Sunday, 18 January 2009

Eating snow, but doing it is style, I hope.

Yesterday was possibly the fist day in weeks that we had the thermometer rise above freezing at any part of the day. That was nice, but it was not the reason for this post. Laura wanted to go snowboarding at Jisan, and since I had only been once before, and had no real idea of how to get there on my own, I wanted to tag along to investigate the means of transport.

I started my day at 6:30 to take a shower and make breakfast in order to be at the bus terminal by 8 am. Apparently we can just use a local bus to get to Jisan. Once there guys from the rental shop picked us up at the bus stop, rented us what we needed, gave you a discount card for the resort, dropped us off at the resort, picked us up again and even took us to the bus stop to finish everything off. WOW. See why I wanted to tag along?

As this was only my second time I was only truly able to leave down the slopes, facing forward all the time, so I wanted to start out practicing turning to get my back facing down the slope. Laura wanted to brush up on that as well, and while I was practicing, and falling every time, se game me a tip that she picked up her previous time. It doesn’t matter what the tip is, the only thing that matter is that it worked. I picked the turning up relatively quickly and I was slaloming/falling down the training slope in no time.

It did not take Laura long to go to a more advanced slope, and me having figured out that only Olympic skiers break their necks, I wasn’t really afraid to try the bigger slopes. In no time we were crisscrossing the upper intermediate slope, and BOY, is that fun. We even went on the longest slope at the resort. The steepest will have to wait.

Note: On the beginner slopes there are to many people moving very slowly or falling around when you don’t expect them to, so you end up just being another faller yourself. Be a little bit more adventurous and suddenly you have open space to practice in.

We were at Jisan from about 9am to 4pm, only stopping for a drink or two and a quick bite at lunch. The rest of the time we were gunning down the lift single lines to get up as fast as we were allowed. It was a great day, I impressed myself, and I can’t wait to go during the week when there are fewer people.

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