Denily and I met for our 6th
time today. I know many people in our class change things up each week in terms
of the meeting place, but Denily and I haven’t met anywhere but the same place,
so I’m sorry for the monotony.
I
mentioned a few weeks ago that Denily and all the international students are
having to read Life of Pi this half of the semester. I also mentioned that
neither Denily or I liked the book very much; however, Denily has now reached
the point where the story is actually pretty interesting (it only took about
200 pages before action happened). I hope that she enjoys the rest of it more
than she did the first part!
This
week we talked a lot about climate and weather and things like that. For
instance, I asked if she had ever been snow skiing. As it turns out, Denily has
never even seen snow! Since mountains surround her, I assumed she had
experienced snow before, but she has not…so we talked about snow skiing. I
shared my only snow-skiing experiences in my life from about 6 or so years ago.
We went to Salt Lake City, where we were taught to ski and immediately let
loose on all the greens and blues you could ask for. Of course, some of the
adults were less capable at skiing than the newly taught 12 year old that I
was; when I was going down a very easy green slope, some lady who apparently
didn’t know how to slow down or turn ran into me from behind and knocked me
down. Thankfully, my landing didn’t hurt…since it was snow.
Later, as I was
getting on a lift with three other people, another incident happened. The four
of us had advanced to the line where the ski lift picks you up, and all of the
sudden, a little bit of time before the chair was to arrive, another lady
scoots forward to join us in our chair, pushing herself in between me and
another person. I was, of course, on the edge of the concrete platform (about
1.5 feet above the ground), and so I fell off the platform. They had to stop
the lift for a second, and I can remember seeing some of my family in the chair
ahead of me looking back and wondering why the lift stopped, only to find me on
the ground. The best part of the whole experience was that once I had been
added on to the same chair with the three four other people, the lady
who knocked me off the platform didn’t even apologize. Either way, these were
funny stories I had from skiing that I shared with Denily.
Tailing off of
that subject, Denily and I talked about mountains. As a resident of Chattanooga,
the best city ever basically, I love mountains. We are surrounded by them, and
while they are not huge mountains like you would find in Colorado, they make
for an awesome addition to an already awesome city. I can go out in the woods
for hours and know how to get from place to place by following streams of
water. Denily, of course, has some significant mountains surrounding Caracas,
her city. She has climbed them several times, but recently, they added a cable
car that takes you to the top of the surrounding mountains. She feels that this
is cheating and really takes the joy out of climbing the peaks. I completely
agree.
While Denily has
been to some relatively high elevations, she has not been high enough to
experience altitude sickness. I told her about the trip I made to Peru about
two years ago and how tired you feel when you run around at high altitude. Naturally,
I had to explain the concept of the hematocrit and erithropoetin to show her
the adaptations of the human body to higher altitudes…but since I know we all
know about that, I won’t worry about explaining it on here…
So yeah, 6
meetings, fun and done! Until I write up the 7th one in the next few
days, I hope you are doing well, dear reader (if you even exist). I know you
don’t really exist, or if you do exist, you didn’t make it this far in this
terribly long blog post. But either way, thank you invisible reader.
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