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Published: March 27th 2012
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A couple updates in one since I'm kind of behind here...
Monday February 27-March 2 – Nyon It’s definitely spring in Geneva! At least for this week. It has been gorgeous and sunny and warm! I walked home today in a t-shirt and then sat on the patio in the sun to do my readings without a jacket on! Bad for the skiing situation in the mountains though… On Tuesday my French class was canceled so I wandered down through Nyon to the lake and walked along it for a ways. There are a number of cute little restaurants and old buildings and a great view of the chateau. Then I found a nice little bench and did my French homework in the sun looking at Mont Blanc and the Alps. Quite lovely!
Skiing in Chamonix – Saturday March 3 My host family took me skiing at Chamonix on Saturday! I’m going again in two weeks with a group from my program so it would have been nice to go somewhere a little different, but it is so incredibly gorgeous there that I am completely okay with going back! We went to the Flegeres ski area on
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View of Nyon from the waterfront the opposite side of the valley from Mont Blanc. Before we go any further let me just clarify something. From hearing about the fact that you can ski in three different countries in the same day in Chamonix I was under the impression that you could ski down a run in Switzerland, take a couple of lifts then ski down a run in France, and then after a couple more lifts be skiing in Italy. Well that is definitely not the case. There are six ski areas that are a part of the Chamonix system and yes, one of them is in Switzerland and another is in Italy so technically you could probably ski at all three in one day if you really wanted to, but they are all a little ways apart so it is not really an effective use of your time. But besides that initial disappointment, the day was awesome! It was cloudy when we got there and the top of Mont Blanc stayed mostly covered throughout the day, but within an hour the rest of the sky cleared up and we had a blue sunny day! The snow is really fine and dry here, that’s the
only way that I can think of to describe it. And fast! My host mom has amazing form when she skis, but I’m more of a fan of going fast than either of my host parents, but it was still a fun day!
La Givrine Adventuring Saturday March 10 Rather than studying for our final exams and writing our paper, Anna and I took the little red train up to La Givrine to go hiking. There are a bunch of cross-country skiing trails up there too, but we decided we just wanted to frolic in the sun and the snow. We ended up spending the whole afternoon up there. It was great to get out into the woods even though it wasn’t really anywhere at all remote and there were a number of other people. Still fun and much better than being stuck inside actually doing anything academic.
In the evening my host dad took me to the Carnival in Genolier. Apparently here carnival celebrations go on all throughout Lent, not just leading up to the start of it. It was more of a cross between an elementary school spaghetti dinner and a community dance recital so
it was definitely aimed at families, but was still fun to see. The best part was the Gugga band – a Swiss-German style brass band that plays at all the big events around the country. They all had crazy costumes, face paint, and ridiculously painted hair.
Chamonix-Mont Blanc and Courmayer – March 16-18 Done with exam week! We had our last three hour final exam on Friday morning (after two other exams and one paper over the course of the week) so to celebrate a group of 9 of us headed to the mountains. We are officially done with the main class part of our semester. Now we just have our independent study project and presentations for the next month. We stayed at the Hostelling International hostel, which is a little bit outside of town but right in front of Mont Blanc and Aguille de Midi so the views were amazing and unobstructed by other buildings. Plus the hostel was really nice and had free hot chocolate in the evenings and breakfast in the mornings. The bus system in the valley is pretty good as well so we were able to get everywhere we wanted to go easily
– besides the fact that it stops running at 8 pm… Makes it kind of hard to go into town for dinner after a day of skiing and still make it back in time. We ended up making friends with some local taxi drivers… On Friday we happened upon the semi-final hockey game between Chamonix and Grenoble so we decided to pretend we were locals and check it out. It was a lot of fun! Both sides were full of fans and they were all singing and cheering almost constantly.
Saturday we went to Grands-Montets. We ended up splitting into smaller groups as necessitated by our differing skiing abilities. Maddy, Sarah, Chris, Steven (Chris’ friend) and I immediately headed as far up the mountain as we could go. It was similar to my last Chamonix experience – cloudy for the first hour and then sunny blue skies for the rest of the day. I think we managed to cover almost every run on the mountain, including the terrain park and even some moguls (you can ask Sarah how those went for her…). It was a really good group and a great day!
Sunday it rained/snowed all day. A
group of us (Kavya, Jasmine, Rachel, Moogie and I) took the bus under Mont Blanc to Courmayer in Italy just for the heck of it. It was my first time in Italy and we didn’t even get our passports checked! They ended up stopping our bus and checking passports when we got back into France though. A couple Americans on our bus didn’t have their passports but all the police said was to carry them with them in the future. Lax Schengen zone enforcement. Courmayer was just a tiny cute little town. We couldn’t see the mountains because of the clouds which was unfortunate, but it was still fun to wander through. We had some delicious homemade pasta and pizza and topped it off with some gelato. The full Italian experience! Our waiters at the restaurant kept trying to talk to us in Italian and laughed at us and watched us eat and couldn’t seem to get the idea that we didn’t speak Italian. It was fun though! Then we went back to Chamonix and wandered around the town a little before going back to our hostel for some hot chocolate and home made applesauce while we sat on the
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Mountains mountains and more mountains couches in the common area and watched the snow fall.
My trip to the Netherlands will get it's own post, so fast-forward to today, March 27...
Now it is definitely summer here! Well at least by my Alaskan standards. Once it hits 60 I'm ready to break out the shorts! We've had pretty much non-stop sun and great weather. First an unusually cold winter and now an unusually warm spring. Stupid global warming... I'm definitely not complaining about the sun though!
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