Commuting

(For some reason I think blogger.com is cutting off the sides of youtube videos, however if you either click the video title, double click the video or right click and select watch in youtube you should be able to watch the video without the edges cut off.)

This is probably one of the coolest daily commutes in the world.

Again for these videos since the sound would just be wind rushing past a tiny microphone I just muted it and put some music with them.

First is up the gondola to the top of the mountain. I took the video during the day on one of my days off as I’m usually too unprepared and have to tie up my boots on the way up the gondola most days, where it gets really foggy is actually passing over a course we’ve named “hidden valley” and yes it’s because it’s almost always in a cloud.

Second is snowboarding down to my hut where I work, I took it pretty slow that day since I’d only been snowboarding for about two weeks.

Third is the ski lift from my hut back up to the top of the mountain and although it can get pretty cold when its snowing and windy, when it’s a clear day the view is really nice, hence my lift being called View 2.

Finally is the run all the way from the top of the mountain to the bottom. Again I took this video on my day off as it was a really nice day and you can see the scenery, but it’s definitely a pretty good feeling when at the end of the day you set off home with about twenty colleagues all on snowboards and skis and just zoom down the mountain, passing the slow customers who are still making their way down, I’ll try to get a video of that at some point too and hopefully it won’t be as bumpy as it was when I took this video.

It’s not that hard really.

Well I made it out of Doha and have been working here for a month now. The work itself is pretty simple, clearing snow so that the ski lifts move, making sure customers don’t get smashed in the face by said ski lifts when they either fall over or completely fail to judge just how fast a ski lift is moving and end up skiing into it, falling over and then panicking as the next one comes along. The complete failure of some people to realise that ski lifts don’t wait until they are ready is quite baffling sometimes. They will queue up behind others, watch them successfully get onto the lift, all they have to do is slide forward a few metres, look behind them for the lift and then sit down when it comes up behind them. But somehow in that short space of time between queuing and sliding into position they will completely forget what they are there for and either look around at the scenery and other skiers, start asking me where I’m from, or whether they can come down the slope that is clearly marked “Danger – Avalanche are imminent” (sic) or even just chatting with the pers.. BAM! the ski lift hits them in the back of the legs completely taking them by surprise and on humourous occasions knocking them over. I do wonder what they thought was going to happen when they stood in the path of the ski lift, it really isn’t that difficult to use.

Anyway, I’ve been working on a video to show you my daily commute but a combination of my snowboarding ability, remembering to take a camera with a fully charged battery to work, Windows movie maker randomly crashing and poor weather have delayed this slightly. However here is a short video to show how bad the weather can get. This day wasn’t the worst but is typical of the weather going home in the evening. Snowboarding when you can’t see the snow is hard and as you can probably see I was using the edge of the mountain to gauge where I was and how fast I was going. I’ve also take out the sound and added some music, because blowing wind wasn’t very pleasant to listen to. Music is Gorillaz – White Light.

Snowboarding in the fog.