Friday Evening
It turns out that sticky rice, white fish and onion sauce does not constitute the most popular evening meal for Felsted students! Following this pretty poor offering from the hotel last night we managed to find a take-away pizza place that catered to the group's nutritional needs and gave them the energy to get through a whole drink each before turning in for the night. The boys got excited when seeing 'Miss Serre Che' being advertised for Sunday evening, assuming it was a local beauty pageant. The revelation that it was in fact the region's 'premier drag queen competition' quickly cooled their desires!
Saturday
A pretty impressive showing from everybody today - we have managed to see and video almost all of the core skills being performed to a high standard. We spent most of the day on the slopes, although Julien & Sebastien (the instructors) took the group into the snowpark to see if our group could transfer their skills to a bit of freestyle. It turns out that Ben L & Harrison are fighting it out for the title of 'most unbalanced skier', with Ben just shading it at the moment.
Here are a few clips from the snowpark
Julien shows how it's done
Gavin's wipe out
Ollie gets some air!
Miss H gets some big air!
Taylor shows off
Harrison's hop
Miss Hookway and myself were able to take most of the morning to observe the group from remote positions and get them into some sort of rank order - the first stage in making a formal assessment. As I mentioned yesterday, the standard is high and there should be no problem completing either the core skills or the 'free expression' run element that constitute the two parts of their assessment. Alicia and George in particular looked excellent, with some good showings from Ben G, Ollie & Taylor.
They were all extremely interested in the 'Ski Tracks' app I have on my iPhone that allows you to track the number of runs you ski, the distance travelled and [more importantly?!] the maximum speed reached. Top speed today was achieved by Taylor with just over 58kmh and I clocked the slowest at a mere 56kmh - consequently I had to wear the 'hat of shame' for the evening; hopefully all photographic evidence has been destroyed! This was exacerbated by the fact that on the last run of the day, Ben - our instructor - decided to take us on a gentle off-piste run. Everything was going fine until I managed to catch an edge going through the woods and ended up facing backwards with a small tree stuck in my backside!
After last night's poor effort for dinner at the hotel, we had a much more enjoyable experience at Mojo's restaurant where the burger and chips was exactly what we were after. A couple of drinks and some pool at La Grotte rounded off a very successful day. It looks like the locals are about to engage me in conversation, so I will need to finish this post in order to be polite and accept Jean's offer of a beer!
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