Salt Lake City, Utah.

I did promise photos from my Spring break trip, so the following are those from my 1st and 2nd day(snowboarding,ouch.) of my 8-day sorta whirlwind trip across the whole of USA. I'll be spending the first 3 days in Salt Lake City, Utah, following which I would be headed to Vegas for 2 days and then I'll be going to Chicago to visit Tengkok for the last 3 days.

This was my suitcase all packed and ready to go on the morning of my flight.
I'm so glad mommy told me to bring a cabin trolley instead of a handcarry (which I sort of was insisting to bring) because if I did not have this, I'd had to have checked in my large large baggage.

Goes to show your parent's advice is always correct! ;)

I was also very lucky because the pants that Pa told me to bring to the states (he said they were nice to sleep in !) turned out to be Ski Pants! Aha, so I didn't have to waste $ get any over here..

Also, Si, thank you SO much for your molton brown shampoo and body wash. ha. They're just the right size to bring on the trip cos I didn't have any travel size shampoo and body wash!

Ok, hmm, weird start to the blog entry.

JFK terminal 2 from which I took the delta flight out.

This is Dulles airport in Washington D.C. - the first stopover before I caught a connecting flight to SLC.

The funny thing is that when I was boarding the flight from JFK to Dulles, the attendant who was collecting the boarding pass said to me "Are you headed to Duh-less?"
I thought he was saying, Dallas, which is in Texas, so I was like, "er... nope? I'm headed to Washington D.C.". I had NO idea that DULLES was pronounced as 'DUH-LESS' - I always thought it was 'DUE-LES' or something.
Imagine my embarrasment.

Random Burger. Whatever.

That's the main terminal behind

So while I was in Dulles, I saw this air officer who had a german shepherd with him. From this picture, you can't really tell the size of the dog.

I went up to chat to the airport officer and he was all friendly, and he said
"Well, we didn't expect him to grow to be so big!"

Well, that dog I tell you, is one huge-ass german Shepherd.
Even Mei jie's queenie was no match at all.

Look how big that dog is compared to the officer.
AMAZING.

When the dog stood up to stretch (you can see it yawning there), it was phenomenal.
The dog's height reached up to his waist. And that officer is not a short guy at all.

Wow.
Zheyi, get a huge dog like that.
But it would stink big time in Singapore.
hmmm.

The flight to Salt Lake City was long.
And tiring.
But as we reached SLC, my gosh, nothing can describe how
AMAZINGLY BEAUTIFUL
the sight was.

These pictures do not do justice to the view.
People in the plane were all just craning their necks to get a glimpse of the view.
I was seated at the window but it was in a weird position, so yea, I too almost had a cramp just to get a good gorgeous complete view.

Look at those mountain ranges man.
Gorgeous.

Passengers looking out.
The sun was seeting from the other side of the plane so the whole cabin was tinged orange.
It was such an amazing experience.

See the shadows of the mountains?
The setting sun cast all shades of pink, orange and purple on the mountains.
It was breath taking.

To land, the plane circled the airport for quite a bit. So I also got a view of the setting sun.

Salt Lake City Airport. Landed!

An advertisement at the airport for the Ski resort area where I was headed.

Ok, so for these 3 days that I'm in Utah, I'll be spending them with Zach who is Wei Kor's friend, and we'll be staying at Zach's other friend, Michael's place.

It was really really really nice of Michael to let me stay there, and his place is SO amazingly beautiful and opulent.

Icecles forming. It's actually not really cold here, around 2-3 degress celcius, so I'm quite amazed that there's still so much snow to ski/snowboard on. But it makes for comfortable snowboarding though!

This is in Michael's apartment's kitche. I thought it was a cupboard , until,

tada! It's a camouflaged fridge!

Now guess what this is.

Tada! A dish washer!

So this is the bedroom where Zach and I are sleeping in.
I sleep on the bed on the right..

This is the living area, with a super huge, but superbly awkwardly positioned TV.
I was telling Zach maybe it's cos it maximizes the length from the TV - it's diagonal so you won't spoil your eyes! Lame la me.

The TV above the Fire place.

This is the kitchen area... very country.

The morning of the second day. The green thing in the middle , that's one of the ski lifts.
We didn't take this one though.

Zach and Michael at an info booth.

Apparently SLC is one of the best places to go ski in the US, so it's no surprise that the Canyons is one huge ass ski resort.

There are a few hotel developments within the resort, and it has one humongous sorta theme parkish ski area, with a main gondola which brings u up to the sort-of a base area, and then a network of ski lifts bringing you up to several ski slopes of various standards.
Very fun and huge place.

On the main gondola.

This was our Snowboard instructor, Kristi.
Zach and I decided to sign up for a snowboard lesson because we really had no idea how to snow board at all. Michael had gone off to ski and we were sorta stuck with rented snowboards, snow shoes and with no idea of how to use them at all. The rest of the day would have been wasted if we did not at least know the basics.
That lesson however, was freakingly expensive! It was US72.50 per person (SGD$111.59 , wtf, the USD is back to 1.54! :( ) for an hour , even more ex than like piano lessons. oh well.
Necessary evil.

Miniature snow man that I made (about 3 cm. ha)

This was a prelude to the amount of falling down that I had to do for the day.
heh.

The ski lift up to the supposed beginner slope. heh.
We should have suspected something cos it was so high up!

Random, but we had our lunch on the top of the mountain! there was like one lone hut there with this really nice restaurant. Amazing.

The view is gorgeous right?
But guess what! that cliff like thing there, that's the beginnig of a ski slope.
S-C-A-R-Y.
Didn't even dare go too near it least I drop down.

This was supposed to be like a beginner slope, but it proved too difficult for us.
It was really scary cos it's easy to fall over on the board, and if you can't control it, well, you fall into like a valley. LOL. ok, maybe not a valley but yea, some steep slope.

So u see how Zach is sitting? yes, that's about how we got through about 3/4 of the ski slope. Moving down on all fours! hahaha. But yea, I tried to snow board properly and fell so many times while doing that. My tailbone now is superbly painful. The falls are no joke man, u fall backwards and ur tail bone gets hit, and the pain just almost goes right up to your head.

The gorgeous view from the gondola on the way back.

Tomorrow, I'M GOING TO OWN THE SLOPE ( yeaaaaaaaaa. )

Seeya!

Missing everyone at home !