Went snowboarding at the weekend. Never been skiing or snowboarding previously, and I’m not sure I enjoyed it enough to go back and do it again, but it was good to try.
It was out at Nanshan. There hasn’t actually been any snow yet, and they only had artificial snow on a couple of the slopes (including, thankfully, the one for complete beginners and babies). I wasn’t feeling entirely confident about the sliding down slidy snow on a slidy board idea at first, but we got a couple of hours tuition which I don’t think taught me very much except that falling over won’t kill you. We also covered the right way to fall, but unfortunately the right way to fall (with your arms curled up in front of you) isn’t so good it overrides the genetically-programmed fingers splayed and screaming method of falling. I managed not to do myself too much damage though, perhaps because I never stayed upright long enough to build up any real momentum. Plus, snow is fairly easy stuff to land on, although it gets you back later.
I allegedly learned to turn in the training. I wasn’t very good at it, and never really figured out how to control things like direction, speed and degree of turn. I’d try to turn left with a view to stopping, but just spin myself 180o right and then continue downhill at the same speed, with a different leg at risk of breaking. All good fun . . .