Body & Brain Exhaustion!!

1/ Graeme, knee deep!! 2/ Andy - "Who me? Do a face plant? Never?!"

Warning more skiing! (but there's something for the non-skiers - scroll down!!)

Body Exhaustion!!
Look, this is just getting ridiculous!!! It just keeps snowing! So what are we to do? We have no choice..we have to get out there and rip it up! Today we went to Megeve, about 40 minutes drive across our valley. All we need do is drive down to Sallanches (basically at the bottom of our hill) and up again on the other side. Megeve is a huge ski area but only a tiny portion of it was available for its opening day. 1 cable car, 1 chairlift and 1 gondola - 3 lifts? Hmmmm - 3 lifts ...sounds like Treble Cone! Half price tickets - E$18. Would have been free if we'd read that pesky fine print again - but let's not go there!!!

But the skiing was amazing. It was quite a blizzard today with high winds, flat light, low visability and driving snow. Perfect NZ/ Aussie conditions! We had about 10 cm of snow in just in a couple of hours. And probably close to 30-40cm for the 6 hours we were there. See the photo of our car that was parked at the bottom of the cable car. This photo was taken at lunch time - 12 noon!!

The terrain opened at Megeve today was fairly mellow and mainly in the trees. I think that the resort was quite concerned about avalanches. There were bombs going off throughout the afternoon. The best skiing was in the trees rather than on the exposed chairlift run at the highest point. The snow in the trees was so deep in places that you actually needed a lot of speed to push through it. Consequently, a series of tumbling emergency stops occurred throughout the day. One of the most memorable was Andy's high speed double binding release followed by a 10m head plant skid! Quite spectacular. (See photo above.) Not to be out-done, Graeme did a unique telemark uphill ski "spear" routine, which saw him do a "ballet" split and then "snow angel" down the slope. (Tragically not captured on film!!) We were weak with laughter for almost the whole day.

1/ Seriously Deep Snow - predict what happens to Gra next? 2/ the car at lunch time!

For the non-skiers.....

Brain Exhaustion!
After our hard day skiing, we had to rush home for our French lesson! Man! It just gets harder. I'm not sure why they even try to say this language has some rules, there's so many exceptions....what's the point? To be fair, "cough" and "plough" in English is a bit hard to explain too, but at least we don't have stupid genders for everything! Please explain to me why the "kitchen" is female and the "oven" is male??? And the answer from our esteemed tutor, Liz, ...."it just is"..."build a bridge" (and get over it!!).

Even more concerning is the fact that the french use, "I have" instead of "I am". For example, instead of saying "I am hungry" they say "J' ai faim" (I have hunger). This is all OK until I say something like " Je suis froide", which I have been doing all this week!! Thinking myself terribly clever to be able to say "I'm cold!" ...what I am actually saying in french, is that "I'm frigid" (And I'm not talking not in the temperature sense!!) Conversely saying that "Je suis chaude" means "I'm feeling hot!" (sexy that is!). Unfortunately, I haven't had the opportunity to drop that line this week!! (It's always below zero!!).

So with our brains and bodies totally exhausted we are off to bed! More skiing tomorrow. Don't know where just yet? Toss up between Chamonix and Courmeyuer? We'll decide in the morning. Bonsoiree!