View from the top

This morning we got up on time. It’s hard to not get up (don’t even need an alarm clock), because at 7am you hear stomping up and down the hallways. The floor creaks very loudly. When you have to do something in the room, you make a lot of noise, especially if you have to open the door.

I didn’t know what our 3rd roommate looked like because when I first saw her, she was already in bed, and then this morning when I saw her, I didn’t have my glasses on. I only realized this when I went down to breakfast, so I asked Elsa. There was a girl who I thought it was, and Elsa said “I think so”. But it turned out that it was her.

We got to St. Johann at around 9am, and got ready. We had some “free skiing” time while they set up the poles. I went up once and it felt really good with the longer skis. Then I was kind of confused as to what we were supposed to do and there was a really long line to get up the lift. The surface tow was empty (surprisingly), so they just decided to do the pole exercises at the bottom. All day we did “prepare, pole, up, forward, wait”. I had that playing in my mind all day. After learning the way to do it, we went up the long lift once and came down. Harold asked me to lead a group down since he said I had good rhythm. And what did I do, I had a spectacular fall almost right away. How embarrassing! But the rest of the way I did fine. The next time we came down, we were videoed, to be shown tonight. I was so nervous the whole time, palms sweating and all the lessons going through my head. I stayed back so that I can watch the other people go down and remember things here and there - boot tongue pressure, pole planting, arms out, etc. etc. After going down, people cheered for me, I was hoping that they were doing that because I looked like I did it right. Sometimes you feel like you did it right, but when seeing yourself on video, you look like crap. But, I was glad that I got it over with and we finished the day doing more pole planting exercises. On the last run, Harold took whoever wanted to go up the red run (intermediate), and I was like “ok, let’s try it” and I think a total of 6 of us went up. The t-bar was super long and I went up with Rodrigo, who is tall and I tried to put the t-bar above my butt so that it wouldn’t hurt him. That was a mistake. By the end, it was really hurting me and I was so happy to get off. We had a great view from the top and the run was a little steeper and longer than what we have done so far, and I went into my panic mode, but was able to get down it. I was so happy to be done for the day, ready for dinner!

The platform toilet

This time I was one of the first ones to the shower, mainly because I just grabbed my bag and brought it all in with me. The shower felt good after a long day of skiing! Although I couldn’t enjoy it because you can’t linger since everyone else is waiting for a shower. Dinner was great, I had the chicken again. After dinner we had the videos and my palms were sweating again. All this time I could put it out of my mind. The 3rd weekenders were first, and they all pretty much looked good. Especially Elsa and Vivian, the two speed demons. They just got it down good. Then our group came up and I was second to last. They were pretty harsh with the critisisms so I didn’t want mine to come up. I noticed that they were a lot nicer to the pretty girls, not fair!!! One of them went right before me so I know that I will get hammered. Well, my turn finally came and I did very well, I actually got applause!! The only critisisms that they could give was to have my skis more close together, but that wasn’t something we covered yet, so that didn’t count. Luca (one of the instructors) said that everything that I was supposed to do I did do right. So that made me feel really good, I was so happy! I called Michael and told him the news and that made him happy too! I went to bed very satisfied.