Thrills and spills are a downhill experience

Skiers prepare for their last run of the day at dusk, as the sky morphs from blue to pale yellow and then pink, at Beijing's Nanshan Ski Resort. She went snowboarding with me under my elaborated descriptions of a newfound interest in snow sports, spurred on partly by the highly romanticized portrayal from Vladimir Nabokov's short story Wingstroke. "Hands nonchalantly thrust into the pockets of her leather jacket and her left ski slightly advanced, she sped off down the slope, ever faster, scarf flying, amid sprays of powdered snow," he wrote. Simply by combining the snowy hill, a couple of boards and the law of gravity, coldness is no longer an annual torment, and snow is not something that prevents people from going out, but an ideal environment that can be made use of to go even faster.