Mountains!

Since I've been home in Edmonton, Canada I decided it would be best to take advantage of the snow that has blanketed the mountains. SO, I headed on the Downhill Riders trip to Whitefish, Montana for New Years with my friend Robyn and 7 others. It was a gong-show busride for the 10 hrs or so it took to get there but we had a blast! We skiied 2 days of the 4 and enjoyed the challenge of the mountain and the powder that had fallen. The company was awesome along with the cheap alcohol and relaxation time.

After my quick escapade to the USA I was home for 2 days and my dad, sister (her boyfriend) and I hit the highway for our annual family ski trip. This years location of choice was Banff, Alberta and skiing at Sunshine. The snow kept falling so we had an amazing amount of powder which was just perfect for trying out my NEW snowboard that I got for Christmas! :D I got an Arbor Push board made of bamboo (which makes it super light) with Salomon boots and bindings. Needless to say I was excited to start riding!! I also loved that I finally got to see one of my good friends Steph because she has been living in Canmore, AB since finishing university. The weekend finished off with a quick stay in Calgary, AB with my cousins and their super adorably lovable daughter Ayla (13 months old).

There's no way I can say I didn't make the most of my Christmas holidays and even though it was busy I enjoyed every minute of it. Tonight I'm relaxing with a glass of wine and trying not to think about the inevitable start of school and classes which begin tomorrow. At least it's my final semester of my Bachelors Degree!

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.

My Lists

Okay so I lied. One more blog post before I head to Morocco and then onto Canada. If you rememeber, way at the start of my blog in my "Aurevoir" post I wrote a list of things I was looking forward to experiencing in France and things I thought I would miss from Canada. Turns out that the things I thought I would miss were not all as big of a deal as I thought so I figured the list needed a little revamping before I went home based on the actual results of my trip. I also decided to write my new list of things that I am most definitely going to miss from France now that I've lived here for 4 months. Here goes.

Things I Actually Missed from Canada

1) My friends
2) My family
3) Hugs
4) My car (especially for groceries)
5) My own bed (my mattress here is absolute crap)
6) My full closet selection (although I quickly broadened my selection here and am now dealing with the concequences while trying to pack)
7) Simple health coverage/my massage therapist
8) People who removed the snow from the streets right after a dump
9) Church and worship with others
10) Having a couch
11) Effective heating
12) Carpet in my room
13) A showerhead you don't need to hold onto
14) Alberta beef/steak
15) Thanksgiving and Halloween
16) Having a washing machine in my house
17) Being able to eat at a restaurant anytime of day, not just from 1-3pm and 7-midnight
18) The gym and working out
19) Starbucks/regular sized coffees
20) Having a backyard

Things I Will Miss from France

1) My friends
2) 2 Euro wine
3) Pain au Chocolat
4) Living in the mountains
5) Walking to school
6) Cheap shoes
7) Gelato
8) Travelling to other countries on the weekends
9) Living by a crystal blue (most of the time) river
10) Speaking French
11) Palmiers (a pastry of course)
12) Fresh bread
13) Christmas market
14) Skiing in the Alps 30 minutes away
15) 12 above weather in December
16) My small class that became my large family
17) Widespread rugby
18) Swiss chocolate being so close

Bittersweet

Here's a little snapshot of where I'm at now. I have:

ONE full day remaining until final exam week starts (with 4 exams to write).
FIVE days until final exams are over.
FIVE and a half days until Jess and I leave for Marrakech, Morocco and most of my friends leave Grenoble.
TEN days (or just over) until I land at the Edmonton International Airport.

Every day that passes seems to be bittersweet. I'm looking forward to going home and seeing my friends and family again but everytime I think about it I am countered with the thought of leaving France and all of the friends I've made who have become my 'away from home' family. I hate the thought that I might not see some of them ever again. I'm sad that the time and effort I've put into these relationships might be 'all for not' if we struggle to keep in contact, but at the same time I'm excited to have new friends across the world, whom I can visit, as well as new travel opportunities.

I'm a little bit scared to return to Canada. Scared that it will feel different, for the adjustments I know I will need to make and scared that I will feel like I left part of myself or my heart in Grenoble. Even a little bit scared that I will settle back into my 'normal life' far too easily and not let myself be challenged by the things I've learned and what I've experienced.

No matter the mish-mash of things that I'm feeling I am certainly going to try to enjoy my last few days in Grenoble and in Europe in whatever way I even can. I write this with a sense of frustration because I wish to be living this week to the fullest and doing everything I enjoy however, the need to study for finals is a huge hinderance on my ability to follow through. Unfortunately, that means that my next 4 days will be spent in little contact with others, cooped up in my apartment, trying to pack as much knowledge in as my brain can currently handle. It also means that you should consider this my last blog post until I land on Canadian soil, or at least until I return to Grenoble (for 6 hours) after Morocco and before my departure from Europe.

Oh and with all this stuff going on its even more exciting when the thought comes to mind that there's actually only 2 weeks left until Christmas!! (just a little bit excited)

Until next time.

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!

Paris, Je T'aime

Good news. Remember when I said in my last post that I was quite saddened knowing I wouldn't be travelling again until after finals? Well that didn't last long and I was actually able to skip town again this past weekend and head for the marvellous city of Par-ee (Paris for you English speakers who didn't catch on)!

I definitely lucked out on this trip. I spent only a couple days lamenting on my lack of future travels when I got an invitation from my friend Charlie to see the Australia vs. France international rugby game on Saturday November 27. That fact in itself had me quite excited and it just topped it with a cherry when I found out that the game was at the Stade de France in Paris. Yes....I was a happy camper. Then Jess decided she was going to come along to explore the city for the weekend also! So we did what we've done best and got online to check out the train schedule and book hostels. We managed to snag on right by the Montmarte area just down from the Sacre Coeur basilica.

Since we had both already visited Paris on touristy trips (4 years ago for me) we decided to spend another long-weekend just relaxing and wandering...boy do I enjoy brief moments of that lifestyle in the midst of the rushed craziness of my usual life. We arrived Thursday evening and searched out the nearest Starbucks. Vitally important since we are so lacking in Grenoble. We then spent the night wandering around by the Moulin Rouge and checked out maybe going to a show....89 Euro?? Didn't happen. The cold was a bit of a shock since we'd been enjoying the mild temperatures of Grenoble, and walking around all day outside just aplifies the "chilled to the bone" feeling, so it was time for the ski jacket, toque and definitely shoes with socks!

Friday we hit up Starbucks again for a "Latte Caramel Noisette" (their Christmas special we don't have in Canada) and headed to Centre Pompidou. We voted against seeing the museums and instead just enjoyed the "modern art" architechture and went out in search of another Starbucks. We checked out the Sorbonne (only from the ouside due to security) and walked around the Latin Quarter in the afternoon looking in quaint bookshops and some jewlery stores. It was then that it started to SNOW....we were quite excited since this was the first snow of the season and we're in the romantic city of Paris....lacking men of course but that's okay. Our evening finished with a giant Indian meal and relaxation at a "tea house" near our hostel.

How did we start Saturday you might ask? Take a guess. Starbucks. I'm tellin ya, you gotta take what you can get while it's around because deprivation sets in fast when small cups of instant coffee are the only thing around. We met Charlie there since he had to come on a later train and took the afternoon to see the Tour Eiffel and walk along the Seine river, enjoying the fall colours and the sun that decided to finally peek through the clouds. We ended up at the Champs d'Elysee where we got to experience something Canada is missing. A Christmas Market! They have little log cabins set up along the avenue selling crafts, scarves, waffles, crepes as well as food stands with giant woks of tartiflette, paella, hot wine, etc. It was a feast for my eyes and my stomach! All the trees were lit up with Chrsitmas lights and there was a ferris wheel, merry-go round and slides that were entertaining the children. It was picturesque and even better when Jess and I went back Sunday to see it in the dark. Saturday night we headed to Charlie's hostel for dinner, beer and cards and off we went to the RUGBY GAME! We had managed to claim the last 2 scarves for that rugby match earlier in the day and were pretty excited to show our colours while cheering on the Aussie team. Of course they whopped France's ass 61-16 final score. Definitely tops as one of the most awesome moments in my life. To end the day, Charlie and I met up with Jess and two girls we met at our hostel (one from Germany and one from Australia) and checked out an absynthe bar that had a definite punk atmosphere.

Sunday was our last day in Paris and we decided to get some much needed rest....which really, was a stupid plan because you never really get a good sleep in a hostel. Either way, we stayed in bed until 10, had a lunch from the grocery store and spent the rest of the day just going back to buy some things we wanted and chilling at...Starbucks. Like I mentioned previously, we also went back to see the Champs Elysee all lit up at night and headed to the train station for a 1st class trip home (they were all out of the other seats....we're too poor for that usually haha).

Needless to say the weekend was an absolute blast and I got lots of fresh air, no matter how cold it was. I quite enjoyed getting my full caffeine fix (as you can see based on the 5 or more visits) and spending time with friends. A la prochaine fois!

Chartreuse Anyone?

Just a quick post compared to the others but I wanted to mention a neat place to check out if you ever come to the Rhone-Alps area of France. After finishing two major group presentations last week, Jess, myself and Charlie (a friend from the UK) headed to Voiron, France on Wednesday November 24th. We did not pick this small town at random, rather it is home to the Chartreuse caves, unique to France and to this area specifically. So alcohol, plus the cheap train tickets of only 5 euro, were essentially what drew us to Voiron for the afternoon.

Voiron was only a 15 minute train ride from Grenoble but there was not much to look at while there, other than the Chartreuse caves. After some cafe au lait at a local shop to kill the time (since things are closed from 12-2pm) we headed down the road to the caves. Luckily, entrance was free (important for us poor students) and we enjoyed our tour, which ended with a free tasting!

Chartreuse is a liqueur made by the Cartheusian Monks since the 1740's. To create the flavour, alcohol is mixed with 130 different herbal extracts and aged for years. It ranges in alcohol content from 40-55%. Most people don't realize there are so many types of Chartreuse as restaurants and bars in Canada tend to only stock the green (55%) version and it's quite expensive at that. During the tasting we had the chance to try the green and yellow Chartreuses along with Genepi (a liquor featuring local mountain flora). In addition, there is Chartreuse VEP which is aged longer in oak casks, Liqueur du 9eme Centenaire and Chartreuse 1605. Lastly there is the Elixir Vegetal de la Grand-Chartreuse which is the original version/discovery of Chartreuse. Historically it was thought to lengthen people's lives but now you can actually find it at the pharmacy and mix a drop or two with water or sugar in order to help with digestion.

I ended up learning a lot and enjoyed the day of relaxing away from school and homework in general. We picked up some regional wine on the way home to finish off the evening with a hot dinner and glass of red. Always makes my day. Okay so I guess this wasn't such a quick post after all...