Snow in Austria

So, Saturday I went to the gospel concert. Sunday morning, I woke up at 8ish in Grenoble, and caught a bus to the nearest Alp, to go skiing.

I've found two things that make skiing stressful. One is when you can hardly see the slope because of the snow hanging in the air, and the other is when the snow is loose and made into piles by the people who skied before you. Not moguls, just random lumps of loose snow. I got to play with both of these yesterday.

I found that I can handle the random lumps of snow. It's actually kind of fun to turn around them, and use them to ski. I'm proud of myself. The whole not-seeing-anything part was kinda bothersome, though.

I've been needing to ski since returning from Austria. After Vienna, we went to the Tirol, to a little town with a tourist population that was 80% Russian. It's a little ridiculous when you get into a gondola and everyone understands one another, but not because they're all speaking English. (Or, German, I guess, since it's the local language.) Apparently, our little town wasn't the only one with so many Russians. On the train ride out (we went to Salzburg next), we met an Italian who said that his skiing town had also been taken over.

Anyway, T-- and I get to this place in the Tirol. There we met up with V--, who had been there for a while already. V-- and I went skiing, while T-- wandered around on foot.

The skiing was incredible. At the end of the first day, V-- was showing me the red trail that took you back down to the town. But he got a little lost, so to get to the trial, we had to go across a huge black slope. It was insane. The slope was very very steep, and it sort of curved around. It was like skiing inside a tea cup, only sometimes it curved out, instead of in. This part lasted a good amount of time, until we got to the less steep, but narrow, ridge, that was the red trail.

It was really good at teaching me to ski better, actually. What would be great, would be to get good enough to go to Mont Blanc, where the last winter Olympics were held. It's only a few hours away . . .