Snowboarding trip 2010

Today is Chinese New Year and Valentines day. Fortunately for a person who is away from home and single like me, this coincidence saved me from grieving in two days. Though I should wish those of you who are cherished, a happy CNY/Valentines or both of it!

While the productivity through the day is greatly reduced by the mood, weather and occasion, I rather spend it on reminiscing the wonderful times earlier this year. This year's winter was much colder, nevertheless we headed to the colder region of French alps for a frost blasting thrill.

Welcome to Villard de Lans!

We took a plane to Grenoble and rode a local hire van to our hostel, much better than the painful 20hours bus ride last year.

The alphines on the slope are all covered with snow after 2 days of heavy snowfall.

One of the path taken most. It is green, means easy. It is also our daily rendezvous.

This path is call Salamandre. A long flat green path, I hate it the most because its not a slope, and without gravity doing the job, I always end up walking the path.

This is a view from the chair lift.

And the chair lifts looks like this. Sitting on it is not a pleasure because without heat generated from body movement, you would feel how is it like to be exposed to wind as cold as -10C.

The most beautiful summit I found in this ski resort. I like the paths too, long blue(medium) trail, although in the end we always ended up in descending the black (very hard) trails.

 

 

Occasionally if we think snowboarding and skiing is not dangerous enough, we tried standing on an icy slippery see-saw.

The weather changed drastically in the week we were there. When we arrived, too little snow cause most of the paths to be closed. Followed by 2 days of extremely fine and sunny weather, 2 days of extremely cold and foggy weather, and 2 days of heavy snowfall.

A mini snowman or snowbaby....

We started off with moderate weather of snowboarding and skiing

Then there was a day we had a great lunch with a good weather on 2000m above sea level.

It seems so warm and cozy sitting on these benches sunbathing. Well actually part of your body not facing the sun is very cold.

The next day, it became foggy..

Worst, came heavy snowfall...

Fresh snow is so thick, you could bury a person with it.

Most of the time we got stuck in thick pile of snow.

And the cold is unbearable.

See the frost deposited on their hair. So "cool"!

When we were not snowboarding, we spend our time playing card games.

And we cooked our dinner most of the nights.

On the last day, smart as we thought we were, we forgot to bring our shoes to return the snow boots.

But plastic bags worked well on snow too!


As always, I believe that the French are better in appreciating food.

 Something quite relative to the fondue, where you melt the cheese and eat it with your meat platter.

The pie of the day. Seafood baked with potatoes and cheese, delicious.

Another pie, if I were to remember, its something called forest pie. Claimed to be very meaty instead of forestry. Reminder that forest is not a habitat only for vegetation, it is also a habitat for animals.

The table of our last dinner in France.

Dessert: Dame Blanche. Very creamy

A very special alcohol drink which contains mountain herbs.

On the mountain restaurant

French toast.

Apple pie.
The french do have a habit much like us(slacking). They spend a long time for lunch, chatting for the first hour before they start looking at the menu, and more talking after that.

Besides, we have a lot of different crepes, from savoury to sweet.

The popeye crepe.

and their alcohol is really strong!

Burning crepe.

Finally we bought those alcohols home. There were these bottle of sugar soaked in 80% alcohol concentration, a cube gives you instant warming sensation.

The riddle of the trip:

Go in hard hard,
Come out soft soft.
In out in out,
juice come out....

I know that a normal 'adult' mind of yours would thought of only one answer. But you should guess a type of food.

If you would have guess it is ice-cream, we share the same great mind. Apparently your answer is still wrong...

Oh, its time for real work!