Waking up at half past four in the morning and spending our only day off school rolling down a mountain until we had snow coming out of our every orifice was definitely my cousin Shadi’s idea. She was thirteen and I eleven and somehow she had got it into her head that the only way we could get out of spending our every weekend with our grandparents was to start skiing! So we did. The first year was terrible. I could not ski to save my life and to make matters worse, I looked like this:

Nice!

 

This season I was mostly wearing: outfits that were three sizes too big for me, very old skis with most of the colour chipped off them and a lovely pair of goggles (shudders)

The father of my good friend Roshanak, Amoo Farid once told me this anecdote. He said one day he was passing the beginners' ski slope and he saw an instructor trying to teach an English lady to ski. Now for going slower, the beginners are taught to point the tips of their skis towards each other and open the ends. In Farsi this is called a Hasht; the number eight, which looks like this: ^ But this poor lady did not speak Farsi and so had no idea what the man shouting at her: ‘Hasht kon’ ‘Do the hasht’ wanted her to do. As she got dangerously close to a group of kids and was about to run them over, the instructor suddenly had a bright idea. ‘Madam’ He shouted, ‘Madam do 8’ which incidentally (as illustrated above) is what I looked like I was trying to do for the whole of my first year.

The good thing about looking like that however is that there is only room for improvement and as I’m sure you will agree, here in the second year I’m looking a lot cooler.

 

This season I was mostly wearing: a big pair of jeans with two tracksuit bottoms underneath, a pink and white hand-me-down jacket from my cousin in Canada, pink sweater with matching earmuffs and a pair of fake Ray Bans from Tajrish bazaar, made with real glass so if you were not the patient type to just wait until the nonexistent UV protection did its thing and made you go blind gradually, you had the option of getting it all over and done with very quickly by either falling flat on your face or simply asking someone to give you a nice punch in the eyes area.

 

This season I was mostly wearing: my dad’s clothes with a pair of fluorescent pink gloves to add a touch of much needed femininity.

And finally the piesta resistance!
Ok those trousers were far too small for me but they were definitely an improvement from all those really huge ones I had been wearing up until then.

 

I know what you’re thinking, ‘How can this human embodiment of cool, end up becoming a geeky blogger?!’ Well my friend I’m afraid I can’t help you there as I myself am just as baffled about this as you are ‘,:-\