Avalanches und so weiter 🏔

On a gray, overcast Monday morning back in January I woke up around 5:30am to get to Schruns a bit before 9am for the beginner ski lesson I was taking with my friend Victoria.

I was very excited about doing a ski lesson, since my first experience skiing had been such a disaster, and I was feeling much more calm about the whole thing since Victoria, also a complete beginner, was doing it with me too.

I took the train from Feldkirch to Bludenz and met up with Coralie and Vic there — both teaching assistants (from France and the UK respectively). We were a bit nervous about the weather, but we hadn’t heard anything from the ski school as of 7am, so we assumed the lesson was going to go as planned — even though the avalanche warning had been raised to…..level 5! (out of five!)

Later in the day I even got an email from the U.S. Embassy in Vienna (a rare thing) warning travelers about the high avalanche warning “in Austrian Alpine regions” (aka Vorarlberg)…haha. (The ski instructors didn’t seem to be phased by the weather at all, so the lesson went on as planned.) There was even an important stretch of train track that was closed that week because the risk of avalanches was too great. All in all — not ideal weather conditions to be learning to ski in.

When we got to Schruns, we somehow hopped on the wrong bus (we wanted bus 85, but there’s like 85a, 85b, 85c….it’s a little bit confusing), and the one we had gotten on didn’t take us directly to the Zamang Bahn. Fortunately, the bus driver told us where to get off and which bus to get on, and it only put us a couple minutes behind.

However, when we arrived at the Zamang Bahn, we walked into a very crowded waiting area to discover that that lift was temporarily closed. According to the people waiting there, it was snowing like crazy at the top of the mountain (“es sprengt nach oben”) and they had no idea when it would reopen. This was particularly annoying because it was almost 9:15, which was when the lesson was supposed to start. Victoria was a champ and called the ski school to find out what was happening (the ski school wasn’t that great with communicating), but they told us that, you know, “Nothing’s happening now, but we’ll see. Still come.”

While we were waiting, I may have told Vic the following story — I’m not sure when I told her, but it makes the rest of our ski lesson experience all the more hilarious. Earlier that week I had happened to mention to some of my teachers that a friend and I were taking a ski lesson. I was attempting to make small talk and skiing is about the only thing I know how to make small talk about with other Vorarlbergers (lol). But when I mentioned the ski lesson, the other teachers didn’t react how I expected them to. The following is an attempted (and translated) reconstruction of our conversation.

“I’m really excited — a friend and I are doing a ski lesson sometime next week!” I began.

“Ohh,” the teachers eyed each other warily and raised their eyebrows and chuckled.

“What?!” I asked. Definitely missing a key piece of information here.

“Should we tell her?” one teacher asked the other.

“Tell me what?!” I was beginning to be a little worried that I had wasted my money on bad ski lessons or something.

“Well ski instructors around here have a reputation….” the other teacher continued.

“!?” I listened, horrified, thinking. Oh man they probably charge a lot and just rip off tourists.

“…yes, a bad reputation…” the other teacher added, and they continued to nod at each other knowingly.

At this point, I was really mortified that I was throwing money out the window for a bad ski lesson.

“What kind of reputation?” I asked, hesitantly, thinking about the lesson I had already paid for.

“Well….” they paused, struggling to find the words, “A reputation for being a bit too friendly with the ladies.”

LOL 😅😂🤣

I about died laughing because it was not what I expected to hear at all. I told Vic and she thought it was hilarious as well, and the whole way to the ski lesson we joked about what kind of ski instructor we’d get. I’ll get back to that in a second. 😅

Eventually after about 20 or 30 minutes of waiting, the lift started running again and we were on our way to the ski lesson!

We made it to the top of Hochjoch, where it had stopped snowing, and rushed around trying to figure out where the ski lesson started. Coralie went off to snowboard and Vic and I found our lesson.

Luckily for us, we were the only complete beginners there that day, so we practically got a private lesson! We told the head ski instructor (a man in his fifties or so) that, while we spoke German, it wasn’t our native language, and to our great amusement, the ski instructor turned to the ski instructor most near our age and said: “Oh hmm…well….Rafael*, since you speak a bit of English, why don’t you take the two pretty ladies, wink wink wink.” 😅 (Changing his real name because Vorarlberg is freakishly small, and I’ve already run into him at the local bar…. 😅)

Vic, of course, is one lucky gal because towards the beginning she actually flew off the ski slope into the deep snow (that’s the unlucky part). The lucky part is that Rafael climbed into the deep snow after her and hauled her out. I watched from the sidelines, as he wrapped his arms around her, making sure she was okay….his cheeks flushed as he helped dig her out….hahaha. It was hilarious. 😉 I thought about falling over just so he would help me up. 😅 Unfortunately, I seemed to have recovered my ski legs and only fell once during the whole lesson (quite an improvement from my last post).

Of course, Vic maintains that it was really embarrassing and not nearly as romantic as it looked from afar, but please. A beautiful ski instructor hauling you out of the snow? Would you say no? 😝

But in all seriousness, the lesson was actually really helpful, and I feel like it helped me gain a lot of confidence and feel more comfortable on my skis. By the end of the lesson, I felt really comfortable stopping and was even turning without falling over!

It started to snow about halfway through the lesson, but we didn’t realize how much it had been snowing until Vic and I asked the ski instructor to snap a photo of us at the end of the lesson.

Look at the amount of snow on my helmet! LOL.

So there you have it. Ski lessons take place here in rain or shine and level five avalanche warnings. You may hear some dynamite in the distance, but don’t be too worried — those are just to trigger controlled avalanches.

At any rate, Vic and I have graduated from ski lessons and have slowly been conquering more and more blue slopes together. More on that later!

xo,

Sarah