Ski dancing week

Just got back from a week of skiing in St. Anton's in Austria followed by a kick ass weekend of dancing in Herfordshire in good old merry England. My legs ache, my arms ache, my neck aches, in fact my entire body is in a considerable amount of pain at the moment.

Mental note; "do not go directly to a 3 day all day all night dance festival straight after spending a week skiiing. You are not as young as you once were" :(

All in all, the skiing was good and despite the fact that the "Aprés ski" was better in Austria than it was in France (and also ignoring the fact that everything was almost twice as expensive as would have been in France) I think I still prefer the usual resort in France that I usually go to. Speaking as a person who dosn't drink (well hardly ever anyways) and/or generally likes really noisy pubs and bars the "kick ass aprés ski" thing is meaningless to me.

This time around I went with a rather large group of people. There were 11 of us in all but there might as well have just been the 2 of us. We rented 2 apartments (each one about 5 minutes from each other but a good half hour walk to the slopes) since there were so many of us. 7 in one apartment and 4 in the other. The majority of the people were all the new post grads from the new lab which meant that I really only knew about 1 and a half people there (I say half because I know one of the post grads but only on a friendly hello basis). So as a result of this, they all went off and did their own things with each other for the most part and never made an effort to include myself or Chris (the other oldie) in any of their activities. I didn't mind so much as I was there for the skiing but still a token gesture towards the "old folk", no matter how meaningless, would have been nice, otherwise we might as well have gone on our own (which wouldn't be too far from the truth in this case).

As for the ski runs; we were lucky enough to have good snow fall for most of the week but a lot of the ski runs at the resort just didn't do anything for me. Instead of having the usual 4 marking systems (i.e. green, blue, red and black) for piste difficulty levels, the pistes at St. Antons' did away with the super beginner green and just started at "improver" blue (probably presuming that only menly men go skiing at St Antons and thus would never be caught dead on a green slope). This I later found out was a bit of a misnomer. Some parts of the blue runs I would probably consider easier red runs and the black runs (the supposedly most difficult runs) were nothing more than what I would have considerd a hard red. In fact some parts of the red runs should have been blue runs. The marking system overall for the pistes were a little erratic.

I left the ski resort a day earlier than the others so that I could catch a plane from Zurich to London and then onto Haileybury College (home of Harry Potter) in Herfordshire for a long weekend of swing dancing. I arrived at 11pm just in time for the evening soiree.

Haileybury College I must admit is actually quite a nice place. You can definitely recognise the locations used for the filming of the Harry Potter movies. You could also see that it is quite a rich, posh school. Fortunately, the students were all on mid term break so we were given make shift accomodation in around the common areas of the students' usual accomodations; for example the students' tv room (which incidently had a huge 46 inch flat screen plasma tv in it). Because we got there a bit late all the good spots were already taken so we had to make do with laying our sleeping bags inside one of the small corridors outside the students' rooms. The only problem with this solution was that the corridor lights were controlled via a motion sensor. This meant that everytime someone turned in their sleep they would set off the motion sensor and thus switch on the lights and wake up everyone else :D This problem was promptly solved the next night with some tin foil and selotape, McGuyver style.

Caught the 6am flight back to Dublin on Monday morning to be nicely on time for work (after having danced all night the previous Sunday evening till 4am before getting a taxi from the venue straight to the airport). Luckily I fell asleep for a few hours (ok it was a lot of few hours) after dinner on Sunday so work on Monday wasn't as bad as it could have been.

Oh, and did I mention I had a driving lesson straight after work? Now that was a loooong day :)