Yeah! Skiing! Our bus was the first one to arrive at the Wanlong skiing resort. We rented skiing shoes and Salomon carving skis. And then went up with the first lift. The weather was nice with blue skies – just really icy cold. The Wanlong resort is the biggest and most difficult skiing resort around Beijing. So here you see the Chinese that can ski. The slopes are really nice. But it is artificial snow as the Beijing area is too dry in winter with almost no snow fall. So it looks like this with brown mountains around:
They had made some artificial muggles (bumps). We tried skiing them but I think they still need to work on them as they were just some spiky piles of hard snow.
As it is very dry and there had been huge wind on the night of December 24th the snow outside of the actual ski slopes was covered with dust, sand and earth. In some cases it gave a dessert or beach like feeling.
We skied an off-piste route. At the top it was completely icy and then it was just so weird to ski through the brown covered snow.
It was funny to find a sign in the middle of all the trees indicating that we could continue to ski straight down or go more left. I have never seen such a sign in Europe. And some off-piste routes are many kilometers long and you might actually get lost.
At the main building of the resort a fat Chinese guy got upset that Julien can ski well. I have never seen a Chinese guy get mad like this because of nothing. It was very surreal but it seems he has a huge inferiority complex. Oh well, next time we better pretend that we cannot ski well. More pictures of today are in this webalbum.
After the full day of being out in the freezing cold air we took a long hot shower to de-frost our fingers and toes. Then there was a huge hotpot dinner together with the Chinese outdoor group.