Skiing vacation

I had the opportunity of joining a group of friends, acquaintances and strangers on a skiing vacation in the Austrian Alps south of Salzburg. We booked a house for a week, and people rotated in and out. I arrived on a Wednesday evening and stayed until Saturday.

I was looking forward to this, if only to see snow and feel like I really am in the right season, namely winter. Unfortunately, I arrived after dark, so saw almost nothing the first evening. However, when I woke up the next morning, I thre open my curtains to take in a great sight: snow AND sun!

We got ready and hit the slopes mid-morning. Having not skied in over 10 years, I wisely headed straight for the ski school to book a lesson. Since I could only get one at 3 PM, two of my friends kindly sacrificed their morning to stay with me on the nummy hill and teach me a few things. The first thing I discovered is that I didn't suck! Turns out the advances in technology and equipment more than made up for my absence from the hills, and I was now a better skier than I ever had been! :-)

A few hours later, we went to a chalet at the top of one peak for lunch. Even more fabulous view from there! And as the temperature was around +3, we sat outdoors for lunch.

After a late lunch, I took a chairlift back down (because I wasn't ready to attack that intermediate slope!) and went to take my lesson.  All in all, it was a fantastic day in the snow and sun. By the time I got home, I figure I'd been outdoors about 7 1/2 hours, and skiing 4-5 hours. Can you anticipate the problem?  After sitting around a few hours that evening, I got up to find out... I could barely walk! Problem! Oh well, nothing to do for it, so I went to bed and hoped for better the next day.

Next morning comes around, and I drag myself out of bed. Hmmm, I can see I won't be pushing it today. But I figured I could work some of the kinks out after a few runs. So off we went to a different peak, me ready to attack the first blue (beginner) hill.

First off, remember these slopes are much, much longer than anything I'd ever skied on. Secondly, there are two things that could interfere with my enjoyment of skiing (well, other than my horrible muscle pain):
1- I dislike going fast in general, I don't even like to toboggan.
2- I have a slight fear of heights.
OK, neither one of these is debilitating and I usually work around them relatively easily (hell, I even went paragliding once). But it turns out standing at the top of a steep hill with a couple of sticks attached to my feet and a couple more in my hands results in these two problems being magnified. A lot.
While I could manage those tolerably well on the blue slope, I wasn't having fun and stopped after 1.5 runs to wait for the rest of the group at our lunchtime meeting point. that was fine, I like to people watch, but I also watched the weather turn progressively uglier: grey, humid, cold, threatening skies.

After lunch, the weather was definitely not cooperating, and that on top of everything else made my decision easy: time to leave. I had been told by my friends that the chairlift that took us to the top of that hill would take me back down. This was good, as the slope leading to the bottom was a red (intermediate) run. Turns out they were wrong! So I thought, OK, you CAN actually ski, so just take it nice and slow and you can make it down. So I tried to go down the red, an unhappy, STEEP, icy-and-powdery-at-the-same-time run. Oh yeah, I was also completely alone on this run, not a skier in sight. And then uh oh, little fear of heights and speed suddenly turned into a dragon! It took me 30-45 minutes to get off the damn mountain, at times with real tears in my eyes.

Conclusion: vacation was fun, bunny hills were fun, actual skiing SUCKS!!! But I didn,t injure myself amd I can tick off "ski in the Alps" from my bucket list, so I consider the whole thing a success.

Mais la prochaine fois, je fais exclusivement du chalet!  ;-)

My musical soul has been soothed...

The best thing about living in Vienna is not the architecture (which is impressive), or even the incessant offering of culture in the forms of plays, concerts, operas, etc. Don't get me wrong, they are great, and never to be taken for granted. But the best thing for musicophiles like me is that you can unexpectedly find yourself exposed to fantastic music, without fanfare, without trappings like concert halls, lights and organized seating.

Until today, my favourite moment in Vienna had been early one Saturday morning in summer, when two men, dressed in very formal suits and obviously still up since the previous night, came to sit at a little table in front of the restaurant below my apartment.  One of the men then pulled his saxophone out of its case and started to play the most amazing jazz I have ever heard. I simply sat in my windowsill, soaking in the morning sun and the beautiful music bouncing off the walls of my narrow little street, and nodding to some of my neighbours doing exactly the same thing. Pure and unadulterated joy in the music and the moment.

Tonight I can add a second unexpected and marvellous musical interlude. On my way back from the supermarket, I took a shortcut through the House of Music, a sort of museum / sound experience. The ground floor consists of an atrium of sorts, with a glass ceiling 3 stories above, a little canteen, a seating area with bistro tables, chairs and plants, and a grand piano to one side. Usually, this piano is unmanned, and the space is often used in the evenings for concerts of all kinds, and for receptions and other events. However, this evening as I passed by, there sat an unassuming man of a certain age, dressed in a casual sports coat. Unremarkable in any way, except for the music: the man was playing classical pieces with fluid ease and a completely relaxed manner. He flowed from one piece to another without a second of interruption, everything from memory of course. It had a feeling of someone who just sat down to play for himself, for the joy of it. Well, I stopped in my tracks, sat down at one of the tables, closed my eyes and just listened. I sat there, alone but for the pianist, for about 20 minutes. While the rendition was not note-perfect, this did not matter at all: imagine sitting in a room with fabulous acoustics, listening to a great musician playing from his heart, just the two of you.

No matter how good a recording, nothing makes as great an impression as live music. For me, piano is the perfect instrument, and I can listen to it for hours on any day. But in this situation, everything came together for the ultimate musical moment:  there was no other sound, no awareness of my surroundings, no time, no thought, everything except the music dropped away, just... stopped. Twenty minutes of pure feeling, of soaring and plunging along with the music.

The music surrounds me, flows within me. I am the music.