Four weeks ago I started winter break! The 3rd(of 4) two week break in the France school year.
Because Chantal(my host mom) and Fabrice(my host dad) were both out of town, I went back to Yzabel and Claude's house. The first morning we left for our voyage .I kept myself entertained by listing to tedtalks on the four hour drive there. way. I was pretty psyched because I'd been missing snow and the closer we got the more snow there was. Part of the drive was through mountains and all the snow on the trees and stuff was really rockin. We stayed with Claude's brother George, and his family who are all wonderful people.The next morning we got our skiing clothes on, got in the cars and drove the 30ish minutes to a ski station . On the way there, there was hardly any snow,so we were worried we wouldn't be able to ski after all. But, just outside of the town(where the station was) we started seeing more and more snow!
It was my first time skiing and I definitely had a lot to learn. I couldn't get the right turn or the stop down and apparently both are pretty important... unless you want to either only go straight, which makes you go rather fast, or you run into the guard net a lot. So I would start going downhill, pick up speed, and purposely fall over to stop.
The next day ,Claude, Yzabel, Canelle, and I went to a nearby town ,Le Puy-en-Velay. It was pretty cool , lot of old architecture, and a really nifty statue/monument, 'Notre-Dame de France'.
Here's the wiki page: awesomeness It was the biggest baby Jesus I'd ever seen.
Tuesday afternoon we went back to Les Arcs.
Wednesday I took the train to Cannes to see Vanessa and two of her friends: Hannah from Austria and Veronica from Columbia(the country). The night before Yzabel told me it was supposed to snow in Cannes Wednesday.Generally when snow is announced in southern France, it's a flurry or maybe even a dusting , so I wasn't worried. While on the train I looked outside and saw white on the ground. The closer I got , the more and more snow I saw. Due to the several inches of snow, no buses(Vanessa's mode of transit) were running in the Cannes area , so she could only stay a couple of hours. Luckily,we did have time to walk to the beach and build a snowman! something that i don't think many people can say they've done! There were a couple other people building snowmen, but ours was by far the best! It was so weird to see so much snow here, it's really rare. After making the snowman, we headed back to the gare(train station). They grabbed a train and I waited for a while(my train was about 2 years late due to the snow).At one point a train arrived for people who had been waiting literally 5 hours and everyone cheered. While people were boarding said train, there was a huge bang and flash(it sounded like a gun shot... sort of scared me). It came from the thing that connects to train to the power lines that run above it. The train station employees yelled for everyone to get off the train.I'm not sure if the group of people who had been waiting there all day got to leave soon after that,because my train arrived soon after , but I still felt bad that they had more delay.After vaccance I went back Fabrice and Chantal's.
Last weekend Chantal, Fabrice, and I went to a ski station "Faux d'Allos" in the alps.When we got there we rented skis and Fabrice started teaching me. This time I got shorter(easier?) skis than the first time I went so I was actually able to ski without falling for minutes at a time! About half way down one ski slope stopped at a dinner and met up with Fabrice and Chantal's friends.
let's just say that at this point I wasn't yet ready for the Olympics downhill, so their friends helped me out on the easy slopes. After going down the easy slopes on my own several times, I met up with Fabrice and his friends, and we headed to the blue(intermediate) slopes. After skiing we all went to this cabin that's co-owned by Chantal and Fabrice's friends. It was kinda of secluded from the rest of the station which was nice. On the front of the house there was a place that was in honor of the three people that got trapped in the cabin and died during an avalanche in 1981 ....that kinda made me nervous. The cabin was on the slope, so you couldn't see the back of the house due to the snow piled around it.
Anyways it was a pretty awesome weekend. It's cool that in 3 hours, you can drive from the coast to a ski resort.
Tuesday night we all had dinner at Fabrice and Chantal's, which was really nice, and Wednesday morning, we left for Italy. The train ride was two hours ,but the ride is all along the coast and really incredible, so it was cool. Italy was pretty nifty. The weather had turned back to it's old rainy self but it was still awesome!We went to this market place that had tons of different types of vendors: truffle, olive, fruit, silk flowers(?), and fish. The seafood section had live shrimp, but also live octopus, which looked quite tasty! Haha ,truthfully, if I bought a live octopus i would probably put it in a aquarium , name it bob, and keep it as a pet. I mean , how cool would it be to have a pet octopus? Went to a pasta shop, a couple chocolate stores, and ate real Italian pizza. It's crazy to think that I can leave for Italy in the morning and be back in time for dinner.
Being a translator is pretty fun. I was able to translate French to English fine, but going from Anglais to Francais was more difficult. I'm guessing I sounded like this when translating what my aunts were saying :" Likes Aunt Beth southern France and saids thanks to you for me family being". I think I generally got the point across though so thats good
It was awesome to have family around, I missed them.
Saturday I moved back to my first host family because my third family is having work done on their house. So I'll be staying at Claude and Yzabel's until the works is done on my next room, which is cool with me,Claude and Yzabel are great
Saturday after noon I hung out with Vanessa, Hannah, and Amanda(all other exchange students) in Nice.it was nice outside, so rather than seeing a movie, we walked around,ate pizza and nutella( not together) and hung out on the beach. On the train ride home I met to college graduates from the US who are helping out in English classes at a lycee here.It was kinda crazy enough to randomly meet two other Americans but on top of that they knew three RYE friends of mine.
Also: I'm really excited about Easter vacation (April 2nd -19th) because my parents and sisters are coming!!! I'm pretty much counting down by the minute (33,405... )
RandomFacts:
- They sell 5 kilo containers of nutella.
- My birthdays coming up in 8 months.
- There is a jar of salmon eggs in my host family's fridge.
- Sigourney Weaver says the word water ,'wortor'. This word is used a lot in the Planet Earth series.
- I'm slowly reading through Charlie in the Chocolate Factory in French.
- The train people rarely check to see if you actually have tickets, so lots of times I wish I just wouldn't have bought the ticket, I guess I'd probably feel bad if I didn't though...
- If you ever go to the cinema in France, you should know exactly how to get out of the weirdly laid out theater, so you can avoid being accused of going in to another movie, and then followed out of the building by employees.
Well that's my last month! I'll have new pictures up here :http://picasaweb.google.com/elitinkfort
Hope all is going well, thanks for reading!
PS: Send some questions that I can put in my next entry, I have a couple but not many, so send away. My email is elitinkfort@gmail.com.
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