Skiing without much snow (pt. 2)

Day three dawned with a lot more promising weather conditions than the previous two - both in terms of snow on the ground (lots) and snow in the air (none). Lessons were actually pretty productive today - the group was down to seven so things went a lot faster. This was a good thing, since we'd only signed up for 3 days lessons and the previous 2 had been fairly unproductive on our eyes! We were supposed to be going to another slope but it was apparently closed so back to the Horn it was for us!

We started off the morning by doing the run from the top of the cable car to the middle station. The run was quite nice, blue all the way, and it pretty much reminded me of the "home run" into the village in Sol, but a bit shorter. Seeing as we were with Walter (the instructor) tho, and he was going slow to make sure everyone could keep up, it took a bit of time to go down, so after lessons in the afternoon me and 3 of the guys decided to do it a bit faster. Took about 30mins the first time, we did it in about 10 by ourselves! Only problem is, the 2nd time down, we sort of ended up losing someone - we were certain he was right behind us. Ah well, I'm sure he was ok...

After getting back to the hotel, showering, changing etc, we decided to go out to a restaurant that one of the lads had had a drink in the night before when we were out playing pool. Was a fancy looking italian place, with one problem - the menu was in german and italian, but no english! Luckily I had some italian and the waiter had good english! I made a bit of a tactical error in my choices - for starter I picked "parmagiana", expecting flaked parmesan over a salad or something, but I forgot that in an austrian restaurant, what you see on the menu is exactly what you get - so I ended up wit lumps of raw parmesan cheese! Now, I like parmesan (I wouldn't have ordered it otherwise), but not on its own and not in the quantity given! My main course was nice, veal (with a hint of parmesan from my overloaded tastebuds), but going by the semi-orgasmic sounds coming from beside me from Evelyn, the steak was even nicer!

After a really nice dinner, we wandered out to try to find a decent lively pub, and then someone spotted a fateful sign outside a place called "The Pub" - "KARAOKE HERE TONIGHT". So, despite the misgivings of some of us, we all headed in. naturally no-one wanted to go up first, so we all shoved a fiver into a kitty for the first person to go up. Once everyone had thrown down, one of the girls said she loved karaoke and was going to go up anyway, but she'd take the money thank you very much! So, alcohol was consumed and much merriment was had, and come more singing actually happened as well. Unfortunately, there were quite a few locals singing local songs as well (or german songs anyway), which were pretty bloody awful! Then again, they like David Hasselhoff in germany too....

Weds was our first "real" day of skiing - we had no lessons and were finally going up the Hannenkamm with Doyley and Clem. The conditions in the morning were pretty bad tho, it was OK on the higher slopes but once you got to mid-mountain, it was raining! Whatever about blizzards, rain is awful to ski in - it turns the snow to slush, which makes it pretty damn hard to turn, and your goggles are useless 'cos they don't have windscreen wipers. By the time we stopped for lunch, we were literally steaming - we were so soaked by the rain and so hot from having to work so hard at turning, there was steam coming off us once we took off our jackets! The afternoon went pretty well tho, whizzing down blue slope after blue slope, and I even managed my first black! Ok, it was a fairly short one, but still, a black is a black. Only fell on my ass a few times, which was pretty good I thought. As the lads said tho, "if you're not falling, you're not going fast enough!"

After the skiing for the day was over, and everyone gathered in the usual watering spot, we decided to head down to a bar called the Londoner, where there was a live band on. This was the liveliest place we'd found so far, so we sort of ended up not bothering to go back and change, or go out and eat. As a result we were pretty well hammered by about 10 - hey, drinking for 5hrs on an empty stomach will do that to you. I even ended up chatting up some chick, which is not something I normally do on a night out (she was irish and all - go figure, I go to austria to hit on an irish girl!). Around 10:30 a few people got the munchies so we wandered out to see what we could get to eat. Unfortunately, the nearest place to get food was McDonalds, but hey, needs must when the devil drives.... We were slightly surprised when we got in to find that they had prawns on the menu. I privately was questioning the advisability of ordering prawns in McDonalds, and in a land-locked country like Austria at that, but Doyley was all gung-ho for it, and apparently they weren't too bad. That bout of gastronomic adventuring tho pretty much paid to our night.

Thursday was our 2nd last day of skiing, and it had pretty much snuck up on us rather fast. I didn't have the best of mornings, in that I managed to both break my shades and lose one of my ski poles. Was silly really, I was going up on one of the chair-lifts, took off my glove to get something out of my pocket and didn't realise that the pole strap was looped around the glove rather than my wrist. I didn't really miss it when going downhill - you don't really use your poles all that much really, altho you do feel a bit unbalanced with just one - but I definitely missed it on the level or when trying to go up a slope. One ski pole makes for a lot of damned hard work pulling yourself up a hill! The worst thing was, I knew exactly where it was, and could even see it every time we took that particular lift back up (which we did a few times), but couldn't get to it. I was expecting to lose my deposit or something at the end of the day when I went to get a replacement, but the girl in the shop just said "ok, go pick out another one there, we'll pick up that one in the spring". Fair enough!

Tat night, me, Doyley, Clem and Fran decided to split off from the group and try out a restaurant that Gar had told us himself and the missus had been in. We went in, and were told we'd be waiting at leat a half an hour. We elected to stay at the restaurant's bar and wait, and even before the first pints had settled in the glasses, the maitre'd was back asking us did we mind sharing. Seems a table of 8 had just come free, and coincidentally a group of english blokes had also arrived looking for seats. They turned out to be good gas, and much fun and entertainment was had, to the extent that it was close to midnight when we rolled out of the place. The others had hit the irish bar in the meantime, so we had to head down and try to catch up with them in the alcohol stakes. Never let it be said that we turned down a challenge! ;-)