Each Friday afternoon, Madeline’s brownie troop does some type of group activity. Today’s activity was a trip to go snow-tubing and being the proud new owner of car, I was recruited to be the brownie bus. I guess there’s a downside to owning a car. Anyway, I followed the troop leader through 2 intersections, a right turn and couple clicks to a man-made snow hill just 5 minutes away from the school!
The vertical elevation was approximately 30 feet and the length was about 100 yards. As we approached, I noticed that kids were tubing on one side, but the main part was for snow skiing!
So, we unpacked the kids, paid 20rmb to enter the park and went to the “lodge” where we rented the tubes for 60 rmb each (about $7.50). The kids (and the adults…including me) had a blast on the tubes. Not to sound like a broken record but the lack of lawsuits here allows for people to have the type of fun that we had when we (and our parents) were kids. The tubing run had been iced down with nice little ramp at the bottom and we could pile 2-3 kids into each tube with reckless abandon. In other words, the staff deferred to the parents to set the safety parameters. But let’s save that thread for another day.
While Lisa, the other moms and the kids tubed, I rented a crappy pair of snow skis and white boots. The guys at the rental counter seemed to be laughing at me…maybe because I was simply wearing some work clothes or maybe it was the size of the boots. At times like this, the language barrier is awesome…I was able to look them straight in the eye with a big smile on you face as if I was laughing with them …”yep..this big American actually does know how to ski…and while you are at it, I recommend staying off the crack pipe”. So I popped my skis on, zipped on over to the rope pull and hooked my butt to the handle for the 2 minute ride up. At the top, I pushed off and after a moment of adapting to the crappy, unwaxed skis, I was able to get just enough speed to get 2 turns in before reaching the bottom of the hill.
I repeated this about 8 times and called it quits. In terms of skiing, it could hardly be worse but in terms of a fun day with the family, it was awesome. The proximity of the hill is great and I suspect that some of us from the school will sneak over at lunch some day to get 30 minutes of skiing in. An even more exciting idea is taking the IT staff there with a bucket of KFC….that would be a riot.
Note: Within a 1.5 hour drive, you can access a number ski areas in the mountains to the north. Skiing is such a new thing to China that it’s probably similar in scale to some of the North Carolina areas. But like everything else here, it’s probably going to boom as more Chinese come into the level of disposable income required to do this type of recreation. I will probably try out some of the ski areas here in the next few weeks and post more about my findings.
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