OK, you can tell I was quite exhausted when I rushed to get the previous posting online, writing frantically on my Sony Clié palmtop while dinner was being served. "Polse" ain't an English word, and as you may have guessed I was just referring to wrist guards. They saved my precious limbs.

Anyway, snowboarding is way cool. I'm afraid of heights, so it was a real test for me to do certain manoevers [like boarding with my face downhill and boarding too fast downhill :)], but I managed to finish a blue piste thanks to the patience of one of my colleages, who learned me more that Monday than I did on snowboard school Saturday. Thanks Jeroen :)

We went last Friday with the night bus to Tignes sur Lac, France, where we arrived somewhere between 11 and 12AM, after a long night with not that much sleep. We changed into our boarding clothes and got our rented board and shoes. I bought a pair of wrist guards too [damn things costed me 35EUR], which saved both my wrists from sure dead by force, as I noted before. We went to our snowboarding lessons [yup, /me total n00b] and had fun [and less fun] on the training piste. I crashed several times [a bit fun really, except for the time I hurt my tailbone] and tried to conquer my afraid of heights. It went quite well and by the time the class was done, we where 3.5 hours on our boards and dieing for some drink and food. After drinking about a litre of Coke, I discovered two of my colleagues who didn't want to join the snow fun, had fixed the wifi internet access of our base pub, the Yeti Bar. So by the time the management team had had us gone through a teambuilding meeting and we where anxiously waiting for dinner to arrive, I was [literally] writing the previous post on this weblog. Quite fun, and I know, rather geeky.

Anyway, I had hurt my right knee a bit by twisting it and later on crashing on it, so in combination with a bit of sleep deprivation I was too late for snowboard class on Sunday [class started at noon, I woke up 11:55AM]. I didn't really mind, so I went out with colleague Jeroen to the top of a mountain reachable by a cabine elevator and enjoyed the scenery. Too bad it was a bit hazy, while it had been shiny as hell the day before while my digicam was sitting in the belly of our touring car.

This Monday it was clear, sunny weather, so Jeroen and I went up to a blue piste [my first real snowboard experience], which costed Jeroen a lot of patience and me quite a lot of courage, but it was damn great to finish the piste the way boarding was intended [kinda]. Then we went to Snow Park where I discovered the only way out of there was by board. However, I didn't want to face another long way down, so I went walking instead [ok, kinda embarrassing], and then sleighing on my board, which was great fun and turned me into a walking Yeti. We had a good cup of coffee and then Jeroen went for some serious boarding, while I enjoyed the scenery on the way back down by elevator. I changed clothes, brought back my board and shoes and sitted a while chatting with friends in the Yeti Bar. When we went out for dinner, it turned out the restaurant [which had French speaking people only] had misunderstood our reservation and was totally overrun by about 40 people dieing for some food. They handled things quite well, though, and we where finished by the time the touring car arrived and we had to stuff our bags back into it.

The way back was even less sleep, as some people refused to sleep [*hate, hate certain person*] and lieing on the transformed-to-stacked-beds chairs kinda hurt my poor muscles. I even managed to get some sleep [like, 1.5 hours or something] and then hell broke loose as the toilet was frozen down and all those merry people with their wine needed to pee badly. They had to wait quite some time, as Brussel doesn't have restplaces on its surrounding highway, and the McDonalds we discovered was still closed at 9AM. Things ran smoother as we entered the Netherlands, as the traffic jams we endured in Belgium where already gone by the time we crossed our border.

Back at work I copied my photographs to the server and went for home, making a stop at my gf's mother's place to enjoy a hot bath and some good dinner. Now I'm sitting here, scanning my mail again and thinking of my warm bed. Another day of work tomorrow...