Yabuli

Looking back, the ski trip was pretty decent. We hopped on a train at 8am Saturday morning for Yabuli, the famed resort that I've been hearing about since I got to Harbin last June. People come from all over China to ski there, people like the CCP high up muckymucks and important business leaders. The train was two and a half hours on hard seats, not too bad - the "hard" seats are just bench seats, there's cushions though and it's comfy for a few hours. After that, we got on a bus for a half hour and arrived at the base of the mountain about 11:30. We knew time would be a little tight with our train leaving that evening so we had packed lunch and decided to waste as little time as possible on things other than skiing. Two agonizing hours later, we finally got on the chairlift. The delay was due to them being poorly set up for large groups, and our rental gear coming from two separate places; one happened to be back down the road about 10 minutes. Only in China.

There was a single chairlift,which I am thankful for, but I had let myself have somewhat higher hopes for this most famous of ski resorts. t's possible that there was another on a nearby mountain we didn't have access to. The mountain was about as high as the one at Snoqualmie summit, not exactly the Alps but enough for a satisfying run anyway. Plus we only had about 2 and a half hours, so there wouldn't have been enough time to go exploring a bunch of other runs anyway. My skiing predictably sucked after a long draught of three or four years off the mountain...did I really add that up right? That's a long time. The snow was not groomed and really heavy, making it even tougher to get into a good rhythm, but by the last run I was feeling alright. I'm definitely going next winter, I won't be letting the amazing US mountains go unused for another year.

Since we couldn't buy the same-day return train tickets until we arrived at Yabuli, there were no sitters left. It was a slow train too, which meant three and a half hours instead of the two and a half going down. I passed the time standing in the aisle talking philosophy with one of the Chinese roommates; we wedged ourselves between sitting passengers every 10 minutes or so to allow the food cart to pass. Luckily we had only skied for a couple hours so standing wasn't an undue burden on our bodies. I couldn't help being a little disappointed at a 13 hour ski day that only involved two and a half hours of skiing. But hey, it was a great bonding experience and the skiing was fun while it lasted.