THE ALPS!

View of the mountains from the train ride

I love this sign

the view part deux

the view

This past weekend was really amazing, as I went skiing in the French ALPS!!! I had so much fun catching up with my old time friend (from the Summer, lol) Danielle who worked at GE with me! I have to say that skiing in the mountains and Wisconsin have many differences. The primary one being that there is just a net between you and a 100 foot cliff fall (which I will come back to later)... and this was just by the beginner slopes. Which brings me to the story which I must tell... I wanted some more fun so I figured we would take on the medium slopes or in this case the blue ones. So after 20 minutes I persuaded Danielle that we should take the journey right on down the blue slopes seeing that there were literally 100s of little kids that could not have been more than  10 years old zooming past us down the slopes following their parents. Well to my surprise those kids were damn near professionals, because we were barely a 100 yards down the slope when there was a steep hill with a dreadful 90 degree turn. So in front of us stood another one of those nets and the side of a mountain! So after Danielle and I got to the top of the first hill, of course with about three falls, we saw that turn and decided that it was a NO-go!  We took off our ski's and decided to walk down the slope in our ski boots to check the slope after the turn with the hopes that we could just start from there. (Mind you, there are still babies passing us up with ease!) Uhhh-NOPE! As I approached the start of the slope slowly, I realized I couldn't see where it ended... i.e. IT WAS STEEP AS HELL!!! So after sitting on a mound of snow in our fatigue we realized that there were two ways to get back to civilization... either we walk the rest of the way down (which was not going to happen because ski boots still slide in the snow) or we start our journey back to where we started. By this point, my face was in bends of agony because walking up a ski slope not only looked dreadful, it also felt horrible!!! it probably took us an hour and a half to get back up the slope seeing that we had to take a break almost every 20 minutes! After that adventure, I was done for the day and my journey set off to the grocery store for a bottle of wine, a hot shower, and a nap!

I actually woke from my nap to the sounds of a very interesting conversation. There were a few of the other students that came from Georgetown talking about religion. I usually try not to put myself in these conversations but hey, I was invited into the convo. From the start of that one question it led to a 3 hour discussion about various parts of life. From politics, to the desire to invent things and how we wanted to make our impact on the world. After the discussions I realized that this was one of the first of many conversations I will have like this while in France!