By Isabella P, Year 10 Journalist Leader

This half term, students from Year 8, 9 and 10 flew to Saalbach in Austria to enjoy a week of skiing. With 69 pupils, slopes of up to 6 km and sunny weather, it was a spectacular trip. With five hours of skiing every day on the thick snow plus snowy walks, lunches, a great pizza evening, quiz night and more, there was plenty to keep everyone happily busy.

These are some of our year group’s favourite memories and top tips for students going on future trips.

Top tips by Year 10 on surviving a ski trip:

Prepare for a domino effect

When peacefully skiing down in a line following your ski instructor, all you need is for one person to fall. What follows can only be described as human dominos on the side of a mountain. When asked what they found most amusing whilst skiing, many of the Year 10s recalled the times they ended up in heaps, tangled up with their friends and the odd ski zooming off down the mountain without the skier attached.

“Don’t bail on a jump midair”

Speeding down the slopes at over 50mph, the advanced group covered all of the slopes on St Michael and St Christoph by Thursday. With all of the group parallel skiing and learning to carve, we often did the snow park jumps, seeing who could safely get the highest! Despite a couple of hard falls which our loving friends filmed  (thankfully no-one was injured), we were really proud of ourselves by the end – speeding over jumps to Rihanna with your friends cheering you on at the top of a mountain is one of best feelings! Looking back, one person’s top tip is “don’t bail on a jump midair and do an undignified running motion before rolling onto the group”. I think they spoke from experience!

Learn some essential German words

Learn some essential German words like, ‘no’, ‘where’ and most importantly ‘I don’t understand’. Having landed in Austria with nearly 70 pupils plus staff, Ms Munro-Hall, equipped with folders full of documentation, arrived to only one bus, and a non-English speaking driver. After smooth sailing through security and luggage and minimal sleep since 2am, we were faced with our first problem. There was only one bus and it was unclear to which of the two hotels it was going. Julia and Eve from Year 10 were enlisted to help with translation and after multiple phone calls to the travel company, self doubt as to whether they wanted to continue with GCSE German, we were on our way!

Don’t sit down on a T-lift and don’t be the cause of a human avalanche

As some of us found out, the fastest way to fall on a T-bar is to sit on it. Completely counter intuitively, “do not sit on the seat-like-thing.” A T-bar is something many of us had not tackled before, and required you not to fall as well as the person next to you not to. As you can imagine, this doubled the odds of falling and one person fell over 6 times often taking their friend down too. As Maya remembers,”One member of our group fell, dragging the other person off, and wiping out the following 10 people.” Eleanor adds,”We were then shown up by 5 year olds who were faultlessly going up with only one hand!”

Bring snacks and the odd cucumber

A ski trip is never complete without an endless supply of snacks. Jasmine even brought two whole cucumbers with her! At 2:30am on the day of our departure, she was happily munching away but did get stopped at security for what they believed was an abnormally long water bottle. One of the cucumbers even spent the week in a pile of snow on the balcony, under the Austrian stars and half of it came all the way back home! Down the road from the Year 10 hotel was a Spar and German Aldi locally called Hofer. We bought a lot of sweets and tried so many German candies, many of which were recommended by our ski instructors!

Bring extra clothes and underwear

On the night before we were due to fly, our flight was cancelled. With strikes in Munich and Vienna, over 300,000 people were searching for flights on what is the busiest weekend for travelling in the year. Most of us were able to look on the bright side and make the most of another day in the Austrian mountains. Mr Lamagna even gave us some mini Maths lessons in preparation for our spring test the following week! In the end, we all headed out to our favourite restaurant, had the biggest snowball fight of the week and slid around in a mini sledge!

A big thank you to our teachers for a great week!