Now that I've been living in Switzerland for over a year, I felt that it was time to tackle downhill skiing. Plus, some colleagues are planning a ski weekend in February, and I wanted to try out skiing before committing for a whole weekend. Luckily my colleague Lilli was also interested in ski school, so this Sunday we got up super early to drive to Laax for ski school.
We took a super-beginners course. I would say that I'm not a super-beginner in that I have been on skis before in my life. Mostly cross-country, which is entirely different, although I did do some downhill skiing about 15 years ago. Anyways, the class was a little slow, but overall quite good.
We were put in a group with 5 people and 1 instructor, which was a pretty good ratio. Unfortunately for me, most of the class was in German, which made it difficult for me to follow. Thankfully, the instructor was German, so I could understand his German better than if he was speaking Swiss German, for example.
We started out on the little kids' slope and spent the morning there. It was really foggy, and we couldn't see much of anything. It was a little eerie, as we could here what sounded like thunder claps occasionally, which were really just planned explosions in the high mountains to mitigate the super-high avalanche danger. Very interesting.
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| Lilli and I at the beginning of the day. |
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| Ski school! |
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| Jan and I waiting for our instructor. |
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| Skiing on the bunny hill. |
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| The bunny hill in the fog. |
For lunch we went to the (almost) top, to the bizarrely named Crap Sogn Gion at 2228m. It started to clear off, and we got little glimpses of the mountains.
After lunch, the winds picked up and were 50 km/hr for a while, which made skiing more interesting. We practiced on some real slopes for a while, and I had my only fall off of a T-bar lift. Those things are quite challenging!
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| On the mountain! |
Then we skiied down, down and more down. I've only ever been skiing in Minnesota and Michigan, so the fact that we could ski for at least 20 minutes down and never have to take a lift was pretty incredible! The weather kept on improving, and the view was really beautiful!
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| On our last descent. |
I really enjoyed my first outing skiing in the mountains and am already trying to figure out when I can go next, since I want to go once more before the big ski weekend. I have to have some time to recover, though, as I am quite sore today and have developed some pretty good bruises on my shins from the ski boots. It was totally worth it, though!
**Some photos courtesy of Lilli's iPhone.
