Over halfway through the skiing trip. After a rough start it's been pleasant overall so far. When I showed up at the bus station on Saturday night after a lovely dinner with Andrea I found myself having to fight with about 200 12 year olds and their parents to "register" for the bus ride. I quickly realized that the so-called registration was another pointless patience testing exercise of the French administrators so I knocked down a couple of parents and used my authoritative lawyer persona to find another way. A few hours of bus ride followed, I slept through Charlie's Angels in French (painful) and, to my relief, found out that it was not going to be 20 middle school kids and auntie Fanni in our group: instead it is a mix of adolescents and twenty-somethings with a few thirty-ish guys and women thrown in for good measure. I am lying about my age again (28), but only because when one of my twenty year old friends, as a response to my smug comment about her not being born in the 80s responded confidently that I surely wasn't much older than her - I just couldn't break her the news. She was quite shocked, as it was....

As far as the skiing is concerned: the Chamonix valley is absolutely gorgeous, the weather is sublime, I am tanned and freckled and the ski lessons are good. I do sometimes feel like I have landed in a place that is a cross between a catholic girl-scouts outing and a boot camp: we have to get up early, do everything together, wait for everyone all the time and for instructions on what to do with ourselves. There is also the drink tickets thing at the bar (no real liquor, of course) and the bunk-beds. But there is also a fun girl I am hanging out with and some relatively cute guys, plus the sun and the mountains and the good food. By today though, I overdosed both on the skiing and the social life so I ran away to Chamonix for the day, went to the swimming pool, did a little sauna session and treated myself to an 80 euro-massage at a four-star hotel to find relief from the pain caused by the bunk-bed and the girl-scouts.

More later - I have to get back and face being reprimanded slightly for buggering off without notice...