Ice skating was one of the early additions to my list. Full disclosure, I have been before, but only on synthetic ice, never on the real, frozen deal. So when my friend invited us to go with her husband and little girl, I jumped at the chance.
The ice skating rink in Frankfurt is where we saw the ice hockey a few weeks ago, but what I didn’t realise is that they also have an outside rink. Our friend’s little girl was quite excited about going on this, and I have to admit, it looked really cool, but as we were all relative beginners and there were no barriers to hold on to, we gave it a wide berth.
Heading to the safety of the indoor ice rink, complete with barriers of course, we encountered our first issue before we even made it to the ice – how to walk with the flipping ice skates on. Seriously, this felt so weird, like I was walking on a weird tightrope. I don’t know how people made it look so easy! I soon got used to the feeling when we made it to the ice.
Oh god, it was so hard. For the first two laps, I daren’t let go of the side. Whilst everybody else skated off, our friend’s little girl doing spins and all sorts, I slowly, so painfully slowly, built up a bit more confident and started to let go more and more.
I never managed a full lap without holding on, despite my little coach’s best efforts of tough love (“No touching the sides Hannah!”), but I was close. We were there around two hours before quite literally being kicked off the ice by an over-zealous worker. I was exhausted but ecstatic – I’d had so much fun, felt a bit more graceful than I looked, and to absolutely everybody’s surprise, didn’t fall over. I’ll definitely be going back, maybe next time I’ll make it outside…
New Day, New Thing 