Ice Skating by Aven

In the mall near our house, we saw an ice skating rink! From the outside, it looked quite small, about the size of an average living room. I saw some people having lots of fun and I wanted to try it, but we had to go home. A day or two later, Dad and I were at the mall to see Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and found that the theater was full. So instead, we went to check out the ice skating rink. We went inside and paid for a half hour. A woman was there to put on some skates and tie them for you. I got out on the rink and more or less “walked” across the rink. Something was different. I tried to skate back across the rink, but my skates kept slipping out to the side instead of going straight ahead.

After a while I started noticing all the skate marks on the ice, which makes sense because I was having a hard time imagining a mini-Zamboni going up and down that tiny rink. I also noticed that it wasn’t as cold as it should be to keep ice frozen. So, I reached down to see how cold it was and was shocked to find that it was not ice at all, but he whole rink was made out of plastic! Can you believe it? Plastic! I was ice-skating on plastic! And it was all icky and oily too! After about five minutes, the rink attendant noticed that I was having trouble, so he came to help me out. I soon learned that I needed to push more to the back than to the side, and to make bigger “walking forward” motions. 

This guy, about 17 or 18 I’d guess, decided that I needed my skates sharpened. He took me over to some sort of skate-sharpening machine. After my skates were all nice and sharp he took me out on the plastic again. My feet started to hurt, so I got out of my skates and bought a bottle of water.

If you find yourself in India, plastic-skating is not one of the things you should do. It’s so different from ice-skating on so many levels, and the rink is so small that even if it were possible to go over two miles an hour, it wouldn’t be much fun anyway.