Hitting the Boards

We, as in some of my work colleagues and I, went snowboarding Tuesday night. Now, some of you may be thinking, he’s in Holland, where the hell did he go snowboarding? It’s true that while the Netherlands can boast many things, mountains aren’t one of them. Hills are such a rarity that people stop and stare at them for hours on end, trying to figure out what alien intelligence created them (okay, so that was an over exaggeration). Well, a few stops down the train line from us, in a place called Voorweg, is Snow World. Snow World is an indoor ski centre with three slopes of artificially created snow (and seems to be extremely popular too). One of the guys is off to Geneva on holiday shortly and there is talk of him venturing onto the slopes, so he wanted to get in a little practice first. The rest of us sort of tagged along as moral support and because, lets face it, it was something different to do.

I had done about half a day of snowboarding previously, some years ago, and it was nice to see that I’d forgotten it all and was far worse than I remembered. The omens were bad when I had to try three pairs of boots before finding a set that would fit (I’ve got fairly big feet) and then, despite saying I led with my left foot, was given a right foot board, which I later changed. We had an hour lesson to start, which taught us the absolute basics, then they let us rip on the smaller slope. We had booked an additional hour after the lesson too. It got pretty busy during our second hour, which made it much harder to play about as we were desperately trying not to hit anyone. Most of us spent more time on our asses than actually boarding, but at least one of us had a good level of competence by the end. I managed to walk away in one piece, but my backside is a little sore, my right knee is a little stiff and twinges when I touch it, as well as being suspiciously warm to the touch, and my right wrist is painful and stiff, but I don’t think it’s broken (or rather, I hope it’s not broken). I’d like to point out that these injuries were all sustained while trying to avoid people who, if it’s possible, were worse than me. All in all it was an enjoyable evening. I even managed to make my way to the top of the slope and go from there, which looked awfully high and forbidding when I got there, despite being pretty small. I won’t be rushing back, but I’d like to have a longer go at it, with a few less people in the way.

I took my small, cheap camera with me (one I wasn’t afraid of losing or breaking), but it’s only a one megapixel thing, with nothing fancy on it, so most of the pictures are incredibly blurry and it’s hard to make anything out. On a side note, I would like to find a small, light, reasonable quality (three megapixel at least) point-and-shoot camera that I can take wherever I go and not worry about losing (so it needs to be cheap). Recommendations are appreciated. I’ll try and put what pictures I have up when I get a chance, so that you can get a general idea if nothing else.