seizième jour

Waking up today was as peacefull as ever..
Emma snuck up with the supper horn (thats right. I get called to supper with a horn :) ) and blasted me with its soothing sound bright and early this morning. I was equally as nice, by grabbing a ruler and chasing her with it. I landed a few goods smacks.

All my mornings this week have been a little off.. I woke up to a mysterious lady downstairs, who for some reason couldn't understand anything i was saying ( I started in french. Notta clue.. so i tried english.. then i just said some wierd words.. same look.) Turns out she is the cleaning lady, who has been on holiday and I havn't seen. I am told shes also not so bright.. which reassured me. My french actaully IS getting better, despite the "retard" looks the lady was shooting at me.

Emma and I were playing "guess who" , using simple phrases in english. Laurence played one round with me, where I asked if her person had freckles. Fuck holes she says, what are those? No joke. exactly fuckholes.. she knew what she said too. So we had a good laughm and she tried again. Fuckholes..then fuckholes fuckholes.. that word is just not happening for her, much to my amusment.

Snowboarding every other day is pretty easy, I think I could do it the rest of my life.. For lunch Emma and I usually pack pickles, cheese bread and a juice box. the kid will eat anything...Its great. We go through a crazy amount of pickles tho..

BINGO. thats right. I got to not just play, help organise it... TWICE. Both nights were slowwwww. I probably gave kisses to the whole down ( no exageration), but now that I think about it, really is no problem... No joke, every guy here from 20 on is good looking. And not just average, like turn your head damn gorgeous..
I have dropped Emma off at three friends houses, all who were coincidently answered by men.
I have also voluneeted to pick Emma up on all possible occasions....

Douzième Jour

I think you must need to grow up here to become accustomed to the huge amounts of wine and cheese consumed.
I don't think I am going to be doing any skiing today..

Last night we went over to a friends house, they all went to school together some how, and have a great many stories to share. I think I should be glad that as the night went on they talked a little too fast for me, and I didn't understand. Everyone was very funny.. they all knew about the Canadian ice hockey game, and how we lost.. and kept giving me pats on the back.. unfortunatly I didn't even understand this. I havn't been keeping up with what is happening at the olympics, ecspecially not with hockey.

We started with some really strong red wine, and then some more, and then some white wine then some champagne.. The champagne is much better then my accustomed baby duck.. but still mkaes me feel the same in the morning. I was trying to prevent this, by saying "seulment un gout" only a taste... they replied by filling my glass to the rim.

I did make apple crisp.. but the kids found it on the table before we got to it, and they ate it. I was thinking when I was making it that I wouldn't get much of it.. so Emma and I made two . We ate one at our house, and brought the other to share.

Over the weekend we watched some jumpers, boarders and skiiers. Most of them were pretty good.. getting in some double twists, and a few back flips. I however was more entertained by the music. Most of the raido music is in English, and usually from a few years back. When a popular song comes on lots of the younger people would sing to them. Or try to at least. The best song was "the roof is on fire" Everyone had the hand actionhs going on.. but the singing was just not there. Everyone was competing to be the loudest. the loudest at groaning or screeching.. or I'm not sure. .. but it was funny. The chorus of the song is very well articulated. Its not difficult.. but somehow they all got an extra dozen sylables in there. I willde finatly bring my camera next time to record it.

dixième joour

Things have been flying by around here!
The last few days have been Emmas ski competitions. She does Slalom and ..super giant Slalam! And yes , that is the name.. I would like to be part of such an aweomse sport name.
She did pretty good (I think), and I thought they were going pretty fast. We watched olympic coverage of it though and it made them look like turtles.

I made supper the other night- Terriaki chicken, rice , steamed vegtables, and apple crumble for desert. It all went over rather well with only one minor setback. The crumble turned out delicous, except for the fact that you could break teeth on it (way better the next day, it softened up). No one told me that the stove was in Farenheit and not Celcius...

My recent trip to the ski hills washroom facilities has solidfied my thoughts on never going to the bathroom outside your house. I know most of you have been through it, but really.. a squat hole? Do you face the wall or out? i have no flipping idea.. And who came up with the bringht idea of lights on a timer? I am trying not to pee on my shoes, and the damn light goes out. Each stall is completely closed off from the main room so it was pitch black. So I fumbled for the light button, which brings me to my next vexation. Who the hell puts slippery linoleum in ski resort bathrooms? Everyone is wet and dripping from the snow, creating a slip-and-slide foor amidst the already unsavory circumstances.

Years of gymnastics, and my balance had to fail me now.. ew ew ewwwwww.
I did eventually break out of the hell hole, but i'm pretty sure I must have scared some poor child out of the bathroom with my steady stream of swears. I won't apologize for them this time though, because they were very well fucking waranted.

Condittions OUTside this week have been lovely, I don't look like a snowman anymore, but just a very happy santa claus. Having less layers on also improves my boarding.. I can move without so much effot:) There is always a negative side though, my falling hurts much more.

I love Laurence. I was appologizing for eating all the chocolate the other day, I have no self control. It is sooo delicous! One little piece.. and then another.. and then you realize the whole damn bar is gone. She laughed at me, adn then asked me if I had realized that the nutella we bought yesterday was gone. She does the same thing , but with a spoon.
We had a big long conversation about her living in Africa, she has been and done some pretty wicked stuff. She lived in Nigeria, and Benin for two years, with the french version of peace corps.

septième jour

All day it rained and rained.. So we were stuck inside most of day. I did go get Natasha, and I am happy that was the only time I had to spend outdoors! The two girls play really well together, so well in fact it leaves me with nothing to do. So I enticed them into some baking, we made cookies from one of their cook books, complete with the cookie cuttouts and sprinkles.

laurence has previously told me where to find the sprinkles, and tried to explain what they were before she found them. They are called "vermicelles" in french, and as she explained it, |ver| is worm, they are like little worms you put on your cookies. I asked if they were made of worms, still oblivious to what we are talking about. Yes they are made of wormsm she replied.

I was kind of of excited to be doing some baking, but now I was not sure. Fortunatly she pulled them out and tried to tell me again that they just "look" like worms,,, which is way better than being made of them.

Another funny baking name is for the sugar, the brown sugar is called auburn- and I have no idea why.

After cookies and lunch ( cous cous lemon tomatoes and chicken) we practiced some english. I had the girls study and read out loud all the english names of the body parts. Then we put the timer for five minutes and had to draw a person and identify as many parts of the body as we could. My drawing was in french, while theirs was in English. Is was pretty funny looking at each others drawings afterm and filling in ones we missed. The whole thing went over really well, and I would like to find some other fun ideas of how to teach vocabm or verbs...or just english! Any ideas anyone?

sixième jour

Today was a quiet day, and by quiet I mean that I watched three movies and went to bed by eight. The day didn't start so quiet though, I accidently woke everyone up around five. I was tiptoeing to the living room, and passed the bathroom when someone came out. Thinking no one was up, I decided to let everyone know of the intruder in the house by letting out a piercing scream and crumpling to the ground. Fortunatly it was not an intruder, it was Laurence, and a great way for me to get everyone up to eat breki with me!

I really need to work on not having such a loud reaction to being startled.

Another unfortunate reaction to being scared is to yell profanity. I would have preferred it here where they don't understand than in other incidents though..Such as in front of a group of kindergarten aged kids and their parents..

Watching movies in french, to my surprise, is fairly easy. I usually get the just of it and some of the jokes. Most of them are hollywood films in french . It is harder if it is a french movie with french humour. Harder for me to understand and harder for me to judge if it is approrpiate for Emma. I started watching a movie with Emma, and about five minutes later I was ready to shut it off. Full frontal fat man nudity , is not something I would like to see , nevermind see with a ten year old.

Then to my horror L arrives from work and sits down. I think I tried to sink into the couch. She comes up during the male waxing scene. Just my luck. To my surprise she laughs, and grabs a pillow to be more comfortable. We watched the whole movie together, every fake boob,butt shaking moment of it. And thus, I don't understand french humour, nor do I think I want to.

here is a trailer to the lovely movie.. for your viewing pleasure!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwFWLniWk28

cinqième jour

Ok. Today i have come to the realization of how grave my situation really is.

They have no cinnamon, no good cereals and ( drumroll please) i don't like their milk.


They have milk that can sit in the cupboard until you open it.. I don't think I am alone in saying that puts me off a bit. So we have ten not opened milk jugs sitting on the shelf in the pantry. I took my first taste of it, and have since decided that it is only good with three or four large tablespoons of nesquick (which is DARK chocolate- how cool is that!).

Their cereal has chocolate in it, which as cool as it sounds, is kind of a waste of your 'daily chocolate intake".

And no cinnamon. We will get some when we go to grenoble because the store here and Natasha and Emmas house don't have it. As far as I understand ( Emma, Natasha and I have a bit of a language gap) they have never had a cinnamon bun,, it seems crazy- perhaps they are thinking of something else? I will ask Laurence to make sure.

I made supper today, something with canned green beans ground beef and tomatos ..the whole time being directed by Emma, we ended up with something that was fairly decent with lots of salt but not what I was suposed to make .. oops!

I have succeeded and drove the standard. We were planning on taking the bus but we read the schedule wrong and had no way to get there ...Except for my car sitting in the driveway. So, with Emma in her ski helmet ( her and Alaina are so alike) we drove and parked no incedents to speak of!
And then we had to leave... Which required backing up..
I couldn't get the car in reverse so I ended up asking the guy in the car next to me to reverse for me. HAHAHA. he looked very baffled when i tried to explain to him what i needed . Sadly I was lacking the word "reverse" in french, and had to demonstrate charades-like. Complete with the putt putt sound of the car and it switching gears. The poor guy didn't look so happy when I got in the car and shuttered off after he backed it up. I supose he was scared at the thought of sharing the road with me. I really don't blame him.

It turn out that you need to lift up a piece of the stick to get it into reverse...seomething that would have been usefull to know.The girls find this very amusing, and still wear their helmets.

I am not sure if I would rather the girls tell me where to go or for me to learn by myself, either way we have problems. I was on my way back home after picking something up from the store, when I made a wrong turn. Not that I knew I made a wrong turn. The girls started singing 'we are going to Grenoooobble grenooooble..." Sadly there are no places to turn around after that..

And then they try to navigate. It makes things just as hard. Tout droit means straight, and droite means right-but when they say it sounds pretty damn similar.

Every turn goes soemthing like this

Me- Here or here ? with hand motions
Girls- DROITE blahblah droiteahabhahah
I turn,,
Girls- laughing, DROITE DROITE
illegal uturn...

quatrième jour!

After last nights supper and wine (lots of wine..) most of the friends, which are officials for the race, stayed over. My body still isn't used to the time, and likes to wake me up at 3 in the morning , every morning for a pee. That means stepping over 6 or so guys on the way to the bathroom. Mostly over, sometimes on, it was dark!
Did I mention some of them were cute?
Emma and i went skiing around 10. We waited for the cute shuttle bus that is bright pink with a cute old, crazy driver. Emma was nice and took me of a few little runs first, and was ok to wait for me when i took out my camera. Then she thought she would test me and take me on a hard one, that i had to walk to and then slide down.. I love lvoe love my snowpants. There are seven lifts, only one of which is a chair.. the others are the hip wrenching throbbling leg t bars.. verrrry long tbars. We had lunch in the lunch room ( L calls all lunch outside of the house a picnick, which i like) I made sandwhichessm but people were pulling out casseroles, jars of picklesm four or five loaves of bread, different salads, and of course wine.
Regardless, my sandwhich was very good. :)
We had pizza for supper tonight, very very delicous, and then a funny almond puree pie thing that wasn't so great. We usually play a game at the end of the night, or watch a movie. tonight it was , again, uno. Unfortunatly allt he other games are trivia qestions.. which i am not so great at...

Troisieme Jour

Saturday today!
The beginning of Emmas two week break, and a day before a ski competition that Jean Michael Organizes. To get out of the house and out of duties for organizing the competition Laurence and I went to Grenoble. (G R E noble Anna not the other one :) ) We toured around the middle of the town took the tram, and to Luarences obvious discomfort took tons of pictures of her and I.

Most of grenoble looks like it is ready to fall apart, very old ,once pretty, buildings with graffitti and missing bricks. Some crazy architect but nothing spectacular, and the poor section of grenoble is very clearly sepearted from the rich.

Driving with Laurence was quite something. She would point out corners that are dangerous (I will be driving Emma to Guitar which is about 30 min away) at the same time as cutting a blind corner , REALLY cutting a corner..

When we were stopped (ironically on a crosswalk) I asked her if pedestrians had the right of way She said that definatly yes, they do. We drove through probably five crosswalks during this converstaion, and waited for traffic on a few more.
She did give me a few very good rules that , even she said, were crazy. The main being that any street that intersects with yours on the right has the right of way. You can be on a main road with three lanes of traffic, and have a little dinky contry road intersect on the right, but if they don't have a traffic sign you must yield. Yes, this means you need to look for a sign on THEIR road. Apparently this is where lots of accidents occur...

After touring around Grenoble we went to get groceries . The store in gresse doesnt have anything really, so they do a big shop every few weeks, and shop one town over in he middle. Laurence is very sweet in trying to get me to find things that I usually eat,so we spent a while searching for peanut butter. We found it but it looks very pale, and funny.. If I dont like it we will see if it tastes good with a few cups of sugar in some cookies. We also got yogurt for me, their coconut yogurt doesnt really cut it.

Tonight we are having a big dinner with al the skiers, one of whom is a hunter. So we are eating Chamois-a deer like thing with horns, pretty cute actually. Laurence is pretty picky and has prepared something else for herself and I if we don't like it, which might be a good thing, as L says it comes with "strong" cheese.

Tommorrow we ski!

Ah- i forgot.
i guess not much happens in this town, or the region- a few of the towns have a newpaper together, with my picutre on thr front. HAHAHA

Deuxième jour

We had crepes last night!!
That is all I needed on this trip, i am ready to come home, with a giant jar of nutella.
I didn't sleep last night until around three , and everyone was gone when i got up. They did however leave a note...
" Hello kristin
You have a key for you on the door. Lunch is beef peas
(there is natasha)
if having a problem call Laurence.
have a good day!"
haha- Emma and Natasha (her best friend) came home for lunch from school, We had beef and peas for lunch (no salt no anything, beef patties with peas from a jar)
they seemed satisfied with the lunch, so after they went back to school I put on my couple dozen layers and headed to the one "supermarket" in town ( two walls of food, moslty cheese and wine, figures.) and bought myself a chocoalte bar.

Despite being cold it was lovely and sunny so i took some pictures. I am my mommys girl- i kept seeing cool looking houses or fountains and would walk over and then another and anothers, until i had no idea where I was and got lost (Despite the town being teeny tiny it is easy to get lost-all the houses look the same, white, and there are no street name)

I eventually made my way home, and have been trying to figure out this stupid keyboard, which i have successfully turned english:)

Next thing on my to-do list is to find a recipe or idea for a supper- Laurence (the mom) is going to take me grocery shopping this weekend in grenoble. any ideas?

Première jour

Victoria -> Vancouver-> Heathrow-> Lyon

I have successfully landed in Lyon but not without some minor speedbumps

1. Don't let anyone tell you that buying a ticket from an agency is easier and quicker. My agent didn't get the memo about the new baggage allowance for bristish Airways (or it was buried in the mess she called a desk) m so i had to pay 80 dollars for one of my bags. On the plus side to that, if I had been flying with AircanadaI would have had to pay 250 dollars..

2. thankyou to whoever told me to make sure I had ample time at the heathrow airport. five hours was just about right. For 2 oclock on a wednesday it was flipping packed! My carry on was a bit too much for their scanners, I got the bonus check, of pulling out all my belongings in front of a bitter old woman (plus side again- she had the most intriguing accent...) A forgotten bottle of eyeglass cleaner was the culprit, which she let me keep even though it was over 100ml. What is the point of rules if they don't enforce them?( This also means that i could have kept my perfume mom!)

3. At french customs, they didn't even stamp my passport or look at my visa! Darn visa was so hard to get I wanted to use it!

Jean-michael picked me up in Lyon and we drove to Gresse en vercors. This trip turned out to be two plus hours, because of all the SNOW. He thought it was very funny, my reaction when leaving the airport and heading outside. A good foot of snow at the airport and another foot at their house. He found it equally amusing when i told him that vancouver had virtually no snow and brought it up during the slow points of conversation.
"So," he would say. "you are from vancouver, in Canada hosting the Winter olympics and no snow ? " Following with a very long chuckle.

We arrived at their house at quarter to one in the morning , Laurence was up to say hi and then went to bed, and I was fed a giant cheese wheel with toasted bread.

The following morning I met Emma, and was shown around the town ( i hesitate to say town, there arn't even street name. "l'eglise" ( church) is on everyones address and then their name, everyone has the same number as well) I now have a snowboard and pass to the mountain, which i can walk too- and know that it is two kisses starting on the left!

My sleeping patterns are still a bit messed up. I played on the computer at about 3 this morning- then went to bed and missed everyone leaving. They did leave a very confusing note and I am not sure whether i am suposed to pick emma and her friend up from school, or if they will come here, I will pick them up just in case.