Martin McDowell's Blog

The Birmingham Snowdome is actually a big building in the city of Tamworth housing a swimming pool, skating arena and other stuff but the biggest attraction is the snow arena in a shape of the letter “L” where you take a conveyor belt up the longer part of the letter “L” then change over to a smaller part that is perpendicular to the first one. The slope is 170m long and the snowdome is covered by, what they call, “real” snow. In Slovenian terms this is actually artificial snow as it the real snow is only the one that falls from the sky. But if you said artificial snow in the UK, you would probably be meaning some sort of artificial plastic mass for witch to ski/board on. The ski slope is not very long as you might imagine but it beats having to travel abroad and you cannot ski in Austria during the summer (usually). For those who have skied at Kranjska gora the ski piste in the Snowdome is about half the length of the “Tinkara” piste.

One there I was surprised to see how many boarders there were. The last time I was skiinng, which was on the ski resort of Krvavec, there were only a few boarders and the majority were still skiers. Here, at the Snowdome, it was the other way round. Most of the skiers were “slightly older” so that made me feel all nice and fuzzy (NOT) – that and the fact I was kept being called a “queer” by my two boarding flatmates (the tossers). Well, at least I beat them at the downhill race TWICE so all is not lost for us skiers.