Big Tips- Week Two

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After a horrible changeover day, feeling fluey and sick from the 4.00am start and the 10.30pm finish we were looking dishevelled and sweaty, ready to greet our new guests. It was Christmas week but it didn’t really feel like a normal Christmas for us. We would have a lot more work to do and we had barely even gotten the hang of what we were doing already.

Despite this our guests seemed nice- they were a completely different group to the first week of hardcore skiers. They were all Malaysian and some had never put a pair of skis on in their lives. They were immediately moaning about the walk up the hill (which we have no sympathy for as we do it every morning) and the shoddy wifi. We were a little worried but needn’t have been; the guests were so polite and helpful and we had an extra pair of hands all week in the form of Jessica, the nine year old girl staying with us. To start with I found the constant shadow around the kitchen quite annoying until we realised she could be used to make canapés and Christmas decorations.

I had finally started to get a bit better at skiing and we had an amazing staff day out on Sunday until, on one of the last runs of the day, I was going too fast, fell, smacking my head on the icy piste. I spent the night with a mild concussion and an egg on my head; thankfully I had my helmet on as the damage would definitely have been worse without

Another reason that our second week was a lot different to the first was that we were serving dinner an hour earlier which meant we were finally finishing in decent time and able to go out with the others. We have still been getting very little sleep due to getting in 2.00am at the earliest most nights and up again a 6.00am to trek to the chalet.

Christmas day rolled around pretty quickly and our guests were sweet enough to buy us matching socks and neck scarves. We were really grateful to be included in their celebrations. We also had about seven hundred pictures taken of us on Christmas day to add the pile that one of the guests had taken of us throughout the week.

We were lucky enough to get out on the mountain for a couple of hours on Christmas as well and I managed to embarrass myself by trying to thrust into a lift carrying my skis when you were supposed to leave your skis outside. Viv and I also both wore onsies to commemorate the special day. Although Christmas went better than expected, we were really looking forward to Boxing Day and another DAY OFF!!! We had a lovely lie in and yet again woke up to brilliant sunshine. We skied over to Vaujany which is fast becoming one of our favourite skiing spots, ending the day with a three course Christmas meal and the big Secret Santa reveal.

The week had flown by once again and we received the best surprise by far on Friday morning when one of our guests put a tip of £200 each into our hands (!!!) We couldn’t believe our luck- especially when they topped it off with another £100 later on. Who says you can’t live like a king on ski seasons.....

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