Just imagination

Your first ski lesson sounds exactly like mine!*

The European instructor, the fact that snow is really slippery and people who can ski don't seem to appreciate how scary that is, the attrition rate of the class, the excitement of doing your first successful snow plough.

I bet you were loving it by the end, right!

I actually get lessons every time I go to the snow because I am quite bad at all sports, and I love all the Europeans who teach ski school. Having said that, my all time favourite lesson was not from a European at all, it was from a Japanese lady called Yuko.

Many years ago, Rib-Eye and I went to Queenstown and while he went off to carve up that sweet powder (is that right?) I booked myself in for a lesson. I started at the bottom level to work on my snow plough. By afternoon I was ready for more of a challenge, so booked a group lesson with Yuko to learn how to do turns.

Though English was Yuko's second language, she made a real effort to explain the art of snow turning to us. She explained that we have to lean our weight to one side if we want to turn, but struggled to convey that we lean the opposite direction from the way we want to turn. Stop me if you know this already, but you basically lean your weight to the right if you want to turn left, and lean your weight to the left if you want to turn right.

Anyway, folks were leaning this way and that and stacking in to each other left right and centre. It was hilarious actually, but I guess some people were not amused. Anyway, Yuko was not OK with what was going on, so after a while, she gathered the group together and said (now I hope everyone has their Japanese accents ready!):

"Imagine your ski have tiny tiny speaker on them, for music listening. On reft ski, the reft speaker. On right ski, the right speaker.

When you want make reft turn, rean crose to hear music from right speaker. When you want make right turn, rean crose to risten to reft speaker. When you want go straight, risten in stereo!!"

Yuko looked very pleased with this analogy, and rightly so.

But as if this wasn't adorable enough, she then said:

"Not real, just imagination!".

She was super cute and that was defo my favourite ski lesson.

*Well, that's not strictly true. The first time I ever had a ski lesson was on Year 9 ski camp and it was pretty much the worst day of my life. It was so bad that I prefer not to include it in the part of my memory reserved for skiing experiences, but keep it instead in the part of my brain reserved for things I never ever want to think about again. Tune in to MSC tomorrow for a full description.