Firsts

Today was a day of firsts.

On Friday I picked up a new board, bindings and shoes since my old equipment is all over the place and it appears that the bindings are broken. Yesterday it was snowing all day, but today I woke up at 8:30 to clear skies and 10cm of new snow. It turns out that there's a ski center within walking distance from my house. So I geared up and headed into the forest with an orange and some chocolate in my backpack. The forest was quiet and without a soul in sight. The sun shone though the snow covered trees and I didn't break a sweat by the time arrived to the deserted lifts. After some quick adjustments with the screwdriver I was on top of the hill looking down on the city and further out into the Oslo fjord. The scene was postcard perfect. It took me a few minutes of unsteady turns, but I soon found my rhythm. As I hit the first patch of new powder I was in heaven, silently gliding on top of white cotton in the middle of a frozen forest.

After I few hours I painfully rediscovered muscles I hadn't used for a few years and the hills filled with families teaching their kids the fundamentals of skiing. I walked back to my house passing dozens of people on cross-country skis, all smiling and happy. We complain a lot about winter, but it's quite obvious that we belong here.

This afternoon I also made tortillas for the first time in my life. I found a shop that sell both coriander (Cilantro) and manzanillo chiles so I decided to get out my Maseca tortilla flour and try to make some decent Mexican food. The salsa turned out quite good, but as always, not spicy enough. I made some guacamole and heated up some "Meksikanske" beans to go with a alambre dish. The tortilla making turned out to be quite a challenge. Getting them evenly flat and avoiding that they stick to things is tricky. I had to craft a makeshift non-stick surface from a ziplock bag. Two big boards served as a press with myself standing on them in order to get the right amount of pressure. The first one looked more like a small pancake and the next 3-4 suffered from cracked edges and burns, but I finally got the hang of it and make some that worked.

Overall a perfect sunday.