Day 59: ESPN Winter X Games!

Day: Thursday 27th January 2011
Temps: WARM!

After sorting out my board & handing back the pro rental for my real board & returning the rental boots I went pretty much all day to the Winter X games.
It was fully decked out with stadiums/podiums/stages. Heaps of media. Huuuuuge half pipe & jumps & snow mobile jump courses & promo stalls giving away lots of free stuff. Was soo cool!
Basically kept walking around entering any competitions I could & getting as many freebies as I could.
Watched a bit of the snow mobiling. Wow. Those guys are crazy. When you see it in real life you get a sense for just how crazy the tricks are. They get sooooo much air and goo soo fast and literally jump right off the snow mobile then have to try and grab it again before they land. Very cool to watch.
There was some skiiers doing jumps in the halfpipe too which was fun to watch.

I went back to the hostel for a bit of lunch & relax & ended up meeting an aussie who just arrived who was my age. Had a goood chat to him & we got along quite well very similar in tastes. Anyways we went back out to the X-games for the night time events. The finals of the snowmobiling were even more epic than the practices that i saw this morning. And we managed to watch the Mens Halfpipe snowboarding. There were the 16 worlds best snowboarders there doing as bigas tricks as they could to try and win. We managed to get access to go right next to the half pipe up the stairs so when a boarder came up he did his entire spins & sommersaults & tricks right in front of you it was soo amazing. Shaun White is probably the biggest name and he was there & he won (unsurprisingly). It's just a celebrity but we were literally 3m away from him and hes such a big name that thats gotta count for something lol.

We then navigated the huuuge crowds (apparently there were nearly 80K people there, and it was the biggest Thursday of the event Ever) and got the free shuttle back into town. We found a pub whose kitchen was still open & had dinner & a few beers & chatted to a few promo girls which was fun. After dinner we basically bar hopped & just had a good night in general. Still strange though, after sun down the younger crowd seems hard to find here. I guess they're all staying in condos or something with all their mates maybe & so don't end up going out.