-----
2012-03-01
2012-03-02
2012-03-03
2012-03-04
2012-03-05
2012-03-06
2012-03-07
2012-03-08
2012-03-09
2012-03-10
2012-03-11
2012-03-12
2012-03-13
-----
SEPTEMBER
OCTOBER
NOVEMBER
DECEMBER
JANUARY
FEBRUARY
MARCH
TITLE: A DAY TRIP
LOCATION: JI COUNTY (蓟县)
MISSION: SKIING
DATE: 2012-01-26
Xu Jia's (许嘉) cousin Xu Yang (许諹) have been talking non-stop about skiing since coming home from Guilin (she studies jewelry design there), so we decided to take her skiing. Ji County is located somewhere between Beijing and Tianjin and is the biggest of the small mountains in the area where you can go skiing. We took one of the shuttle-buses at 07:00 and the trip took around 3 hours. The girls had never tried skiing before so we hired an instructor whom helped us with renting clothes, lockers and skis. I thought having an instructor around would make the renting process go a little quicker, but not so. It was not until 11:00 that we were ready to hit the lifts and start the fun. As everywhere in China there were tons of people and only four slopes (easy, medium, hard and very hard). Only two actually, because the lift for the two difficult ones was broken. There were so many people in fact that I only got to go four times before it was time to go home again (!). Because of all the people falling in the lifts (furthest left, picture #6) and forcing them to stop every 2 minutes, the instructor had the girls walk up instead to save time. This made for some very tired skiers (picture #7). When their two hours of with instructor was up, we joined up and took on the easy slope. Both of the girls did really well considering the amount of time they actually got to spend skiing. Xu Jia especially, as she suffered a slight handicap due to her way to big beanie, which kept sliding down over her eyes. At 15:00 we returned our equipment and headed completely exhausted back to the bus. I think I will make that my new year's resolution by the way; "more skiing". Too much fun and snow to miss out on.