Straight off I will say that there is a little bit of exaggeration in that opening sentence.
To call where we went a mountain would be a bold faced lie, it was actually a quite large hill dumped with imported snow (just as ridiculous as that sounds), and as you can imagine any "skiing" that can be done on a quite large hill is limited. But take this with a pinch of salt, it's a much better story that way!
On New Years Day, my boyfriend at the time, Orion, suggested we take a little trip somewhere for the day. This was not a particularly unusual suggestion as there is plenty to do around Yinchuan and we often took advantage of the nearby mountains or old movie studios for a day out. But this time he suggested something a little bit different, skiing.
I had never been skiing before, but Orion seemed confident so I agreed and off we went to ski. The only thing was that I wasn't sure exactly where we would be able to ski in the vicinity of our city. We'd been into the mountains, but I'd never seen or heard of anywhere that one could ski. We drove for about an hour and then Orion said we'd arrived, and I can tell you now it really didn't look like much.
The mountain I had been imagining was in fact a quite large hill, but it was covered in snow at least! Orion told me that this snow was imported in from higher up in the mountains and dumped here so that people could experience the mountain joys without actually going into the mountain. So very, very Chinese.
As we hired our skis and boots, where the lady refused to believe my feet were as big as I said they were, an instructor can over and asked if we wanted any skiing lessons. As this was my first time on skis I wasn't adverse to the idea, but Orion just scoffed and said a very dismissive no thank you.
With that level of confidence that we didn't need any lessons you may think that my cocky boyfriend had amble skiing experience under his belt, and that's what I thought!
Sadly this was not the case.
It was not until we had climbed to the top of the hill that Orion decided to mention that this was, in fact, his first time skiing too! Oh good...
I had no idea what I was doing but once you're at the top of the hill you don't have much choice but to go down it, right?! I'd vaguely heard about "ploughing" as a way to stop and I just thought how hard can it be?
Turns out very hard! I pushed off from the top of the hill and immediately realised that this was a terrible idea and that it was much much too late to be realising that. I was in free fall and try as I might ploughing was not working! As I gathered speed my skis were crossing and the damn poles seemed to do absolutely nothing (what are they for?!). My other issue was that I was definitely the only foreigner on this mountain and everyone was staring at me (probably not helped by the fact I was shouting like a maniac).
I'll tell you for nothing that racing down a hill, screaming and out of control is not the moment that you want a load of Chinese people staring and pointing at you. There was definitely some laughing in the mix. The bonus of all the shouting was that most people were moving artfully out of may way as I sped past, but not everyone had the skills to move so swiftly.
As I reached the bottom of the slope I realised that I was about to absolutely obliterate a crowd of small children. Oh hell no.
I was screaming "get out of the way children! Move!" which obviously they did't understand and Orion was laughing too much to be able to help. This was going badly. Up to this point, I had somehow managed to stay upright, mainly out of extreme fear over breaking every bone in my body, but now I knew something had to give. Keeping in mind that I was in absolutely zero control over where I went, I somehow managed to make a vague interpretation of a plough work and swerving madly lost a little bit of speed as I came to the flat and managed to narrowly miss the group of stunning children before smashing into a waiting Orion and inelegantly tipping over.
It was not the most elegant descent but I was just glad that I hadn't died and a little bit peeved that Orion had so blatantly mislead me about his skiing abilities. Maybe the fact that I hadn't just died or fallen over until right at the end means I have an inherent ski talent deep within me, but on that occasion I decided to stay away from the "slopes" and opted instead for playing on a sledge across the frozen lake.
I'll tell you one thing for nothing, next time I go skiing I will be getting ski lessons!
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