Up and down the moutains

Having spent most of my adult life in Brighton I thought I knew what it meant to live in a small place. Oh dear god, I really didn’t have a clue about the true nature of small.

The first clue to this was after a night spent flirting outrageously with (then being rather rude to) what I thought was a random Frenchman, I found him working behind the bar of the local tavern, which has since become a local haunt. It taught me a lesson that there really is not anonymity here.

There is of course an upside to this. You can walk into literally any bar in the village and if you don’t know at least some of the patrons then you know the staff, and given the local consumption round here it’s not long before the door opens to reveal last night’s drinking buddy. It makes me wander whether there is a village in England where you could emulate this without the said drinking buddy being 50ish.

Up the mountain is a different matter. Courchevel 1850 is well known in the Alps for being bling central. It’s chock full of the Russian mafia whose ‘moles’ strole the slopes ski-less in fur coats with small yappy type dogs in tow. But the skiers are the real treat. You haven’t seen bling until you’ve seen Russian ski attire. We’re talking all in one white ski suits with motifs, chains, fur, diamante, the works (including small dog).

There are stories from up the mountain of people ordering bottles of wine at the cost of 70,000 euros for lunch and not even finishing them. There really is that much money here. Unfortunately I’ve seen it, but not had any of it spent on me.

Sufficed to say 1850 is not really my speed, but the occasional excursions up there generally end up at the local ‘discotech’ Kalico’s. The main danger with this is getting a bit over excited and deciding to let the last bus home go without you. The late night public transport round here is limited to say the least and on our wage the local taxis are just not an option. This means that the only way home is down the piste… in a bin bag. This sounds like a really good laugh unless, as was the case the night I tried it, the snow has turned to mush, turned into massive lumps and re-frozen meaning that you’re bin bag gets shredded to pieces in 3 minutes and you have to come down it on your heals down a red run falling every few steps for an hour and a half. The ice cuts on my hands have only really just healed.

Best leave the excursions to 1850 well alone, they’re dangerous.

I was going to blog about booze, drinking and the general merriment, humiliation and injury that comes attached to this. However everyone knows what it’s like to be drunk. Sufficed to say the evening life of a ski resort focuses on little else but chucking large quantities of booze down your neck and trying to get home over great expanses of ice and snow.

However, far and away the highlight of the drinking week at Courchevel 1550 is Flugel night. At first glance Flugel night might be just another one of those ploys by the local bar to get you to spend far too much money on vast quantities of another novelty beverage (essentially a shot of vodka Redbull in a little bottle). This is in fact until you walk into said bar on said night. It can only be described as total carnage.

On my first Flugel night we arrived, and I can honestly say that I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s a fairly dingy filthy little place at the best of times, always full of seasonires spending their pitiful earnings on strong larger, but on this particular night someone seemed to have turned most of the lights off, turned on the pumping techno and thought it a good idea to throw most of the contents of the bar all over the floor. Clustered round the bar were about 20 people, smashed out of their heads and buzzing their tits off, banging out what can only be described as a primal beat on the bar with the little empty Flugel bottles they clutched in their hands. The same bottles are what littered the floor. It was actually rather feral and disturbing. Needless to say I joined them immediately.

When drinking Flugel one must: Bang the bottle repeatedly on the table; place the bottle on the table; remove the lid and place it on your nose; pick the bottle up with your mouth; drink the contents and replace the bottle on the table without using your hands; place the cap facing upwards on the top of the bottle (again without use of your hands); throw the bottle on the flour with great relish; repeat ad-infenitum until you’ve got the shakes and you can barely remember your own name. This process can then be followed by yattering randomly to anyone who’ll listen, jumping up and down like a loon, crawling around on the floor, or boy hunting. None of which matter cos the next day it will all be a blur.

Arrr, Flugel night. How I love you. Believe me when you live somewhere this small something like Flugel night coming around is enough to make your whole week.

Well… this should be a major part of this blog. After all it’s what most people out here come out for. It’s pretty hard to know what to say about it because I know how dull I found people talking to me about it before I came out. After all, I just came out to cook and get drunk right?

To be honest I learnt to ski mainly cos I knew how bored I’d be out here if I didn’t, oh, and because it was free. The first of these reasons is the only thing that kept on the slopes for the first week. I think I can safely say that I sucked… big time! Moving at a snail’s pace down a gradual incline shitting myself and then going flying (into the rest of the class most of the time was a particular specialty of mine), was really not my idea of fun.

Then when you watch other people doing it, my thoughts were not, Oh I wish I could do it like that’ but more like, ‘What a bunch of crazy bastards! Why on earth would anyone want to chuck themselves down something that looks like a cliff face at about 40 miles an hour?!??!’

The one positive thing I can say about learning to ski was that my legs NEVER hurt. This can not however be said about EVERY other muscle in my body! Spending the best part of two weeks bodily pushing myself up off the ground about 4 times an hour meant that sometimes even thinking hurt. I’m not joking! You can’t use your legs to get you up at all because there two big bastard slidey things attached to them, so you literally have to support your whole body weight with your upper body. I had pistols like boy band heart throb at one point ;-). One day I couldn’t brush my hair because my neck muscles hurt to much brace against the brush.

Luckily things changed and I am now captain speedy and loving it. In fact I can’t imagine what it will be like to come home and not ski now. I’ve not been out for about four days now because I’ve been ill and I’m already really twitchy.

It’s incredible that your perception on these things can change. A green slope that used to take me 20 minutes zig-zagging across to get down, I can now almost go straight down in about 30 seconds. I red run that I used to look up and get a lump in my throat I can now get down with no trouble. But the weirdest thing is that they actually look different gradients to me now. This is why it’s so nice to progress so far in one place because you know that even though they look like different slopes they are defiantly the ones that used to terrify you.

Yeah, so it’s half way through the season on Saturday and I now sort of feel that I’ve got enough perspective on life out here to start blogging. I know it seems strange because a blog should really be a week by week account of the things that happen to you as they happen but life out here is just so different from travelling life that I’ve found it almost impossible to collect together enough things of interest to make it worth your while reading.

A day to day account would probably read something along the lines of cook, clean, chat, ski, sleep, eat cake, cook, talk talk talk, drink, sleep. All this interspersed with endless discussions of the snow conditions, which runs are best/iciest/bumpiest/steepest and why, what’s the best way to clean a toilet/oven/stone floor/fire place and whose guests are dullest/oddest/most likely to be caught wandering the chalet in tighty-whities. See… aren’t you glad that I’ve not been filling cyber space with this inane shit?

This all makes it sound like life out here is rubbish. It’s not at all; it’s just so very hard to understand why monotony is so very enjoyable.

So, two months on, here’s what it was like…

IN THE BEGINNING…

The beginning was pretty rubbish actually. Nothing was open, we weren’t allowed to ski, cleaning was constant and 12 hour work days were common. None of the public transport networks were open and even if they were we had no idea where we were going anyway. Life consisted of being driven between different chalets (none of which were mine) and having to clean them despite the fact that they looked totally spotless to me (urgh!!).

On the upside I was surrounded by a bunch of people who had all been hired due to their ability to be friendly and smiley no matter what and to talk to anyone. I’ve never seen anything like the first night when I looked around to see everyone chatting ten to the dozen having known each other for about 6 hours. Of course we do have to take into account that this is a job which includes pretty much unlimited (and more importantly, unmonitored) wine ;-), which I think helped.

Once all the chalets were opened up and the guests started coming we had to contend with Christmas and New Year, which when you don’t really know anyone that well is a little weird. The third meal I had to cook was a full Christmas roast, in a kitchen which I don’t even have to spread my arms in to touch the walls. I also started to realise the problems associated with working for a small company when half the staff came down with bronchitis and there was absolutely no cover available and everyone had to keep on working through fevers and coughing fits.

Christmas was also not helped by the fact that the mother of the family I had seemed to get all competitive with me on Christmas day. I’ve heard this is not uncommon in a chalet where women can suddenly seem to take offence at the fact that you’ve the audacity to look after their family instead of them. What a bitch I am?

I tried writing this all at the time but it all seemed so depressing and negative and the only reason that I can write it now is because it all seems so long ago and things are so different now that it doesn’t seem to matter. Also there were some really nice bits. Fancy dressing skiing on Christmas day (after a bottle of champagne… weeee!), sharing a room with three other girls has actually been a real giggle and meant that we’ve got an awful lot closer than most other people, pulling yourself up every now and again and realising that you can see Mont Blanc from your window surrounded by snow capped, pine speckled peaks, chatting for a living, free wine and discovering how nice afternoon naps can be a Thursday (… Friday/Monday/Wednesday…) …. Oh, and skiing…. That’s a laugh too ;-)

But more on that later.

To sum up now… up until now I’ve not wanted to come home at all, quite the opposite in fact. There is a bit of me that thinks I may have found Mecca (and no, not the bingo hall). But half way is really big mental point, so literally today, writing this, I’ve started missing home, family and friends. It makes you think that maybe applying a time restrictions to time away is a bad idea…