Pegoopah and other Korean lessons

I kind of forgot Valentine’s Day this year. I didn’t forget it was happening, but I pretty much neglected it and learned to ski instead. Best Valentine’s Day ever!
My boss planned a ski trip for our Hagwon and the best part was teachers got to go cost free! It kind of made up for all the times he’s been a little douchey towards us but does not give him a free pass to be douchey in the future. We stayed at the Phoenix resort and got ski lessons from the father of one of our students. He also happens to be the husband of our main secretary. Their children are beautiful (probably because their mother is gorgeous)! I really liked him but the issue came when he didn’t speak English but was teaching me to ski. Good thing I learn well by example. The language barrier wasn’t really a problem though because I picked up pretty quick on his Korean prompts and learned to ski with no injuries! He also threw in some key english words he learned through me repeating over and over what I THOUGHT he wanted to say. So you have me on a hill muttering, “Arapro, Arapro” and him saying, “Up, Down, Up, Down” The first being a reminder to pick my poles up and not scrunch my arms close to my body and the second being his reminder how to turn properly but raising my hips up then down. It was really cool when I made it down the hill twice on my own! Small victory but it definitely made me wanna go back! There was a tiny mishap though, as one would expect to hear of when someone like me goes skiing.
We got there on Saturday and three sessions to ski. The first session was an introductory lesson for the beginner skiiers. After that session, we had dinner and then were supposed to meet up to get another lesson except our instructor failed to inform us where we would be meeting. We waited about half an hour where we had our first lesson and didn’t see him. So we practiced a bit more before I started feeling super antsy about getting on a real hill. I should have been able to reason it out in my head and think “You’ve only been skiing for about 2 hours and have been going down a hill with almost no gradient whatsoever…maybe going down a real hill is a bad idea…” But instead my inner dialogue went something like this, “You only live once! You’re in effing KOREA! You should at least TRY a real hill! It can’t be that bad, Claire is LEARNING to snowboard on this hill. Just do it.” So I convince my co worker to come with (she even skiied worse than me) and we got on the lift to what we thought was the beginner hill. We get off the lift look down the hill and quickly realize in no reality is this the beginner hill. My co worker asks the lift operator where the beginner’s hill is and he says we are most definitely on the wrong hill. I try to convince her to go down anyways but she is very much against it since she cried on the lift from being so scared…my persuasion skills were misused in the case of convincing her to get on the lift. I finally persuade her to try and get down the hill and I take off to go down myself. I couldn’t really control my speed too well since I had just learned and shouldn’t have been on an intermediate hill anyways, so after sliding somewhat uncontrollably down the hill, I accidentally run into a snowboarder as I’m trying to stop and he acts like it was HIS fault I ran into him. I realized then that I could definitely get hurt on this hill. I was about a 1/3 of the way down and was looking at the rest of the hill noticing how steep it seemed and realizing how unable I was of stopping. In short, I was freaking out. I don’t remember being that scared since the night before I moved to Korea. I honestly had no idea what to do and about 3 times almost had myself convinced I could handle the rest of the way down, but since I knew that I could barely handle the first 1/3 I couldn’t fool myself into the last part. It was awful. At that point, I hated skiing. As badly as I wanted to cry I knew that wouldn’t help my situation and finally figured out a way to get down the hill via a closed in lift (since at this point one of skis wouldn’t go back on my foot, no idea how that happened) through the help of a ski pro. I didn’t know how to say anything in Korean except “help” so they showed me where the lift was. I wanted to hug them. The next day I got a proper lesson from my instructor and really learned to ski. Thus, at the end of the day, skiing had redeemed itself and I did not hate it but LOVED it.
I also met two Russian dudes in the mart on the resort and they invited me to celebrate some victory with them. I couldn’t celebrate with them, but I DID practice my Russian with them. It was great. I forgot how much I enjoy Russian people and their wonderful accents and beautiful language. I realized my Russian has digressed considerably and my Korean has improved since I was answering in Korean without thinking. It was cool and disappointing at the same time.
Before the ski weekend, I got a new co worker! We’ll call her C. She is GREAT. We seem to have a lot in common and we both had tons of fun with our co teachers this weekend, so I’m very glad she is here! There are times like this weekend that I am reminded how much God is looking after me. I don’t need reminders to tell me how awesome God is, but this weekend was a reminder that He is all powerful and loving. I really, really appreciate reminders like that. I know the stories I told aren’t really proof of this reminder but nonetheless, the reminders were present. And…my body aches.