Skiing...Can you believe it...I cant!!

9th July 2010

Its been a few days since my last update so I thought I would get something down. A few interesting things have happened which are definitely worth mentioning.

Every Tuesday night is staff night out as quite a few people on the hill have the Wednesday off. Chris was keen to get pretty loose/blind so we headed out to the brothel for pre-drinks, then onto Turoa lodge. Again I would like to stress the Brothel is not an actual brothel but the name of a house where a couple of Scottish sisters (the mckenzies) live. They love a good night out. We started there and I met a few new folk. After a serious pre drinking session I went on down to the lodge with Tony and had a good old throwdown. Loads of people were there, all mountain staff. It was a fun night out, a lot of socialising, a bit of dancing and general good times. Chris H definitely got to where he needed to be, he looked like he was having a top night. The snow school were out in full force, I remember throwing it down with Chloe and the crew for bit. Chloe is this rad 19 year old chick from NZ who worked as a liftie in Canada and did the Turoa Rookie Snowboard instructor program last winter. She is the nicest most down to earth 19 year old woman I have ever met and is just quality company.

By the time we got home it was around 3am and I got up the next morning far too late. To be fair I didnt have a huge amount to do, however I checked the mountain report at 11ish and found out that a couple of upper mountain lifts were open so I hitched up to the mountain. I got a ride literally from my door to the hitching spot, then 10 mins later a Mt Ruapehu mini van picked me up and took me up the hill. The weather was sooo miserable, it was rainy cold and windy on the hill and I ended up doing 2 runs because I got too cold and the visibility was terrible. Turned out to not really be worth coming up, however not feeling the guilt I would have felt not attempting to even go up to the hill and check it out made it ok. After all the reason I came to NZ was to ride the mountain so I should bloody well try my best to make it up as often as I can.

The following days riding wasn’t much better, I got up earlier and went on the snow school bus up to the hill. I had a little ride with Chloe in the morning and it was pretty average. I decided to do more shadowing and luckily managed to shadow Chris H for 3 hours in the afternoon. I really have gained a lot from Shadowing and these hours were no exception.

Some crazy news I got from Rob was that we would be teaching next week, instead of training because the snow school are likely to need us. Also to help out the school gave us the option to do skiing crossover training to become level 1 ski instructors. I jumped at the chance to do this, it would be awesome to get instruction on 1) learning skiing 2) how to teach skiing. As an instructor being dual ability increases your chances of getting employment and more teaching hours for sure. Jake (a snowboard instructor trainer for the Turoa snow school) told me a joke in the US about instructors – “what do you call a snowboard instructor that can teach skiing – a ski instructor!” It would be great to be multi disciplined and progress in another area for sure. We then found out that we would start training the next day! (Friday)

Before that I had another night out, this time with the Miro gang in my old house and Tony. It was a lot of fun. More memorable was arriving home to 2 of my housemates, and 2 girls that were staying with us, attempting to do 100 shots of beer in 100 minutes. The thing that confused me was why they started this at the end of the night instead of the beginning. They got to 32 shots and called it, they were all absolutely wasted and drinking for no other reason than to just drink. It looked pretty brutal.

What was even more amusing was seeing one of those guys up the next morning at 7am stumbling around still drunk heading to work. His name is Jack and is young and lives in MK in the UK. He works in rentals and is a good kid for sure.

My day started well, I finally received my snowboard instructors uniform, so I think I should be getting some actual house teaching now which should be ace!! I hope I look good in it!!??! After getting the coveted uniform I started on the skiing crossover course with 3 others from my internship, Laura, Matt Arnstein and Anthony. Laura just finished a winter in Bulgaria doing her BASI 1,2 and park. Matt Arnstein just got back from a winter in Canada and Anthony also just finished a winter in Canada on the Canadian Rockies course doing his CASI 1 and 2 and Park.

Our instructor is Kyle Armstrong, a sweet Canadian guy who is a Level 4 instructor and an examiner. Basically at 26 he is one of the youngest fully certified Canadian ski instructors. Its massively impressive and he is just such a nice guy.

My day pretty much consisted of learning how to ski and learning how to teach it. Its soo different to snowboarding, I found my biomechanics need a little work to adjust to the massively different body positions in skiing, I think that will help a lot, but it was a good day. We were parallel turning. I was the only one of the 4 to bail (twice) but oh well!!

After skiing I went to the gym to stretch off from all the pain i was in after skiing and Tony cooked me a mean feed and thats about it for now.

Peace and love people!