Living in the Midst of It

I live in a place called Kläppen. It's a house about 20 minutes from the center of town owned by Skistar. It's mostly lift operators and ski instructors who live here but we've got a few caretakers, pist machine drivers and cooks around as well.

3 floors, 4 entries, 3 kitchens, 7 fridges, 4 freezers, 2 laundries, 2 saunas, 3 tv rooms and somewhere around 35 housemates it's quite the Big Brother experience. You can see what the entry way looks like in terms of finding one's shoes on the way to work; and this is immediately AFTER our weekly clean.

Last week we had the first big staff party with pretty much everyone in the whole company. That's something like 700-800 people at the most expensive hotel in town. We had a superhero/fairytale theme which produced some pretty interesting costumes. I haven't been able to track down the people with the cameras to show off my very well thought-out Clark Kent costume but I managed a few snaps myself.

It seems like only yesterday I was talking about blue skies, sun and +4 temperatures. Well you never know what's going to happen around here and at the moment I am scared to shave off my beard to see what is underneath. Last week I got some pretty nasty frostbite on my chin and I fear there may be a scar. That's how it goes when you go out snowboarding all day with lots of clothes on; you feel hot and sweaty moving around all the time but your face is getting a barrage of wind chill that means an effective temperature close to -40 degrees. Ouch.

Other than that I am injury free; slowly getting my nerves back in the park after the leg break. But I fear I have done some permanent psychological damage there, the fear is there and it's not going anywhere just yet. My luck hasn't been all good with guests; I had a kid this week who had some pretty serious ADHD even for a 5 year old and wouldn't listen to a word I said; just wanted to disappear, fail around on the lift, turn down the wrong track and so on. That's a bit of a nerve tester I can tell you; you can imagine trying to explain to a parent that their child wouldn't listen on their way to the hospital... Doesn't really cut it.