name is Jack, and his english isn't brilliant. It's enough to get by, as he demonstrates everything it can generally be figured out. He's not a great teacher but he is very entertaining, and the morning went quickly. I fell over 3 times, which is the most of anybody in the group. It was particularly bad falling over on the last exercise of the day, as everyone else did it right. Apparently the skis I was given are about 10 cms too long, so I need to change them.

After that learning, I was absolutely exhausted particularly by the walk back to the hotel. So I had a bit of a rest before heading for another nursery slope to practice for a bit. So all on my own I've learnt a little bit about changing direction. I don't do it well, but if I had to get to the bottom of the mountain without falling I'm pretty confident I could now do it. I'd look like a horrible novice while doing it, but I could. By the end of the week I hope that I'll be able to ski properly instead of ploughing my way down the mountain. The few times I got it right and just went down it was great fun. Of course, I did fall over quite a bit. There's a trick to getting off the button lifts I haven't mastered yet. Sometimes it all just works, and I end up parallel to the mountain and ready to go, out of the way of the people coming up. Most times I go in the wrong direction, or fall over. I did accidentally ski backwards, simply because I didn't turn enough and there was someone else coming up the lift. Lesser of two evils was me ending up in the carpark :) I managed to come to a good stop, and if I had any idea how I'd done it I'd be very proud :) My last crash was particularly spectacular, I was trying to turn parallel to the mountain and had too much speed. As my technique is very bad, I lost it and fell over head first, losing both skis. That was a little painful on the knee, and since I've got plenty of other time left to ski I thought that was enough for the day.

As for other times, there are a whole bunch of guys who are traveling solo, so we all eat together. I'm the only beginner so meal times are the only time I see them. 8 guys all up, and one guy keeps complaining about there being no women. Considering I'm the youngest by at least 10 years it's a little weird hearing him complain. I was coming purely to learn to ski and hopefully meet a few people to go around European cities, not to meet women as he seems to be. Still, it takes all types. The hotel is right next to a nursery slope, which is all I'm capable of. So in the afternoons I can just go up and down that, practicing what I've learned.

I'm much more tired then I thought I would be, the first night we did stay up quite late and probably drank a bottle of wine each. I felt good the next day, but come the late afternoon I thought I'd have a quick nap before dinner, and ended up getting woken by reception asking where I was. They have a system designed to seat everybody at a time of their choosing, and everybody else from the group was waiting for me. Oops. Not so much tonight, just need to organise a wake up call now. I never realised just how much I relied on my mobile until I lost it.

Only one last thing to mention. When I first started typing this post, the autosave notification was in French. Sometime during this it's become English. Makes me curious how that is worked out. Not curious enough to do anything about it of course, but curious :) Alright, that's enough of making people jealous, I'm going to bed to sleep. On my bunk bed....luxurious :)