#158. Ski Party (Saturday, February 22, 2025)
What was your best day…of having a new experience feel totally normal?
Every winter, as per Canadian tradition, a large group from my institution organizes a weekend trip to Mont Tremblant in Quebec, about two hours away. The invite list was super-secretive. You basically had to be a domestic or international economist who was in the know, a research assistant who was in the know, or someone else at the institution who was really in the know through several different channels.
Naturally, as a financial-markets non-RA who had spent most of my life firmly in the “never in the know” category, I was not on the list. But a month before this, Tian Wu and Ryan House from Happy Hour—researchers from financial stability and my department, respectively—decide we’re going to crash the party anyway. So Tian goes ahead and rents a cabin for two nights, for us three and both of their partners, Florentyna and Teodora (not at our institution). Yeah, so I was the fifth wheel, but excited nonetheless.
Right after work Friday, we leave in Ryan’s truck, get lost a few times on side roads, buy our beer at a tiny convenience store in the middle of nowhere, and eventually reach our spacious cabin with a mountain view from the kitchen balcony. That whole night feels oddly domestic; Tian has brought all the hot pot equipment and ingredients, so we spend two hours working through absurd quantities of broth, lamb, and random vegetables. Enzo (Italian researcher from domestic) joins us halfway through, tells us that the research assistants, most of whom had taken Friday off for an extra ski day, are already having their own party. But we’re so comfortable where we are, that the six of us end up just drinking and chatting all the way past midnight. (Embarrassingly, given how recent this was, I can barely remember what we talked about.)
The next day, we take the shuttle to the ski slopes. Now, I’m not actually a skier. Or, more specifically, not an alpine skier.1 So instead, I join a smaller group of economists to cross-country ski along this deep, winding forest path. Except, since two of them are pros and three are beginners, I end up doing the route essentially alone. It’s a good two hours, during which I legitimately come close to injuring myself a few times, slipping on small hills because I hadn’t expected the rented skis to be so slick.2 Eventually I reach the endpoint: some random fancy hotel and side street that I’m not even sure is still part of Mont Tremblant. The hotel staff aren’t very helpful on where I am, so I do the only thing I can think of: ski the same two hours back.
Once I’m done, I meet everyone at the renowned après-ski bar Le P’tit Caribou. Downstairs is a full bar; upstairs has a legit nightclub vibe, with skiers packed shoulder to shoulder, jumping and singing—mostly in French—to a DJ at five in the afternoon.
From there, we do another hot pot dinner, then head over to the “main” research assistant cabin for the big Saturday night house party. And despite the super-secretive invite list, there must be at least sixty people there—most of whom I know by this point. Nothing specific dominates the night: a lot of drinking, a lot of dancing—or vague attempts at it—in a cramped space, blowing a two-cup lead in flip cup, hearing Gordon’s long story about recently getting into Penn’s prestigious economics PhD program, then prancing through fresh snow with Gordon and Enzo after 2:00 A.M. and overshooting my cabin by two blocks.
And as I settle in that night for a long-overdue sleep, I realize the significance of this. I’d spent childhood, college, and my working years hearing about friends going on overnight ski trips—equal parts extreme skiing and extreme partying. It had always seemed like some common cultural ritual I was permanently on the outside of. And here I was, at thirty-five, doing it for the first time.
And best of all, it didn’t even feel like a big deal.
- The first and only time I tried alpine skiing in high school, I was already at my full height and—quite reasonably, I thought—terrified of falling and breaking something. Later gruesome ski-injury stories only reinforced that. Somehow, everyone telling me “it’s so fun” never had the same effect.
- Ryan’s truck had no room for my own skis. The pair I normally used three or four times a winter had, as far as I know, not been waxed once in the twenty-one years I’d owned them. So my frame of reference for how slick skis were supposed to be was wildly off.