Last week was Ski Week for the language school. I encountered some negativity before I left, in the form of people questioning why I was choosing to learn to snowboard instead of ski. "Skiing is easier!" They said, "You'll have to be really careful not to hurt yourself if you go snowboarding."
To be fair, I also encountered positivity from several of the other language students, who assured me it was easier than all the nay-sayers would have me believe. However, human nature makes us focus on the negative, and I was a bit worried as I began Ski Week. I questioned myself and my ability to learn. As usual when I choose to do this, everything turned out better than I hoped.
The first day I felt pretty awkward with my snowboard. It almost felt like I didn't deserve to have it or walk around with it. We did some warm-up exercises and learned the basics of going down a hill (on the back edge of the board) without dying. I felt pretty good about myself throughout this process. Then we got to the lesson on turns. At this point in the day, I had fallen and gotten up so much that I was really tired and could not execute the turns with any kind of regularity. This frustrated me greatly.
On the second day, I executed several turns pretty much as soon as I tried them. They weren't smooth or graceful, but they were a lot better than the day before. With this newfound confidence, I went and got myself stuck in some powder...possibly more than once. We also did an exercise, which I did really well at. I also survived a red slope, though at one point I knocked all the wind out of myself and had to lay on the slope gasping for a little while.
The third day gave us the choice of either more snowboarding or going shopping. I went snowboarding. We went to a bigger mountain this time, with lots of scary new slopes to fall down (or off of). It was fun. I stopped worrying about executing perfect turns and just concentrated on getting down the hill using a combination of the things I'd learned earlier in the week. Everything improved. We went down some black slopes and at one point I broke one of my bindings in a spectacular crash. This crash was immediately followed by an old guy on skis spraying snow in my face. Having fixed my binding, we continued on down the slope. The trip also forced me to confront my fear of heights. We rode some pretty intense chair lifts. All in all, it was really fun.
The last day was, in some ways, the most exciting. A very short while into the day, as I was snowboarding back down to the bottom of what we called the "Devil's T-Bar" (which I had just fallen off of), I jammed my thumb into the slope. It hurt a lot, and by the time I reached the bottom of the slope, my right thumb had swelled greatly (awkward construction in that sentence). I made my way back to the lodge (which was at the top of the mountain (one took a gondola from the base to the lodge).
I waited for awhile, and then decided to go to the gondola station to see what I could do. My thumb was hurting really bad and I thought I might have broken it. I took the gondola back down to the base of the mountain and then waited for the ambulance to come and get me. It did, complete with an Austrian-speaking driver and a young man doing his required civil service. We picked up another patient on the way to the hospital.
When we got to the hospital, I waited for them to call me. When they did, the doctor looked at my hand and told me to go back out and wait for an X-Ray. I did so. After the X-Ray, there was more waiting. Finally, I was called into another doctor, who felt it was his responsibility to cause me pain. After poking, prodding, and twisting on my thumb, he sent me into another room with a nurse to get a cast put on my hand.
The cast will only stay on for a week. Although it does make typing hard, I wanted to write this all down before I forgot to. Now I'm back at Bogi and am going to stay pretty much all night tonight in order to watch the Super Bowl.
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