My Tumultuous Relationship With... A Pair Of Skis

Facing a fear is never simple. You're scared shitless and all the scenes depicting everything that could possibly go wrong flash quickly through your mind. Palms get sweaty, stomach starts to ache, you begin to tremble. But at the same time, you're trying to get control of your body and mind. What I do is I talk to myself. "Come on, you can do this, nothing bad is going to happen, be strong, you're an ESTRELLA! Get with it! Get it together! Let's go."

I put on a pair of skis on Tuesday, half unwillingly. I tried skiing once because I wanted to try a new sport. I could sum up that experience with one word: catastrophy. I went with a group of about 30 students from my university, and half of us were beginners. I was the worst in that group, hands down. I just didn't get it. Coming from a tropical climate, let's just say that snow and I aren't exactly best buddies. I crashed and burned, literally. I crashed into a fence and had a bruise the size of a baseball on my arm for about a month.

Fast forward a year later and, ha! Don't you love life's surprises! I'm living in the Rhone-Alpes region of France, the French ski capital. I would even dare call it Europe's ski capital. There was no way I could NOT go skiing and live here. It would be a shame. Not to mention the amount of people that would KILL to go skiing in the Alps...me not going skiing while living an hour drive from the nearest ski resort would not be cool.

The first half an hour on skis was atrocious. I spent 27 of those minutes on my cold, wet butt. The other three were me attempting to get up. I wanted to throw in the towel soooo bad. Why would I want to subject myself to this? The view was so pretty from the ground, why get up? But with patience and perseverance, I managed to FINALLY learn how to ski. Jess the English assistant is an expert skiier and she dedicated the whole time we were there to teaching me to ski, and teaching me to love it and not give up. And I do now, I do love it! I can't wait to go back.

The Alps are absolutely breathtaking. My neck still hurts from looking up (or from falling so many times?). No pictures can do justice to their majesty. But I tried anyway! Here are a few.