.Skiing in the Alps.
 

“Good Morning Australia” was how I was greeted every morning by the Swedes working in the ski hire shop. I was clearly the odd one out, a rare spotted specimen high up in the Alps…  

Anything that is your first time deserves a blog post… and when it’s skiing for the first time and in the Alps in Italy, I can only do the trip justice by writing about it.

As an EU citizen most flight companies will allow someone to fly with just a normal identification card, but not Easy Jet. And so as Jakob (my boyfriend) learnt, even though the EU has created ‘open boarders’, always bring your passport ‘just in case’. Back to Sweden he went until Monday night when he could book on the next available flight (it was Friday morning…)

So without Jakob who had been anticipating the trip for weeks, I boarded the plane to Milan with his parents and aunt. Thank goodness for our close relationship and many trips away together before, otherwise the plane trip could have been quite awkward, but it wasn’t… rather I just got all the attention from his parents that he should have been getting!

Day 1 of the skiing and I was glad Jakob had forgotten his passport. My Italian instructor was a big cutie and although teaching me the basics, he decided I picked it up too easily and so he spent the rest of the lesson teaching my how to drink Cafe Machiatto “Italian Style” (just a lot of sugar!)

Waking up in the apartment all to myself was lonely on Day 2 but knowing at 9am I was to meet Guilleamo, there was no reason not to get out of bed! It is amazing the way we can develop skills so easily. In just 24 hours I had gone from the ski school slopes that I once thought were steep, to being able to go on tours all over the ski system.

Jakob and Lisa finally arrived and on day 3 we were a full team… but I still had to have just a couple more hours with Guilleamo (I didn’t need it, but he wanted to show me a really cool coffee place) so another 70 euros later, I spent a couple of hours chatting and having a great time with my new Italian friend.

The food was sensational! Even 3000 metres up, the soups and pastas were of the greatest standards. It doesn’t quite make sense to me how they can be so good up on the pists- maybe it’s because lunch was always accompanied by a glass of wine or Bombardino (a yellow warm liqueur with cream and cocoa on top).

Day 4 and I understood the whole “you’re not going to be cold when skiing” thing. Sunbaking in the alps!? I didn’t think it was actually possible, but the sun was so bright and beautifully warming. It was the first time I really got to appreciate the views and exactly where we were in the world and it was something very special!

The rest of the week didn’t bring the best sunshine but it didn’t matter, I had to experience it ‘warts and all’ and so while stuck in a snow storm after falling over and trying to put my ski back on even though my boot was covered in snow, I really got the picture of everything skiing is.

It’s a balance in the greatest amount. It's warm yet cold, it's active and exercise, yet unconditionally relaxing, it's utter preparation with the correct ski gear and its total unpreperation for what the mountains can bring, it's food and alcohol and it’s a time to all be together, whether in the long ski lifts that can last 5 minutes or of a night time when its only 9pm but everyone is ready for bed.

Here’s to skiing and here’s to not making it one of those ‘once in a lifetime opportunities’.

Note to self: Pretend you don’t know how to ski at the start of every ski holiday… Guilleamo will help you out ;)

 
 

 
 

 

 

 
 

 

 

a banana smoothie.

a staple component on my daily life. banana, yogurt, honey, almonds and just enough cinnamon to make the smoothie the most perfect blend of ingredients. but yesterday this was not the case.

home from the gym in the morning i begin to make my banana smoothie. the banana is just ripe and i know there's just enough milk in the fridge. just as any other day, all is going smoothly. i begin to add the last ingredient... the cinnamon. i search amongst the spices and eventually find it. i take off the lid and shake on the cinnamon, just as i would do any other day. but! someone has tampered with the cinnamon jar and the filter has been removed and so instead of shaking out the perfect amount, the entire jar of cinnamon pours into my smoothie. its disastrous. the cinnamon is stuck to the honey and its throughout all the milk. there is no way to work around this.

with the excessively unnecessary amount of cinnamon down the sink the smoothies goes. of course there are now no bananas left in the fruit bowl and more significantly, the milk carton is empty. i guess toast it is!

note to self: check the cinnamon before adding the perfect amount

          1 team. 4 friends. 100km. what could be so tough?!

the start line buzzed with excitment and every walker was full of anticipation. together the event had raised over 2.2 million but as the countdown hit 2 minutes there was also a sense of 'why the fuck did we sign up for this' and 'oh shit, its raining'! 

for the next four hours despite the rain, energy levels were high, for some unknown reason we even decided it would be fun to run the first few kilometres! chekpoint 2 came and with the smell of lunch in the air the rain ceased and we piled our stomachs full of friend rice and checked our feet that had already began forming 'hot spots' because of the wet weather.

we met so many  people along the way but for some reason they were keen to either drop back or hurry on forward. i think it had something to do with our insanely loud voices and joking mannerisms. maybe it was just a bit much for everyone?!

checkpoint 3 was a breeze and we arrived at checkpoint 4 unscathed and still in high spirits. dinner was served, but our appetite was barely there. happy to start the walk through the night we unpacked our night gear and turned on our head torches! little did we really understand, for the next 11 hours, this small beem of light would be our only perspective of where the hell we were. 

our journey over the next 11 hours was totally delusional. we hadnt studied the maps at all before we left so we knew nothing about what was ahead of us. it was a matter of putting one foot in front of the other and following the beam of light coming from our head torch. soont here were two broken headtorches in the team so we stuck close to all follow eachothers footsteps. We asked a marshell how far until the next checkpoint and with her comment we found great optimism and wanted to push on. "you're doing well, 5 km to go until check point 6!" thank goodness we thought. about 2 hours later and what we thought was 10km we realised she was wrong. totally unaware of how far there actually was to go we put our headphones in and dragged ourselves to the next checkpoint. at one stage we decided we must have past the checkpoint and were walking to the next, we were wrong. eventually we made it to checkpoint 6, gave our blisters and aches and pains some attention and struggled onwards.

the sun began to rise at 6.45am and the light was welcomed with great relief that we could now get rid of our head torches. now running on solar power we pushed down a great hill to checkpoint 8. the last checkpoint on the journey but definetly the hardest to leave. we had heard the next 7km of the trail was the toughest, only up and down and had realised walking up wasnt the struggle, it was the downhill and pressure on our knees that proved difficult. 

the 5km mark just screamed “you’re almost there” and with a sip of gatorade a rush of anticipation took over our whole body and we were ready to conquer this walk no matter how much our bodies told us to stop. we struggled up each hill and ran down the other side, we just wanted to get this bloody thing over and done with now. 500 metres left and the celebrations had begun. 

25 hours 15 minutes later we had made it! i am an Oxfam trailwalker... i walked 100km... what’s next!?


note to self: tell everybody who reads this to give the 100km oxfam walk a go. you will absolutely suprise yourself at how far your body will let you go.

sauna, snow and sweden.

A sauna to swedish people is like the beach to australians. i arrived for a day at the sauna with a group of friends totally relaxed. the sauna was surrounded by a frozen lake and being my first sauna experienced in sweden, i thought it was magical. just like most situations i was soon to find out i was totally unprepared and unaware. six beers down the gurgler and to my apprehension it was my time to take a dip in the ice? i didnt quite know what this involved. but i was happy and relaxed and so i agreed. situated 20 metres from the sauna, lay an ice cut hole with steps elluding us down and under the ice cold water. without thinking i jumped in. and jumped straight out. tingles raced down my spine. it felt like i had just been stabbed with a million needles. they say a dip in the ice realeases more andrenaline than an orgasm. i fear for the intimacy of whoever said this.

note to self- sauna and beers dont mix.



 




on the way to Meredith Musical Festival in december 



 



The pants of India.

Wearing ali baba pants in India is just one of those ‘must do’ things... You go to India, you buy ali baba pants and wear them everywhere. It is not the traditional clothing but has somehow become connected to the travelling cult that invades India each year.

I bought my first pair in Kolkata after being in India for one month. I was in. I looked like I belonged to the travelling hippy cult. Little did I know the complications these pants would possess...

For once, i thought I was prepared. I was travelling on a motorbike and thought long pants were necessary. I was not wrong, they were. What I was wrong about was thinking that riding a motorbike wearing 10 bolts of material around my legs would be easy. As I went to sit down on the bike seat something stopped it. It was like wearing a skirt and trying to sit. There was a big clod of material stopping me from sitting. So I yanked up the ali baba pants and sat trying to keep the extra material away from the engine in fear of them lighting on fire. I wondered if anyone else had this problem? Maybe everyone wearing them were just to cool to wear anything else! 

The biggest problem occurred when it was time to use the squat toilets. Squating is difficult enough for a westerner and with the metres of material in between, wearing the Ali Baba pants surely made squatting a trying task. Once balanced and in position, it was then a matter of holding up the material and keeping it out of aim. Fortunately by the end of my stay I managed the squat toilet while in ali baba pants, needless to say it did take some attempts to get it right!

Finally, every travellers most hated chore. Hand washing. Generally with a bucket and some of your shampoo it was never an enjoyable task and the ali baba pants again proved useless in the washing department. After twisting and twirling them to get all the water out, due to the excessive amount of material, the average drying time was far beyond the other clothes and often they ended up in your pack still damp and of course smelling when you got to your next destination.

Note to self- wear Ali Baba pants to look cool but know that they aren’t convenient in any way.

 

 



the swedish supermarket.

My first perception of Sweden was simple. It is a relatively similar country to Australia, both culturally and socially. Well… that’s what I thought until I visited the supermarket alone for the first time…in winter. Never did I imagine a simple job could be quite the task. As for the winter, I arrived to the supermarket in a jacket, gloves and scarf. Immediately as I entered the sliding glass doors a rush of warm air surrounded me. I ripped of my winter accessories in fear of fainting and grabbed a shopping basket that had wheels for the purposes of towing it along the ground behind you. All of a sudden i was caught up in one big juggling act, carrying your woollens and managing the wheely basket, at that point you feel like you’ll never manage. While the obvious perception that the language barrier may be the next problem, it isn’t.

In Australia, most supermarkets a relatively set up with the same flow and design. You gather your fruit and meat first, move through the aisles and grab your dairy products last. This may also be how the people of Sweden work, but for an Australian, it’s utter disarray. The cookies come after the fruit which then backs onto the dishwashing liquids, followed by cooking utensils and after that somewhere down the back you will find the tetra-pak cartons of milk. While still maintaining the great juggling act, you start to pick up a 3 litre milk carton but really it is far too large to lug home, thus a one litre milk is bought even though you know that by tomorrow you will have run out. Time now for the register, that’s the easy part, the check-out-chicks there to help you. Alas! The juggling act doesn’t stop here. As like in Australia, the groceries are unpacked onto a convey belt. At this stage the lady behind the counter doesn’t recognise you are foreign and the usually greeting of ‘hej hej’ is exchange from me to her. My groceries then appear on another convey belt on the other side on the counter. This confuses me. But wait, she isn’t packing them? I look around to the other shoppers to try and work out what to do, jacket, scarf and gloves sill in hand. After witnessing the lady beside me I copy her by buying two paper bags.

I pay and all of a sudden the rush starts to pack my own groceries! Caught unaware and unprepared, I place my jacket, gloves and scarf on the floor and in a hurry I pack my paper bags. Dairy goes in with bread, fruit goes in with cans. Nothing is in order. Nothing is bagged correctly. But I have no time to rearrange. I grab my bags, somehow manage to throw my scarf and jacket on and I scamper out into the artic weather of -4 degrees. If I place my bags down on the snow to put my gloves on, the paper bags could get soggy, so I decide to start the journey home without my gloves on. It all seems too difficult to put them back on.

One grocery shop, just 1 litre of milk and a few other necessities later I’m on my way home. Mission complete!

Note to self- don’t expect the ‘check-out-chick’ to pack your groceries into free bags.

flags flying high for the birth of Princess Estelle