Another gray weekend in Geneva, another beautiful sunny day in the mountains. While Geneva’s weather is by no means bad, there sure are a lot of sunless days during the winter. Since it had been a couple weeks since I’d seen the sun, I jumped on a ski bus and headed to France. The first hour of the trip seemed like it might have been a waste, as we kept gaining in altitude, but the clouds didn’t disappear. Finally, though, we cleared them, and bright, sunny skies awaited.
I’m continuing to work on the snowboarding thing that I foolishly started this season. This weekend, I was working on what is called “connecting turns”. To the layperson, that means “turning”, and as you can understand, it’s a somewhat important trick to add to your repertoire. The good news is, I made it through the day without sustaining so much as a minor injury, which is always a positive. The bad news is, I still fell probably more than 30 times. I think I’ve just learned to fall on the parts of my body that are less important, such as my head. I’ve also learned how to say “I’m going to fall” in French, and I repeated it to just about anyone who would listen. Hey – that’s using the future tense – that’s a positive step!
On the topic of snowboarding, I want to revisit something I mentioned in an earlier post; that is, the J-Bar. Previously, I had called these things the minions of evil, and went on to describe why this was a correct statement. Since that first time, I had thought that maybe I had been a little harsh. 
The past two times I went snowboarding, I really didn’t have any trouble with them, and they had been kind of convenient in many ways. This weekend, however, they decided to remind me of how thoroughly vile an apparatus they are. When I first got on one, I was all ready to go, and the thing paused for a moment, then shot me from 0 to 25 mph in about half a second. I managed to stay on, but let’s just say that the future generation of Wintermeyers weren’t particularly happy. The next time I tried the J-Bar, there was no way I would be able to hold on, so I just let it go, at which point the guy who was running the lift thought he would try and berate me (what he didn’t know was that I’m impervious to yelling in the French language). So I then used a different J-Bar, and within about 20 feet of getting up the hill, the machine broke down; just wasn’t my day I guess. That said, a third incident saw some other guy try to use the J-Bar (who happened to be 2 people in front of me), and the entire thing fell off the line it was attached to! That was totally meant for me, but thankfully machines aren’t yet advanced enough to get their timing down.
All in all, however, it was a good weekend snowboarding, with beautiful sunny skies, relatively warm weather, and no major injuries. Also, Geneva wasn’t the place to be anyway, as there were riots going on downtown. Yes, riots – apparently the police fired tear gas at some protestors, which is pretty cool. I don’t know that it was getting particularly violent or anything, but our theory is that the police normally don’t get to use their muscle around here, so on those rare occasions when they see demonstrators, they go all out and just wail on them. Gotta love Switzerland!
Next weekend: Verbier!
Random Snowboard Weekend
