Skiing in the Sierra Nevadas!

My friends Jackie, Samantha, and I wanted to go skiing in the Sierra Nevadas since it is only like 45 minutes away and the best skiing in Spain. So I woke up EARLY and then still almost missed the bus because my bus to the bus station was late. This is where transportation gets very tricky here: you never know what time the bus is going to come and if you need to take a bus to the bus station to catch another bus somewhere else…well, it’s a toss up on whether you’ll make it or not! On the way up the mountains I had a few waves of nausea but thankfully I was okay. We met other APIs on the bus (the program we are here with is called API (Academic Programs International) so when we see other kids from our program we call them APIs) so luckily we got to spend the day with them too and I got to know some girls I didn’t know before. We rented our skiis, got all decked out (I had forgotten how much work GETTING READY to go skiing is), and headed for the gondola. If you don’t know what a gondola is ( I didn’t) it is a closed lift that you stand in and it takes you up to the other lifts. The markings on the slopes were a little different here. In order from easy to difficult there are green, blue, red, and black slopes. I would have been happy to take a few greens, but the crazies I was with were a little more advanced than I was so we started on blue. The first slope we chose happened to be very icy and so I got concerned that they would all be the same but they weren’t. I quickly realized that blue slopes here are significantly more intense than blue slopes at home. Haha, imagine that! Nevertheless, I was fine and quickly got my groove back on the slopes. Some of you probably just read that and laughed because I have only been skiing like 3 times in my whole life, but whatever I can hang. I only had one major wipeout, a minor one, and an intentional one in order to stop. I was really worried about going in the first place because I really don’t want to end up in a Spanish hospital. So I had done some serious praying and was really trusting God to keep me safe. He demonstrated His faithfulness because not only did I not get hurt, but I had a wonderful time enjoying His creation and spending time with new friends. We stopped for a lunch break and then went back out, but soon my knees started to feel weak and I decided to play it safe and not push my body farther than it wanted to go. This leads to another story: I was already exhausted and had some aching muscles because when I was at the gym the night before I forgot to convert the weight machines from kilograms to pounds. Therefore, I lifted with my legs approximately TWICE as much as I should have. At the time, I did think it was heavy, but I thought that I had just gotten weak. And just so everybody knows, your legs are actually CAPABLE of lifting a LOT of weight, but you WILL pay for it the next day. Just another everyday misunderstanding in Spain! Jackie and I enjoyed chatting at a café while the other ladies kept skiing and we apparently spent so much time there that we forgot to pay before leaving. We were trudging off when we realized we hadn’t paid and scurried back to do so. We apologized profusely to our waitress who HAD noticed, but she was nice and thanked us for coming back. We were so appalled at what we had almost done! There was a concert in the middle of all the shops with some random band performing covers. They were pretty good (especially with the Shakira song) and we wanted to stay and listen but we had to catch the bus back to Graná (the abbreviated way to write and say Granada; basically they don’t pronounce d and t very often if it is at the end of the word). That's your random fact of the day brought to you by yours truly,

Ashton