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When I was an eighteen-year old my cousins who lived in Switzerland because of my uncle's job invited me over for a month in January. They lived in Geneva and I didn't speak any French then. Since I am a Brazilian from Rio de Janeiro, I left for my cousins' in the middle of the Summer, which is to say there was a temperature gap of about forty degrees between the two cities at that specific moment. Anyway, there were lots of different things to do over there, but the one thing I was eager to try was to go skiing. In fact, I immediately accepted their invitation to one of the ski resorts nearby and liked the program on that weekend so much that I couldn't wait for the next weekend to go and visit yet another of the ski resorts around Geneva. That's when my uncle told me I didn't have to wait at all because there was a daily bus service to many of the ski areas to be seen. All I had to do was get up early in the morning with my cousins and, instead of going to school with them, head to the bus station and enjoy a weekday skiing. I was really excited about the idea and got to Le Pras de Lys, a ski resort less than an hour form Geneva, all by myself. The first thing that struck me was how empty the place was. All that weekend crowd had vanished and what I found out was an extremely beautiful landscape. The tracks were covered with the whitest fluffy snow and the deep blue of the sky was a kind of gift to my eyes whenever I, with my poor ability, fell off once again. Actually, since it was only the second time I went skiing in my life, that happened more often than I would like to admit, but didn't stop me from trying harder and harder until I could tell I had made a little progress. At that point, after a huge French lunch at the local restaurant, I realized I had only a couple of hours more to ski and rushed onto one of the lifts to the track I thought would be just as easy as one of those I had been skiing all day long. To my surprise, however, the lift kept going up until I reached the very top of the mountain and realized the only way down was a... black track! I was appalled and just didn't know what to do, since I couldn't speak French and there were too few people around to ask for help. Fifteen minutes later I was on the verge of tears before that steepest slope and a couple just got off the lift. I had nothing to lose so I decided to beg them for instructions on what I had to do to reach back to the beginning without knowing how to ski. To my luck they could understand my body language and took less than one minute to teach me the basics of the sport: the distribution of my bodyweight over my skis, which would enable me to take control of both of them. Right after that the French couple took off and I had to put to practice what I had just been taught, which I did at first very carefully. However, my excitement about how I could do it as the quick lesson showed off good results, as well as the feeling of the cold wind on my face, encouraged me to let go of myself. I was experimenting a sensation, I thought, of total freedom. Then, I thought to myself, 'wow, I can do it! I'm going really fast, really faaaast...' At that very moment, everything became deep blue before my eyes. I was now facing the sky, having just just crumbled onto the snow.