Les Carroz is truly in the festive spirit. In addition to the beautiful christmas decorations and lights at night, during the day actors posing as "Gendamerie" interact with the shoppers, performing little skits and causing a lot of laughter and chaos. They have been riding through town on "backward" cycles much to our amusement. How on earth they haven't slipped on the diabolically icy footpaths or been run down by a random car, I'll never know.
Our definition of "busy" will need to be "redefined!! The hoardes have started to arrive. There are queues for the parking, the lifts, all the shops..in fact I think that if more than 3 people accidentally stand one behind the other, a whole bunch of other people think that it must be a queue for something important and obediently line up behind them!
But the French seem wonderfully patient. For 3 days we have stopped at our local Pharmacy to buy some more Glucosomine tablets to lubricate the "creaky old knees". But everytime the queue has been the length of the shop, so we have continued on. Today, we had run out of this miracle drug so there was no choice...we had to line up & take our turn. As I mentioned, the French seem totally unconcerned by the crowds. The 3 pharmacists working at the counter politely greet each customer and the conversation appears to deal with all the niceties, "Hello, How are you ? Nice to see you back here this christmas. Where are you staying? Are you enjoying the snow?....how is the boil on your second cousin's bottom clearing up?".......you've got the idea! This chit-chat continues oblivious to the queue building to the point where the front door can no longer close and the line has taken a "U-Turn" to snake the length of the small shop. But through all this, the French talk in hushed tones and the children play quietly. The only time the amicable peace is disturbed is when an English speaker arrives and announces "Gor Blimey - what a queue!" at the top of their voices!! No wonder the French think we "Anglais" are uncivilised!!
Earlier this morning, we joined the Teste family to watch their youngest "speed demon" - Camille compete in a race. She scored a silver medal! The crowd went wild!! Actually that was just the family!
While the sun was is still shining, the temperature has dropped over the last couple of days and it was only about -8C. We got really cold waiting for Camille's run to start and we never really got warm again despite skiing pretty hard during the late morning. In the end, the cold drove us home early for a late lunch at "Le Refuge" (our little apartment). Not necessarily, a bad thing mind you, as we had failed to do our homework and Liz was coming to us for our lesson at 4:30pm.
After school, we headed out for drinks at a nice little new bar in town, with the usual crowd and another Irish couple called Dave and Sue. They also run a chalet just near Gavin and Sue. So it appears that there is a little "ex-pat" network forming. Ended up having a Pizza and hearing all about Gavin & Sue's campervan trip through Europe. Seems to us that it won't be long until they head to NZ for another campervan extravaganza!
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