The greatly anticipated staff New Years party was, unfortunately, a slight let down. By the time I made it there, post work, everyone was spectacularly trashed and crammed into the "party room". While it was clear that the majority of people were having a good time, I found it slightly unpleasant and much like a high school party.
This disappointing celebration was followed, two days later, by the dreaded departure of one of our beloved flatmates. Despite being forewarned of Jacob's leaving for Europe, seeing him off at the bus stop was something we didn't want to have to do. The next week or so was spent in painful anticipation of who would be forced upon us as our new room mate. We figured that it would be just our luck to have an awesome room mate replaced with some weirdo no one wanted to hang out with. Luckily for us we were presented with Nick, a fellow kiwi who is not only from Tauranga, but went to Otumoetai College as well! There is a slight chance that I became irrationally excited by this news...but I'm over it now. He fits in well, so that's all that matters.
Around the same time as all this happened, we got a large (to us) snowfall over the course of a couple of days - 50cm in 72hours or something like that. This created great excitement within the village, although it unfortunately resulted in an unpleasant experience on my part.
The first day of the big snowfall started out great, I went to a really good snowboard lesson with some friends and had a lot of fun.
After lunch though, that was when it happened. I let myself be talked into going up the Champagne chair lift, one higher than I was used to, and was told that it would be "so much fun". However, a certain member of our group led us down the mountain the wrong way. Instead of heading down the Champagne run, we headed down the other side which mainly consists of cat tracks - narrow runs that force you to go straight for an extended period of time, something I was far from comfortable with. Due to my lack of experience, I was soon left behind by the rest of the group except for another kiwi girl - Rebecca - who was kind enough to stick with me the whole way down. Unfortunately, as it was taking me so long to get down, it got to the point where the lifts were going to be closing and Rebecca wasn't sure how to get out of where we were without using the lifts. Luckily, the lifties started doing their sweep of the mountain to make sure no one was left and they were able to help us out. If they hadn't turned up, I was fairly certain we would get stuck out there and end up getting eaten by a Cougar.
All in all, it was definitely the worst experience I have had over here.
Onto more cheerful matters!
About a week ago we had a staff trip to Lake Louise, another ski resort about 2 hours away in Alberta. There had been another staff trip prior to this, but due to work I was unable to go, so I was pretty pumped for this one.
On the bus at 7am - when its still completely dark - followed by a quick snooze, we were at the resort. It was quite a different experience to Panorama, the resort itself is very very small, only a couple of buildings, but the variety of runs the had were great.
There was a big gondola that we took up the mountain, when we were having a break, so we could get some good photos of the surrounding mountains.
We spent the rest of the afternoon on one of the green runs which was slightly more interesting than the green runs we have here at Panorama, once we could force ourselves outside again after a cosy lunch inside that is.
We had a really good day, and were back on the bus by 4pm. We attempted to go to the pub that night, but due to general exhaustion it was a bit of a bust.
So now we get to spend the next two weeks dreading the departure of another flatmate, Madison. But hopefully events like Australia Day will help keep our mind off it.
Thanks for reading!
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