17 – Little darling, it’s been a long, cold, lonely winter

…lonely, maybe, but not long and cold enough. And more importantly, it’s not over yet. (Yay!) I could start going on about how winter is important for nature to be reborn or something equally as deep, but enough bullshit on this blog (for a while at least, I am fairly confident it will be back in due time in full splendor).

Point is, I love winter. I love all the things you can do in winter. First time I stood on skis (little yellow plastic ones, with a picture of a cat on it), I was 3 years old, if not 2. You could take a train from our village to the mountains, and ski through the forest all the way to our doorstep. We’d skip school when we were teenagers and go skiing instead. We’d play ice hockey on the frozen pond. No helmets, no protections, the only rule was not to raise the puck above knee level. A rule that most times no one respected, hence more often than not we’d come home with a broken nose or an open wound on the eyebrow. I have a scar on my chin that happened when my dad took me skating once when I was not more than 5 or 6. He will deny it, but he made me trip. I remember it quite clearly (plus the stitches are still visible). I guess kids nowadays don’t get similar battle scars from fiddling with their iPads. “Remember that day I cleared 50 levels of Candy Crush in one afternoon?” That is, when they actually stick with stupid games and don’t go straight to internet porn.

After and hour of thick fog, the skies cleared

I have just spent a weekend skiing with my parents in the Austrian Alps, precisely Pass Thurn. I didn’t bother to bring my proper camera to the slopes. I do the hard version of snowboarding – firm binding, it’s fast, rough, technical and physically more demanding than the soft board. (I could also remark something about preference for long and firm things, but I’m a lady.) However, sometimes an edge slips and I end up sliding 200 m on my back, so I didn’t want to risk smashing one of the expensive lenses.