Everything hurts today. Stiff, sore legs; sunburned face. Every bend brings a groan.

It’s that good kind of pain that says, “Damn. Yesterday was good.”

Skiing was a last-minute decision, and like all last-minute decisions, I was unprepared. I’m out of shape. I don’t own anything resembling alpine attire. I haven’t buckled a clunky set of ski boots, rode a chair lift or stared down a mountain and thought, “as fast as possible” in exactly 10 years.

The last time I wore skis was my freshman year of high school, when my family still took vacations together, six of us crammed into an SUV for a trip to Mammoth. And we barely got on the mountain that last trip. It rained most of the time.

It all comes back though, like riding a bike, for lack of a better analogy. The first run was awkward, my turns required that snowplow move that beginners do as they make slow S-shapes down the bunny slopes. But after that first run, damn, I could go all day, faster and faster, just find me a bigger hill.

That proved to be the biggest challenge: making a quarter-mile of man-made snow into something worth skiing. I spent most of our three hours out there on the steepest of three runs, first carving through powder then skidding down the ice as the shadows came later in the day. I loved it.

It was all the better because there were 20 of us, almost all expats, going up together. That made it 20 RMB cheaper and the crowded ride up that much more like a demented version of my old family vacations. Except nobody passed around bongs and beer on the family vacations. Maybe that’s not the best comparison after all.

Anyway, it was just what I needed, and the aches today are something I looked forward to yesterday.

Oh, and a hat tip to Valehru, who organized the trip. Thanks for getting us all out there. Video is coming soon.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 10th, 2006 at 8:33 am and is filed under the Dalian life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.