My French Education: Accent

French is hard.  It's hard to say, it's hard to hear, there are oodles of rules, and the fact that you can just run all the words together and put gaps pretty much where you like, means you need a multi-pass parser to read the previous sentence spoken to you into your head several times before you get what is being said.

Anyway, this weekend i hit a milestone.  Someone (a French someone) asked me where i was from because he couldn't place my accent.  That means i'm actually speaking fluently enough to actually have an accent.  I bet a South African accent sounds rather weird in French!

Anyway, hooray for me.  So far we've bought a TV, a car, and are now starting a business in French.  We spent the last Sunday morning entirely with French (non-English-speaking) friends.  I reckon another 20 - 30 years and i'll be fluent.

I must say i really like the language, despite its difficulties for an anglophone.  It's so polite, everything rhymes, and the guttural R is the coolest sound ever made by a human.  C'est vraiment genial!

Tignes in November

This weekend, thanks to the combined team effort of some of our awesome friends out here, Natalie and i managed to get away to Tignes for some pre-season skiing on the glacier.  It was an amazing weekend away, thanks to our excellent friends who gave us place to stay and looked after Scarlett and Runa for us.

Natalie at 3100m

The apartment we stayed in was the closest possible apartment to the funiculaire - literally 50m in a straight line.  The snow at the top was surprisingly good and i've become surprisingly unfit during the summer - my salopettes were too tight!

At about 3300m trying my best to carve

The common problem for the last year has been that my old Bandits are ruined and so i've been having to ski everywhere on my Sultan 94s.  They are way too big for skiing glacier ice and hard bumps, and quite tricky to carve - i have to get my new skis soon!  I'm thinking Scott Aztec, but the jury is out... you know how good i am at making fast purchasing decisions.

Natalie, carving :)

I can heartily recommend Tignes - we've skied there in January, August, and now November.  The snow is always good, the sun has always been out and we've always had an amazing time.

The downside is it is incredibly expensive.  We spent about €150 on food for the two of us for 2 lunches and a small evening meal... incroyable.

The other downside is that you do rather feel like a beginner with all the amazing race-skiers around.  The standard of skiing is extremely high.  Most people rate resorts in terms of steepness and number of correct coloured runs to establish the beginner-friendly-ness of a resort.  I think it's smarter to just look at the average skill level of the other skiers there.  The skill level at Tignes in November is unbelievably good.  It's worth going just to watch them ski and learn from their technique.

Having said all that the lady in the background of Natalie's photo above was a statistical outlying to the number of experts out there... i think i need to airbrush her out...

The Problem

This is the problem with the snow in the French Alps so far this season:

Taken on La Grande Motte at 3150m yesterday

Let's hope it doesn't continue...  What's happening now is what happened last February.  There's a high pressure stuck over the Alps keeping all the weather away.  Go away high-pressure i want some SNOW!

Tronçonneuse

I got to do "Mountain-Man" things this weekend.  Everyone should own a chainsaw - they are the most awesomest of awesome machines evA.

Doing stuff with wood and metal at 119 dB.  Awesome.

Interestingly, the chainsaw cost €500, but the protective gear (chainsaw-gloves, chainsaw-sleeves (which i now wear to bed - they are so comfy), chainsaw-boots, chainsaw-trousers, and face-protector) cost about €400.  Having said that, maybe it really isn't that interesting.  Supposedly the trousers can block the chainsaw blade - i wouldn't like to test it - the trousers aren't as solid as the wood the saw can cut though with very little effort.

Anyway, we now probably have enough wood to get us through to end-January - then we will just freeze for the rest of the winter because heating your house in the moutains is just too expensive.  Plus i'm a Mountain Man now so i don't get cold.

Passage de Savolaire

Last Sunday Natalie and i went our for a "short walk" above Essert la Pierre.  Just like in the Sound of Music, the mountain kept calling us higher and we ended up at the spectacular Passage de Savolaire, which at 1997m leads to a narrow-ish couloir down into the Vallée d'Abondance.

Passage de Savolaire, looking down to Abondance

We're definitely going to be checking this out on rando when Winter gets here.  It will have to be early in the season though as the climb is in full sun.  The couloir down into Abondance should be awesome, as, at 5pm, there was still frost on the ground on the north-facing slopes.

About half-way up we passed Brion, which consists of one farm - apart from the lack of electricity and phone, this would be an awesome place to live - in the Winter you get sun until 17:00 and a perfect view of Mont Blanc over the shoulder of Nantaux.

At Brion, looking towards the huge mass that is Nantaux

Finally, at the top, just above the Passage, there's the tiny peak called Pointe des Lanchettes where Scarlett and Runa figured it was time for a break and some sun-tanning.  We're definitely running into Winter now with it getting really cold in the shade.  We'll absolutely be back here when it's covered in snow, and, incidentally, if you're climbing it and planning to ski into Abondance, i'd say the couloir to the right of Pointe des Lanchettes as you ascend from Brion would be the easier ski in - the route to the left is narrower and looks a lot steeper.

At the top of Pointe des Lanchettes

Eleven eleven eleven

This is the real reason we moved to France and chose to live in the mountains - so we could do this:

Happy eleven-eleven-eleven, tout le monde.