Canadaland

To be honest, as soon as I arrived in Canada I forgot about my blog. It seems that the busyness of my life before I left was just put on hold and ready to bombard me as soon as I got home again. But it has been fun too.

In the end, Jess and I never made it to Marrakech which was (more than) thoroughly dissapointing for me. I was soooo excited to check out the "riads", maybe go to a spa, go 4x4ing, take a camel ride and be in a warm climate before heading back to frigid Canada. We left Grenoble, France at 5am on Friday December 17, 2010 after an evening of celebrating. Unfortunately, we missed our flight at 7am due to circumstances that were out of our control but also due to the lack of organization and communication on the part of the airport storage staff. We then decided to shell out the extra 200 euro to pay for a new flight to Morocco later that evening. We waited around the airport in Lyon all day and evening because our flight was delayed and eventually cancelled and not because of the weather (like many other flights) but because there was no crew to fly our plane. This left us a bit in despair seeing as all the hotels around the airport were now booked and no taxis were willing to drive into town because of the "horrific weather" (a little snow) that they were experiencing.Luckily Jess and I were able to book a hotel in Lyon on an airport computer and caught the last Rhone Express train to town. We had to stay at a hotel for 3 nights, basically waiting until our flight home to Canada was to depart on Tuesday December 21, 2010. We decided just to relax, watch movies, re-packing, eat macaroons and pain au chocolat and try to dissolve our bitterness over Morocco.

The weather was not letting up and we had read on Facebook that many of our other classmates were stuck in Lyon or in other parts of Europe during their attempts to get home for the holidays. London Heathrow and Paris Charles de Gaulle were essentially closed due to large snowfall and the airports unpreparedness for handling this type of weather. The other regional airports such as Frankfurt and Lyon were having issues flying since the snow would fall, melt (because weather sat around zero degrees) and then would freeze again and all the runways could not be cleared or it was not safe to fly. Needless to say, Jess and I started getting concerned about making it to Frankfurt on Tuesday (the first leg of our flight home). In the end we switched that flight to Monday and spend a solid 22 hours in the Frankfurt airport, overnight, until our flight to Calgary left the next afternoon.

If you look close this picture is of the departure monitors in Frankfurt and you can see that over 90% of the flights the day we left Europe were cancelled.

Either way both us and our luggage made it home to Canada, eventually, and after some stressing and large amounts of frustration. I've got to say though that when I took my first breath as I walked off the plane in Canada, the air was so cold I started coughing because my lungs couldn't take it. Not a pleasant welcome.

Best part about being home was that I got to see my friends and family and that I was home for Christmas, especially when I knew there were so many people that were still stuck in airports and didn't make it home for the holidays.

Ski Day!

It's on my bucket list to ski in both the French and Swiss Alps and on Saturday I was finally able to cross one of those off my list :)

I found out mid week that a couple people from my class were planning to head to Deux Alps to ski/ride for the day and I jumped on that like a fat kid on cake (or like Dania on a pain au chocolat). I brought most of my ski stuff to France since it was always my intention to make it to a mountain before I left and just had to borrow snow pants from someone. Luckily that worked itself out quite easily. Unfortunately, I came for the wrong school semester to ski because the ski season really only started last week and its still "low season." But either way I was determined to get out on the slopes even with my impending final exams and papers.

It had been snowing/raining for the last week solid and I completely lucked out because Saturday was just gorgeous weather and the sun was shining ALL day. No snow to blind us but super fresh powder from all the snow that had fallen the night and days before. Many of my classmates had never actually skiied before, or at least not much, so I ended up skiing by myself for the morning. This was perfectly fine by me and I still thoroughly enjoyed myself. Put the earphones in, gloves on and I was set to discover the French Alps.

Well the sad thing was that since it is still "low season" only 1/4 to a 1/3 of the lifts and runs were open since most of the snow had yet to settle and avalanche warnings were high. The guy at the rental shop (yes I had to rent gear which was a frustrating change from using my own) had actually given me freestyle skis accidently so I just stuck with them and decided it would be interesting to try them out. Different skis, powder and high altitudes led to a fun but challenging day of skiing. Not only that but after hitting up numerous black runs, which took me a while to get through, I discovered that the European rating system is different than Canada and the black runs I was taking were actually considered double blacks in Canada and the red runs here are what we consider 'black diamonds'. Plus, I was soon informed that the altitude was much higher than Canadian mountains and we got up to about 3000m above sea level. Boy, did that ever make me feel better about my skiing. For the morning I had just determined I had just gotten super out of shape since last season or that the freestyle skis were so much harder to use since it was taking so much more energy to ski the slopes than usual.

Ultimately the day was awesome; hanging out with friends, eating tasty, wood oven pizza, skiing in powder and discovering a new mountain. My only regret is that I wish I was here to experience the Alps to their fullest, for the whole winter. I guess the Rocky Mountains will have to do until the next European adventure!