I'm not a very good skier. I had a few lessons, so I'll fall over just every minute or so.
Anyway, the key to learning how to ski is that you learn how to stop. If you can't stop, basically all bets are off. Well, to stop, you need to twist your legs so that the skis form a V-shape. The tips need to be closer than the backs of the skis, otherwise your left leg will go left, and your right leg will go right. Kinda funny, but not very useful. The way you put your skis is described as a "pizza", referring to a pizza slice.
So, twist your knees inward to slow down, twist them outward again to get the skis more parallel, and thus go faster. Easy enough.
Just as I had mastered this (somewhat), I suddenly needed to learn how to turn. This is a rather counter intuitive thing. To go left, you shift your weight to the right and the other way around. I needed to unlearn something that was wired in my brain somehow.

Anyway, while I was learning this, I was wondering why I had to do this in the first place. Why coudn't I continue with the pizza thing, since it was going so well?

Well it's obvious! Once you realize it, of course. Doing pizzas was nice and well on the kiddie slopes that I was practicing on, but would not slow me down sufficiently on any real slopes. Gravity defeats the pizza, so to speak. Turning on steep slopes transforms the steep slopes into not so steep slopes, since you are skiing parallel to the mountain.

I guess this very basic and elementary fact is so obvious, that nobody ever bothers to mention it. At least, nobody mentioned it to me.

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