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Published: April 26th 2006
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The Crew
Yvonne, Craig, Luke, Me, Mick, Carla, Simon, Alice I heard my lips uttering something I never thought possible: "I'm sad that it's the end of winter." Madness? Perhaps. But until now I had never experienced the mad rush of snowboarding. It's my new favourite thing to do and I wish I could send myself to a slope right now.
Eight of us went to Poland to ski and snowboard. Zakopane is the main centre for snow sports in Poland and is about two hours south of Krakow and the mountains there mark the border with Slovakia. We were a bit of a rabble with very tenuous connections linking us all - my roommate was a guy who my friend's friend and boyfriend met after they met his sister while travelling! Luckily we all got along really well. We all shared a similar snowsport ability with someone in the group (Alice sharing the 'novice' category with myelf) so the days were lonely for nobody and at night we had a continuous game of 500 going with rotating teams because everybody there was into it. (Learn 500 if you don't know it - it is to cards what snowboarding is to winter.) We drank tasty Polish beer. We ate meat
Alice and Craig
Deep in competition during a game of 500. Note Fatty's injured hand. and potatos with vigour. We laughed at ourselves and our poor, poor attempts at Polish communication.
Polish is a difficult language, paticularly for those of us from Downunder who butcher even English with our monotonous, consonant dropping, questioning inflection voices. In an attempt to make an effort with the pleases and thankyous that were needed in the course of our days, some in the group turned to substitution to get them through, for instance thankyou - dziekuje - became zinc cream. Although some funny looks were received I think the message generally got across. Within days we were verging on bilingual with the works like snieg (sounds like schnek and means snow) and spac (sounds like spadge and means sleep) routinely being used in our conversations; after a big day on the schnek you're in need of a good spadge. Apologies to Polish speakers!
But enough of language. Let's talk about me being a snowboarding superstar.
Seeing as my hockey career hasn't quite given me the Olympic glory first hoped for, I decided that maybe I was focussing on the WRONG Olympics. Surely as an Aussie the odds for my inclusion in the chillier form are much
better than trying to swim/run/cycle my way to gold. I had skied once before so figured to go with that to hasten the visit by the national selectors. Alice and I donned the skis, got a lesson and snowploughed our way through two days. Despite my instructor Jacek being a former Polish national ski champion, he was unable to guide me to skill levels reflective of his own. As such, and considering the lessons and equipment hire were so cheap, I made a U-turn and decided to spend the second half of my time there as a snowboarder.
I knew I had made the right decision when on day one, no idea how to strap the board to my feet, but excited that I looked damn cool and extreme, I was welcomed to the sport by the delicious Kristopher, my instructor. Holding hands with the dreamy man down the slopes did not give me much incentive to improve to a level where I could head down the hill unsupported. Five minutes into the £12 lesson and I was wondering whether I had access to £120 pounds to enable lessons until dark (and if the lift shut down and we
had to have dinner and cocktail instead then so be it). Frequent faceplants into the snow knocked that thought from my brain over the hour of tuition and by the end of it I was snowboarding solo and beginning to master the tricks of changing direction.
Alice stole Kristopher from me after my hour; I kept a close eye on her and the amount of hand holding going on. And then he was gone. :-( But hey, to be an Olympic snowboarder I needed to focus on myself so our parting was for the best. Run after run of boarding followed - I couldn't stop! Although I love outdoorsy stuff, often by the end of a day of hard work I'm happy to stop and crack open a beer. With snowboarding however, any time I had to stop, whether it be for food, water, loo or lift shutdown, I was so upset. It's hard to describe but compared to skiing I enjoyed the boarding so much more: I enjoyed the speed as opposed to resisting it on skis, I felt more in control of myself and less encumbered by what seemed too much paraphernalia of skiing. I bought myself
a cool headband to replace my beanie and I felt authentic... despite still travelling at about 5km/hr on the baby slope! I have found my new favourite sport.
On my last day there I was next to Alice, strapping on the board at the top of the hill and suddenly I looked up to the chair lift next to us only to see..... Kristopher! Alice quickly sled down the hill so he wouldn't see her starting to board. I had the opposite idea. He calmly sled down at the top of the lift. I looked up...
K: "Aaaah, the Australian girl!" (big grin, OBVIOUSLY enamoured with me, only human)
J: "Oh hello Kristopher" (cute and wooing smile, existence of a terrified student standing there holding Kristopher's hand is ignored)
J: "Kristopher, you'll be so proud of me I've improved so much. Let me show you."
Vision in my head: I speed down the hill, swooshing from side to side, carving up the snow, my long blond hair trailing behind me in the wind. I stop at the bottom with a huge spray of snow. Kristoph arrives a second later. "Jessica... from the moment I saw you...."
Vision the public got: I slowly turned my board to move down the hill. My wet, medium length, mousey brown hair is stuck to my head due to frequently falls in the snow earlier on. At a speed slower than a small child's crawl I start sliding sideways. Unable to stop I ram into Krisopher AND his student. I try to grab an arm. I miss. I faceplant DOWN the hill in the style of some sort of paralysed starfish. Alice's laugh reaches my ears from twenty metres away. Kristopher hauls me up in silence, quickly turns to his student and leads him away from me at a rapid pace. Ah well, when he sees me on the podium accepting gold he will rue the day he left me face down on a hill chewing on the snow.
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anonymous
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Jessie Joo Joo Not only are you the most entertaining writer i have ever come across (and there have been many)yo are the most gorgeous! Christophe does not have a clue what he is missing out on!!!!