How NOT to make friends in Garmisch

I'll tell you how. You dress up in winter clothes, put on strange shoes and skis, and lurch over to the cross-country piste to have your first lesson. You are accompanied by an accomplished teacher, who sets you all manner of tasks in order to make you acquire the art of skating, which is a bit like inlining, but on skis. This is all fine, but the piste is overcrowded and more confident skiers come from behind and in front and seem to have forgotten what it is like to be a beginner. I've never been sworn at so much in my life! The disadvantage, compared with downhill skiing, is that traffic goes both ways, rather than one way, i.e. down the hill.

We are off this afternoon to try out a less-frequented piste, in the hope that we won't annoy too many people, and that we might cement our skills from yesterday. Gaia is already worried that we might be spotted by people from the village, but we feel secure in the knowledge that we are already regarded as completely loopy, or plem plem, as the Germans so neatly put it. So it actually doesn't matter what we do any more.