#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, my institution organizes a weekend trip to Mont Tremblant in Quebec (about two hours away). And the invite list was super-secretive. You either had to be an economist in either the domestic or international teams who was in the know, a research assistant (in any department) who was in the know, or any other person at the institution who was really in the know through at least three different channels.

Naturally, as a financial markets non-research assistant who firmly fell in the “never in the know” category throughout my life, 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 that we’re going to crash the party anyways. 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 on Friday we leave in Ryan’s truck, get lost a few times on some side roads, pick up all our beer at this small convenience store in the middle of nowhere, then arrive at our spacious residence—with a nice view of the mountains from the kitchen balcony. That whole night feels oddly domestic; Tao has brought all the hot pot equipment and ingredients, so we savor liters upon liters of soup and lamb meat and random vegetables for two hours. Enzo (Italian researcher from domestic) joins us halfway through, tells us that the research assistants—most of whom took the day off to do an extra day of skiing—are having their party right now. But we’re so comfortable where we are, that the six of us end up just drinking and chatting all the way past midnight. (It’s embarrassing given the recency, but I can barely recall about what.)

We get up bright and early the next day to take the shuttle to the ski slopes. Now, I’m not actually a skier. Or, more specifically, not an alpine skier.¹ So I 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—where I legitimately risk injury a few times by slipping and falling on small hills because I didn’t expect my rented skis to be so slick²—before I reach the endpoint at a random fancy hotel and side street that I’m not even sure is part of Mont Tremblant. The staff at this fancy hotel has no idea to get back; so, after giving them my phone to charge up for a full hour (the socket in my cabin wasn’t working), I do the only thing I can do to get un-lost and ski back the two hours the way I came.

Once I’m done, I meet up with everyone at the renowned apres-ski bar, Le P’tit Caribou, which has a full bar area downstairs and has a legit nightclub vibe on the main floor, with apres-skiers shoulder to shoulder in the space jumping and singing (mostly in French) to a DJ spinning tunes at the front—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 others there—most of whom I know by this point. It’s a pretty wild party: nothing much stands out, except a lot of drinking, a lot of dancing (or vague attempts to dance) in a cramped space, blowing a two-cup lead in flip-cup, hearing the long story from Gordon of how he recently got into the prestigious Penn Economic PhD program, then prancing out into a large blanket of freshly-fallen snow with Gordon and Enzo at two hours past midnight and overshooting my cabin by two blocks.

And as I settle in that night for a long-overdue sleep, I realized the significance of this. I’d heard all through childhood and college years and my working years about so many friends going on overnight ski trips—of equal parts extreme skiing and extreme partying. Like it was a common cultural activity I’d been eternally 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 in high school, I was already at my full height and so (justifiably) afraid of falling and breaking my bones that I never got comfortable. Many gruesome injury stories I heard about in later years solidified my mind about never trying it again (hearing “it’s so fun” from everybody strangely didn’t have the same effect).
I had to rent because Ryan’s truck had no room. The one pair I owned to use for cross-country at the local slopes about three or four times a winter, I don’t think I ever got waxed in the twenty-one years since I acquired them. So my frame of reference was way off.