Another Thing to Cross off my List:

Skiing in the Alps! I have absolutely no idea what else is on this ‘list,’ probably some chores I never did this summer at home and a couple of things I need to buy from Spar. In retrospect, it was probably the wrong list to put ‘ski in the Alps one day’ on and I realize now I need to re-organize my listing habits. I’ll put that on my list.

Back to today, it appears that the third time is a charm, and I finally spent a day on the slopes! Now I must tell you that this has been a big deal for me, deciding how much money and time I want to spend on skiing this semester. Deciding whether it was worth it to buy my own skis, which ski-pass to buy, and worrying whether my gloves matched my hat. In the end, I did buy my own skis, they were really cheap only 60 euro with bindings. Everything else was at least twice as much. They were so cheap because they were a 2004/2005 model and thus are ‘unfashionable.’ I got some ski-boots from the Büro and some ski poles for really cheap at Hofer, an amazing grocery store that can only be described as a Costco but everything is not in bulk and a small random sample of the non-food items, really random sample, as in they’re selling skis and bed sheets between the baking goods and the juice. Once I had my equip., I had to figure which season ticket to buy. I’ll spare you the boredom of my long decision process but it was a relief when I finally figured it out. Once I had everything, who knew that the most difficult thing would be getting out there to ski?

I tried once about a month ago. Aaron and Mariel were going to the glacier about an hour and a half outside of town. There wasn’t much snow in the mountains at the time but since it’s a giant river of ice you can pretty much ski on it in the summer. We had planned on getting up early and catching the early bus out of town. Well what happened was we woke up early, but I had not waken up yet, my evil other personality had waken up in my place. This is actually quite common, Jake usually takes over for the half hour to hour after I wake up or when I haven’t eaten in a while and my blood sugar is low. He’s the one who turns off my alarm or convinces me that I don’t need to go to class because we probably weren’t doing anything important that day. Anyways, Jake told Aaron and Mariel to go without me probably because “I’m really tired” or “I don’t feel well.” Since I wasn’t there, I don’t really know what he said. I woke up a few hours later to realize they had left without me.

The second time was last weekend. It had been snowing in the mountains for about a week and Christian, Aaron, Mariel, and I got really excited about fresh snow. Unfortunately, the glacier was the only place that was open since it is so early in the season. We made another plan to wake up early and take the bus out there. I warned Aaron not to listen to Jake and we got up early and Aaron and I were able to fight Jake back. We hiked across town to the train station and got on the bus to the glacier, finally on our way!. So this time we actually made it to the mountain. The further up the bus climbed and edged around tight corners with breathtaking sights all around, the windier and more blizzardy it got. When we arrived, they said we couldn’t buy our tickets (I was planning on buying my season ticket) until they opened the mountain which would be in about an hour. It was closed due to extreme weather conditions. We waited around for it to open but at the time they said it would they told us it was too dangerous for the gondolas. So we had to take the 2 hr expensive bus ride back to IBK, unsuccessful. Should’ve listened to Jake.

Finally, today on my third try I made it! Since many of the closer, more local, places have opened up, we decided to try one of those. We went to Patscher Kofel, where they had the slalom ski races for the Olympics, near the bobsled track. The entire mountain was not open, there were only two lifts and pretty much only one trail open but it was better than nothing. We decided to go a little later in the morning so we didn’t have to deal with Jake and it got scary for a second because when we arrived they told us that the lift was having issues so we had to wait a half hour for them to fix it. In the meantime we bought our season passes, the Freizeit Ticket, which meant taking a picture which also meant jumping in Aaron’s picture at the last second which also meant him freaking out at me for the next ten minutes how I ruined the picture. I think it definitely improved it, but that’s just me. Finally they opened the mountain and we made our way up with the other cheering Austrians.

I was nervous at first and seriously doubted whether this investment into skiing this year was a good decision. This was mostly because the last time I seriously skied was about four years ago, not counting the time I went with the Cattern family and we were forced to sustain ourselves for half the day on a small piece of lemon bread. Also, there were seriously 5 year old kids wizzing by me. It was insane! Like I’m pretty sure it’s a bigger deal when an Austrian child is able to sustain himself on skis by itself than when it can stand on its own. Not to mention the fact that Austrians ski way different in general than they do in America. Americans spend a lot of time turning and making pretty s-shapes with their tracks but it seems that the Austrians just point their skis downhill and don’t stop until they hit the bottom, or it seems unless someone else has fallen. One time I stopped to adjust my goggles, lost my balance and fell over and within 4 seconds, 4 Austrians all came in out of nowhere asking if I needed help. After my first run though, I got the hang of it and it became really fun, but I was defiantly shown up by everyone on the mountain over the age of 6 today. It also seemed like it was the ‘teach your child to ski’ day. Parents had their Austrian children all dressed up in 15 layers of clothing so they could barely move their limbs, a massive helmet, a pair of goggles that is twice the size of their face to match, and tiny 1 foot long skis. The would essentially go to a relatively mild slope, stand the kid up, and gave him little nudge, he would go about ten feet, then kind of lazily succumb to gravity and flop over. Then you had the 6-7 year old girls you had to watch for two reasons, if you looked directly at their matching pink sparkly snow suit you would go blind and they were doing the 2 mph ski-plows down the entire mountain in the middle of the trail.

In the end, we skied for about 3-4 hours and I was really enjoying it by the end and I look forward to doing it many more times in the future.