of snow and skiing

I fergot to tell you guys that I've been going skiing :D


That's me, in the red pants, getting a hang of my skis. It was really awkward, I felt like I had extra long feet which wouldn't go where I wanted them to. It was more difficult than learning rolling blading coz you had the slope to contend with.


Andreas, our ever patient ski instructor from Switzerland. Together with his other MBA friends, Alvaro, Shinko and Kazu, they taught us the basics and guided us even though some of us took a long time to learn.


After going through some practice runs near the kid's play area, we decided to test our skills by going up. The ride on the ski lift was pretty stable though it stopped once in awhile for the ocassional hesitant skier. I have this thing with heights, so it was quite unnerving at first.


Unsurprisingly, I fell down a few times and had a hard time picking myself up without having to unbuckle my skis. But it's fun when you're not the only one learning. Whenever one of us fell, the rest would laugh and help him/her up.


Since I hated falling down, I would try my best to stay steady while going downhill. I already had a fear of heights, not liking speed added to the thrill of skiing down the slope. So much so that I strained my muscles in my effort not to fall down!


Some of them say the best way to learn is to fall down. After awhile, my muscles got tired, and I allowed myself to fall down. The more I practiced, the more confident I got. It was like an adrenaline rush, the ability to complete the run. So it was a good thing we bought an all-day pass for the ski lift.


We must've got on more than 10 times that day. We were one of the earliest to arrive, and the last to leave. We even had snowball fights at the end of the day, after the ski lifts had stopped operating and the workers had come back from their shifts.


If I hadn't said this before, let me say it again : learning new stuff reinvogirates me! Just like doing my postgrads got my brains thinking again (brains weren't exactly needed in my previous job!), learning skiing challenged me to overcome my fears and gave me the confidence to push myself further.