Our induction week quickly turned from mucking around and generally having a crazy experience to some seriously huge leaps into our roles as instructors.
Wednesday morning we had set up several activities for some local school kids to occupy themselves for the day; toboggans, slalom courses and a bbq. We all donned our uniforms and lined up next to the parking lot as a coach pulled up and out stepped around thirty nine year-old Norwegian primary school children. I put on my best smile and greeted them as they walked past with their mini skis, their tiny little boots and their minuscule ski poles.
"Goddag, goddag... Valkommna!"
To begin with, my job was quite simple. Keep and eye on the kids, make sure they don't run off, help them get into their boots, fit them for rentals and helmets and generally make sure they are all happy and having fun. We were then split into groups and I suddenly found myself teaching these kids how to ski. Thankfully I was assigned the lowest ability level: but keep in mind these kids were born and raised in a ski town. Most of them have been skiing for many years and here I am teaching them! Somehow I managed to struggle through the morning: sheerly through size and power my skiing is more solid than these kids and I am pretty sure I managed to fool them into thinking I knew what I was doing. Sure a few things popped up; questions were asked and I had no idea what they were saying... but by some miracle I didn't fall over once all morning. Yeah baby.
It was about minus 15 that day so the kids quickly started to freeze up. We headed inside for some varm saft (hot Ribena basically) and that was the end of the skiing part of the day. I made it! From there on we manned the BBQ and gave out hot dogs, set up a snow racer track (little race car things on skis) and had snowball fights with the kids as we slid around the mountain on our butts. Good fun had by all- except one little girl who took particular offense to my snowball antics. Apparently she started to resent the fact that she couldn't hit me with one without being less than 2 meters away so resorted to punches and kicks. Note: a ski boot to the shin hurts; even when wielded by a 9 year old. Seeing a man down I was suddenly inundated by small children - God bless 'em - while taking many fists full of snow to the exposed areas of my face.
Skiing update: Today I did my first red slope on skis. Pow!
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