Frigid January rain poured down on Florence's dark cobbled streets. We walked quickly down Via del Melarancio towards the train station to catch the 7:00 to Bologna, trying to avoid the ubiquitous puddles. Scores of Africans were selling umbrellas outside of Santa Maria Novella to people holding newspapers and jackets over their heads. We pulled our winter coats tightly around us to dull the jack knife wind. It was going to be good to get out of the city, I thought. Florence stinks when it rains.

The four of us got on the train. Will, Pat, Kat and me, Matt. We told Will we were going to change his name in his sleep so he wouldn't screw up our rhyme anymore. 'Hat' could work. He didn't seem concerned.

This was our first trip outside of Florence. We had only arrived two weeks before for our study abroad program at Lorenzo de' Medici, which encouraged its students to travel by not giving them classes on Fridays. So, on Thursday night, we went to the Alps to go skiing -- the Dolomites, to be precise.

We got to Trento, in the foothills of the Dolomites, around midnight. The city was deserted and cold. Will had made reservations at the Hotel Venezia, in Trento's main piazza. On the way, we passed a hotel on the left with a yellow sign of a horse.

The lobby of the Hotel Venezia was filled with tints of yellow. Will told the man at the desk that we had a reservation. The man checked the book and said, "Ah, yes. For two. But you are four." And? "And we cannot put four people into a room reserved for two." So? "So two of you can have the room." Only two? "Only two." And the others? "The others will have to find someplace else to sleep." But we had a reservation! "Yes. For two. But you are four." The four of us stormed out.

There was silence outside in the piazza. The wedding cake fountain in the middle of the square slept beneath a heavy moon, next to the duomo. Neptune stood fiercely with his trident above the empty pool. My hands were ice. We dropped our bags and wondered, "What now?" Kat and Pat went to check on a hostel they had read about that was down the street. It didn't open until March. So, what now? Then someone mentioned the hotel with the yellow horse.

We practically ran.

After knocking hysterically on the locked door, a little old woman in a yellow flowery dress opened the horse hotel. She shook her head, "After midnight, no!" She sliced the air sideways with her hands. Not good. Bad. Mean old woman. Mean. Then she looked around outside, smiled and whispered, "But you are lucky tonight." We fought to get through the door.

She said something about her husband and not being allowed to let people in after mezzanotte, but he wasn't here tonight, so there wasn't a problem. We thanked her ceaselessly as she showed us to our rooms. Then, almost as quickly as we had run into the hotel, we went back into the cold, starving, looking for food.

On the stone street behind the duomo we found an open tavern. The inside was like a mountain lodge -- wooden columns, wooden beams crossing below the roof, wooden tables, wooden chairs, every part of the structure was a shade of brown. The tablecloths were checkerboards of red and white with wooden candles standing on top. The drapes matched the tablecloths. The menus were in German.

"Did we cross the border?" I asked, perusing the menu section with wurst, wienerschnitzel and schweinefleisch, trying to discover a clue that would reveal what the food was. Everybody shrugged. After a few minutes, a blond waiter came to our table and greeted us, "Guten tag. Wie gehts?" Eyes darted across the table. Silence. Kat spoke up. "Umm, guten tag. Speaken, wait, umm, de Italiano?" The waiter opened his hand to Italian conversation. "Certo. Prego." Pat, Will and I shot each other glances and leaned in to throw whispers at Kat. "Idiot, we don't speak Italian. Ask him if he speaks English." Kat was reluctant, "But I just asked him if he spoke Italian." We hissed back, "Nobody told you to do that." She counterattacked, "I didn't see any of you saying anything!" Then Pat ended negotiations, "Ask him, fool!" "Fine! God!" Then she turned to our waiter, "Umm, parli..." "Yes I do."

It turns out that Northeastern Italy was under Austrian control until the end of World War I, when it was transferred to Italian hands. This explains the blond haired, blue eyed, fair skinned, German-speaking waiters running around wooden taverns serving schnitzel and sauerkraut with Aecht Schlenkerla beer in ceramic mugs so big that you could stick your head in them. Not that you would stick your head in, of course.

The next morning we said goodbye to the old woman in the flowery yellow dress (she still had it on) and went to the bus station to get on an empty blue bus that was going to Moena, a tiny village in the Dolomites about fifteen miles southeast of Bolzano. The bus ride was fine until we started going up into the mountains. Treachery lurked beyond every turn; many without walls or hope if a tire were to slip over the edge. It was dreadfully cold, but my hands still managed to sweat every time we swung around a curve overlooking endless crags falling to a northern Italian abyss.

Snow overtook the landscape as we entered the village. Houses that you only see on postcards from Switzerland were sitting in front of our eyes, snow on their steep roofs; smoke billowing from their chimneys. Wood stacks, piled in geometric configurations, were just to the sides of the houses, smothered in the stuff of winter wonderlands. Lofty pine trees cut white triangles into the grey sky.

We got off the bus.

Our hotel was a welcome surprise. Hotel Belvedere: three stars, a restaurant, a bar, a lounge, a gym, a health spa, around forty rooms, and totally empty. There were only four guests in the Belvedere, and you've already met them. 50,000 lire a night. That was less than twenty-five bucks a night for an entire hotel to ourselves. Not bad.

It was already late in the afternoon by the time we got to the hotel, so we decided on trying to find the slopes and figure out the Italian ski system instead of going up for a short run. The problem was finding the slopes. We had no map and no clue, just the kid working the hotel that didn't speak a word of English. Like a bad game of charades, Will did his best impression of a skier on the slopes, even adding the sound effects as he shifted his hips from left to right, "Swish, swish." Pat and Kat pretended to put on ski goggles and boots. The kid watched with a question mark frozen into his face. Then he smacked his hands and pointed at Will, "Sciare!" and made his hand take a nosedive, "Shhhhhooooooo." "Si si si si si! That! Dov'e?" He pointed up the road.

Florence and Rome are exquisite visual feasts, their art and culture carved from a divine hand. But the sheer beauty and magnitude of these mountains blows every da Vinci, Michelangelo and Rafael away. We were above the clouds, in the middle of peaks shimmering with blankets of white, looking down at cities and villages that had been transformed to mere shadows of pins, thousands of feet below. Beautiful doesn't do it justice. Powerful, majestic, awesome come closer. Intoxicating, mesmerizing, serenity, purity describe some of its effects and sensations. But words topple easily. Mountains don't.

The slopes were just a ten-minute walk from the hotel. We passed a valley to the left of the road, where we could see layers of clouds, one above and one below, as if we were between the fluffy sheets of the rockiest bed in the world. When we checked the lift schedule and prices, Pat, Kat and Will started saying things like, "Wow." "That's unbelievable." "Can that be right?" 30,000 lire for a lift ticket for a half-day. Fifteen dollars. "Is that good?" I asked, clueless. They replied in unison, "Yes."

The next morning we hopped down the stairs of the equipment room to the ski lift, ready to hit the slopes. A light haired, light skinned man with a cowboy hat and a thick mustache greeted us with a hearty, "Guten tag!" from behind the counter in front of stacks of skis and poles. We all returned the guten tag. "Ah! Americans!" He croaked, "Texas," pointing to his cowboy hat, "six days, 1982. New York, eight days, 1990. California, ten days, 2003. I cannot wait! Come, come! Where you from?" Pat did his Californian spiel. Will, Kat and I talked about North Carolina. "North Carolina!" he cried, "Horses! Do you drive horses?" We looked at each other. "I drive a Honda," I said. "What type horse is that?" "It's a car." "You no have a horse?" "No, no horse. I'm actually kind of scared of horses." The guy looked disappointed. Kat spoke up, "I rode a horse once." He smiled, "What type horse?" "Umm. Black. No, wait! Uh. Brown. It was a brown horse." He sighed, "So you need equipment?"

I looked at my little pink skis wondering if my friends had played some dirty trick on me. When the man asked me, "How good you are?" and I told him that I had less than no idea, minus zero, beyond clueless, my good friends told him to give me the slowest skis he had. He handed me pink skis with pink poles over the counter. My friends took the poles away from me and handed them back. "No poles. They'll only confuse you." I trusted them.

I crashed before we even started. The upside down "V" they told me to make with my skis didn't stop me from running into the poles of the chair lift. They had to stop their entire operations just to get me safely onto one of the chairs. Then we were off, into the desert of the Alps.

Snow started pouring down as we were lifted up the side of the mountain. Everything but the grey sky was white. As the platform approached, Will told me to let my skis slide against the ground before standing up. And once the skis were solidly on the ground, to use the momentum from the chair to push me forward.

My skis hit the ground and started to slide. I stood up and pushed myself away from the chair. I slid with ease. I was doing it -- I was skiing! Then I felt my balance start to slip away. My arms started flapping, trying to fly myself upright again. Mayday! Mayday! I'm going down. I repeat, I'm going down! The only support in sight was the Italian monitoring the chairs. He grabbed my jacket just in time and set me straight. I thanked him breathlessly; then I fell over. He took me by the arms and lifted me up, but my skis were unsteady, slipping out from under me. I grabbed at his jacket in desperation to pull myself up, but I started pulling both of us down, so he tossed my hands off of him, and I fell all by myself. Then he walked away, leaving me in the snow.

One of the problems of not having poles is that you can't push yourself all the way up after you've fallen. You've got to scrunch yourself up into a little ball on your side and try pushing yourself upright until your arms barely reach the ground. Then comes the final push, like trying to jump onto a brick wall -- too much and you'll fall over the side; too little and you jump right into the bricks, falling back where you came from. It's a movement that requires finesse. Something I completely lacked.

After numerous attempts, I gave up trying to get to my feet. Instead, I tried to take my skis off. No luck. They were stuck. Will had to unclick them from my boots and help me to my feet. We walked towards the little cabin where they were serving hot chocolate and espresso. I sat down on one of the benches outside and watched as my so-called friends left me to go up to the intermediate runs, saying, "Practice on the baby slope in front of the cabin, then try the bunny slopes."

And practice I did. Ski fifty feet down a one-degree slope, crash to stop, walk sideways to get back to the top, and then do it again. I did it again. And again. And again.

And then I got bored. Going on another chair lift to get to the bunny slopes scared me, but I didn't want to wait around until others were ready to go. Time needed to be killed. So I went to the lift, managing not to crash when I got on.

Peril awaited as I flew off the chair onto the slopes. Bunny slopes… not so much. They were more like black widow slopes, or cobra slopes, or you're-going-to-die slopes. Straight down. No sooner had I gotten off the chair than I was headed right at the trees. I crashed to stop. I regrouped and tried to get up, but the pink skis had a mind of their own; they wanted to go down the mountain without my consent. I crashed to stop. Stupid skis. I tried again. This time I was able to get up and control the skis in the process. I started moving slowly down the mountain. Then, before I knew it, the pink skis and I started screaming down the slopes, out of control, like a drunken bullet. I needed to stop before I killed myself. So I crashed. And crashed. And crashed.

And so it went. Seconds of absurd free-fall followed by crashing. Crashing became synonymous with stopping. I waited until people weren't around to takeoff, not wanting to endanger the innocents. Little Italians skied around me as I lay wallowing in the snow after a wipeout. Girls sang at me in Italian from the chair lift. It wasn't uplifting.

I wanted to leave that nasty winter wonderland and those pink skis to go sit in a warm room where my hands wouldn't be soaked in icy gloves, where I wouldn't have to throw myself into the ground to stop moving, where I could stand up without worrying about falling off a mountain. But there were no shortcuts. There was nowhere to go but down.

Slowly, I made my way down the mountain, arriving at the little cabin two hours later. After asking around, I found out that the run usually takes no more than ten minutes.

I could barely move the next day. My legs were so sore that I had to swing them up and down stairs because I couldn't bend them at the knee. But I wasn't the only one walking like a penguin. Everyone else was waddling too.

The only bus back to Trento was at 1:20. At around 12:30, we hobbled downhill with all of our luggage to a pizzeria to get something to eat before the sinuous ride. The bus stop was just up the road. Nobody had a watch, so we had to keep asking the waiter for the time. Then Will said he forgot something back at the hotel. It was 1:00. He had plenty of time.

1:05 came and went. No Will. 1:10 came and went. No Will. 1:15 arrived and the three of us decided that Will could handle himself. We paid in a rush and dragged our luggage to the door just in time to see the bus fly by.

We chased after the bus down the hill, screaming for it to stop. After a few seconds, the bus disappeared around a corner. We kept running, our bags banging against our backs and our legs. My lungs were burning with freezing air and my legs were burning with stabbing pain as we tore around the corner. And there it was! The bus was pulled off to the side of the road with its break lights glowing red. It was stopped! We ran up the side of the bus, panting, and then crawled up the stairs.

Will was sitting in the back with a smug look on his face. We didn't ask. We didn't care.

And six hours later, when we got back to Florence, it was still raining.

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