The Best Laid Plans.....

Well, my weekend didn't exactly go quite the way I was planning it earlier in the week. I know Shane is going to be disappointed in me (again), but I still haven't managed to hit any of the local nightspots here in Beijing and mix with the locals. I was planning to, but then matters were taken out of my control.

The original plan was that myself and a crowd from work were going to head off skiing on sat (organized by the guy who'd slept in last weekned and missed my other ski trip), and then I'd meet up with a few of the irish guys and head down to Sanlitun sat night. Sunday then I was planning on going on a cycle tour to the Ming Tombs (assuming I was able to be up early enough to get to the meeting place at Jinshuan park by 8am!). It started off ok, met up with the work crowd and headed out to the ski resort. Turns out it was the same place I was in last week!

Seeing as only 3 others out of the 14 ppl had been skiing before, I ended up spending the morning teaching a few of them how to ski. Me, the guy who has been skiing a total of 2 times before this, teaching other ppl how to ski!! It sort of started off me showing one of the girls how to get up the slope without falling on her ass, and sort of grew from there. I'm not saying now that the fact that the girl I started helping was really fit had anything to do with me deciding to "coach" her, but I'm not saying it didn't have anything to do with it either! :-P

So far so good anyway, skiing went OK, even managed to get a few runs on the "big" slopes in between coaching sessions (they'd stopped the lifts to the top slope tho, as it was melted too much to ski on, so I only had the blue run). After the skiing tho is where things started to not go to plan. There'd been mention of us going to a spa earlier in the week, but I thought it was just for a few hours then we'd be heading back into town. When we got there tho, suddenly we're checking into this hotelont eh outskirts of the city! It seems the guy who'd told me about it had neglected to mention to me that we were staying the night. So, not only was I not going out in town like I'd wanted to, I was also left with no change of clothes, and wearing the gear I'd been skiing in!

We went out for dinner anyway, then back to the spa, where we went into the hot springs. My god! When they say hot, they mean hot! Now I know what food must feel like when you throw it in the cooking pot! Some of the pools were OK, but others were just barely on the cool side of unbearable. The air temp was maybe only 3-4 degrees (all the pools were outside), but I still had to get out to cool down every now and then. Thing is tho, you were so hot after the water you didn't even notice the cold air! Was an interesting place tho, lots of hot springs with difernet kinds of minerals in some of the pools (supposed to be good for you and all). I couldn't take any pics tho as you weren't allowed, something to do with everyone being half nekkid I guess. Anyway, we were tehre til about 11ish, and afterwards we went bac to one of the hotel rooms where they tried to teach me how to play Mahjongg (complicated) and a few chinese card games. The card games thing wasn't so successful anyway, mainly 'cos the people who were trying to explain it to me could nevr find the right words in english, and spent so much time arguing over hte rules that half the time it dind't seem like they knew them either! That went on til about 2am anyway, then up at 9 for 10am checkout and I got back to my apartment about 11:30 - so much for the 8am cycle tour!

So, a good enough day, but not quite the day I had planned.......