Méribel, take 1.

Over vacation (after my week of oysters), I went skiing in Méribel with my host siblings and their grandparents and some friends. I am finally writing about it now because I'm supposed to write a blog post by Friday. Therefore you can expect a little less introspection than usual, as I am working under a deadline. (Hey, when you do sports 3-4 times a week, you don't have a lot of free time for blogging.)

Méribel is beautiful. It's in the French Alps, which dwarf the Sierra Nevadas and makes them look shabby and brown in comparison. The grandparents own an apartment near the ski slopes, which was cozy and small and convenient. Here's a picture of all of us – (left to right) me, my host sister, her boyfriend, grandma, host brother, and 3 of my host brother's friends. Grandpa isn't in the picture because he took it.

The other fun thing about Méribel, besides having an amazing quality of snow, was that it was chock-full of Russians and Brits. Apparently Méribel has earned a reputation as a rich and international ski resort, and now you're just as likely to hear English on the streets as French.

Méribel!

My host sibs continue to make fun of me because, starved of English for 4 months, I was desperate to make friends with some Brits, and always tried to get on ski lifts with them. My super unsubtle opening line was “Are you guys from ENGLAND??”

My host brother did one even worse – once we were in the ski lift with some guys who started speaking in German. My brother takes German at school, so for the benefit of the rest of us, he stage whispered “It's Germans!” which was hilarious because, if the Germans didn't speak French, the only thing to tip them off about what we were saying would be the obviously loud whisper.

Fortunately, my host sister brought her boyfriend – let's call him Pierre since I still operate under the principle of not sharing people's names – who didn't know how to ski, because I'm not a very good skiier and my host siblings are both intimidatingly talented. (I have skiied since I was quite young, but switched to snowboarding when I was 13, snowboarded for 3 years, and then spent two years away from the snow because I was in NYC and the Caribbean and other fun places. So anyway, I haven't skiied for 5 years and I'm a little rusty.) We ended up spending the first day at the free bunny hill slope (it wasn't really a bunny hill, more of a normal green run) and the morning of the second day walking to a really pretty lake and the afternoon at the bunny hill and the late afternoon sledding and having snowball fights. (The sledding and snowball fights was my personal favorite part, even though the skiing was pretty boss too.)

The last 2 days we bought our ski passes and skiied the heck out of Méribel. At first I was a little hesitant and didn't do so well -- I blame it on my collection of 3 wrist fracturing incidents I collected while snowboarding, which has made me more cautious. I was a little bit disgusted that Pierre, fearless athletic kid that he is, did as well or better than I did even with no previous skiing experience. We didn't stick to the easy slopes, either -- we did Saulire, which is the highest peak in the Méribel Valley, and descended on mostly reds. Red is a European code that would be a mild black diamond in the US.

I bought this super awesome Canadian balaclava from the Christmas market in Nantes. I swear, I was bordering on heat stroke. You'll never ever be cold with one of these babies.

At first I struggled with Saulire, because the first wall is all full of moguls. The rest of that day I went around a different blue trail that avoided the first wall of Saulire, and rejoined everyone else after. Pierre is fearless -- he falls all the time, but still enjoys himself and refuses to take an easier path. At the end of the day I was completely drained, and since there'd been lots of sun and then a sudden drop in temperature as the sun started to sink behind the mountains, everything was iced-over, which made my last descent back to the cabin not very pleasant. But then the last day the snow was unbelievably perfect, I had sort of re-found my rhythm, and we had a blast. We did all reds at Tougnete, which is officially my favorite mountain ever. When it's marked red purely for the steepness of the slope, but the conditions are perfect -- great snow, no moguls, no ice, not too much powder, not too many people on the slopes -- I just have a blast, going a million miles an hour down the run. Pierre does better in bad conditions because he isn't afraid, but I beat him down the mountain by a good chunk of time in ideal conditions because then I trust myself with speed and know how to do little snake-track slaloms instead of big wide turns. Those are my favorites. In the afternoon we did the Olympic face, which was our first real black run (at least where the whole thing was black, and not just a little black arm of a red slope). It was surprisingly not too difficult, but by then we'd gotten well into our rhythm. In the late afternoon we returned to Saulire. The goal: speed runs, to get as many reps as possible before the lifts close at 4:30. Saulire, which I had struggled with just the day before and is really really long, we demolished in 4 minutes, twice (after one warm-up round of 7 minutes or so). It was insane. And awesome. So that is the story of my ski adventures. I highly recommend Méribel, or the Alps in general, to anyone who is into skiing and/or beautiful places. I could live there.

In other news, not much has been going on. I have been undergoing a philosophical crisis on the nature of fashion (continued from my rant on feminism), trying to decide if conforming to the norm is good or bad (the hipster in me vs. the blend-in-with-the-natives anthropologist in me + the insecure teenager in me). French people are extremely judgemental about superficial things, and will pretty much shun everyone who doesn't dress amazingly (calling them weirdos and freaks behind their backs and being faultlessly polite but distant to their faces). By “dress amazingly” I mean I have seen this shunning and name-calling happen for people who dress normally, or even a little better than the American average: jeans, boots, wool coat, and scarf. (Maybe it was the nerdy glasses that tipped the scale over to unacceptable? Or does just plain not being beautiful render you a social leper?) I have never experienced this before this year, and there is no more successful way to make everyone feel insecure and disgusted with humanity. (At least, for me personally.) Thus, issues. And I need to figure out whether to look more French, which I had been working on up until now, or give up and just be me, with the ragged flannel shirts I stole from my dad, no jewelry, jeans, and my good old black Converse. The question is, is fashion a social obligation, a set of rules that must be met and a source of anxiety (as I see it), or is it a way to give yourself more confidence by looking in the mirror and feeling good about yourself, feeling well put-together, as Julia sees it? I suppose it depends on if you're into that sort of thing or not, if you even like fashion in the first place. But if we shun unfashionable people, then it's pretty much an obligation to “like fashion,” in which case... well, it's an obligation. Let's just say “I can't wait to get back to America, land of sweatpants” and leave it at that.

Otherwise, school continues to go well. We had parent-teacher conferences last Friday, which went well, as all my teachers gushed to my host mom about how well I do in school. (It sickens me! Oh, how it sickens me to be doing about 15% of the work I did last year, and getting such results. My brain is BORED and UNSTIMULATED even though we spend 9 hours a day at school. I'm going to have to turn artistic or something.) At least my math teacher was rather nonchalant about it, telling me he had nothing to say and to go away, cause clearly my level of knowledge is more than adequate for the contents of the course. (What a great guy.) And I have to say my favorite meeting was with my history teacher, because we spent half the time talking about the Cold War, like the history nerds we are.

Oh, non-sequitor – I hear the train! That means the cold is coming, because the wind is coming from the east, otherwise I wouldn't hear the train. Maybe it'll snow! We've been hoping to inch a few degrees colder for weeks now, because when there's snow we don't have to go to school.

I also switched English classes (again) recently, which is pretty cool. I like switching classes. My new teacher speaks incredibly good English for a Frenchie, and in voice and mannerisms reminds me very much of my 8^th grade physics teacher.

While I'm suffering slowly through the boredom that is high school and waiting with bated breath for my February trip to England and ski trip #2, I'm busy planning next summer. It is going to be super exciting! My family is coming to meet my host family in June and then we'll do *something cool* in Europe (haven't figured out what yet) before going to meet up with our dear friends Cheryl and Eric who currently live in Germany. Then we'll come home (!) and in mid-July, my host sister will come join us! We'll show her all the attractions of SanFran and the Valley and then take a roadtrip across the country to visit my aunt's cabin in Wisconsin, as we do every summer, and also bring my stuff to college. Words cannot express how excited I am for all this. The year abroad was nice and all, but can't we hurry up and finish the last 5 months and get to the exciting stuff now?

Chill French-Canadian song of the day: Loup Blanc by Mes Aïeux