Le Franco Phoney

Some friends asked me to look after their chalet last weekend so they could watch their son ski in a competition elsewhere. They only had two guests and they had cooked all the meals, so all I had to do was serve them, and drop the guests off in town. No worries, right? Maybe less worries if my VW Golf was reliable. It’s an old car, but I love it because I can pop the roof down in summer and really enjoy driving in such a beautiful place. There was no enjoyment last weekend. With a piece of corroded rubber preventing the accelerator cable from working, I hitched up to the chalet with a friend who, visiting for the weekend, had a hire car. The guests arrived before us, but luckily the chalet owners’ other son was there to greet them. The three of us fumbled through serving dinner despite the frozen salad and the absence of milk for coffee.

Breakfast the next morning was fun. I had driven the chalet van down to my place the night before so I could get back to the chalet, but with 15cm of snow on my steep driveway and no snow tyres, the van only made it half way up the hill before the wheels spun. I tried to reverse it but managed to stall it, then flood the engine. I rolled it down the driveway where it was avoidable to other cars but still in the way. It wouldn’t restart and I wondered if I’d killed the battery. I borrowed my friend’s hire car which apparently did have snow tyres, drove past the dumped van and my broken Golf and waited for the guests to wake up. They didn’t. The pressure was on to catch first lifts with my friend at 9am and it was now 8.15am. I knocked on the guests’ door and asked if they were coming down for breakfast. As I’d guessed, they had forgotten that the clocks went forward an hour the night before. Eggs poached, toast made, guests tired but full, I avoided explaining that there was no van to drop them off. Instead, I opted to yell out a farewell while they got changed into the ski clothes.

The chalet owners returned just before dessert that night, which was lucky because we couldn’t find it. Panic over and guests fed, I’d even managed to get the van back to the chalet. The problem? I hadn’t taken it out of gear when starting it. A chalet girl I am not.

1. Annecy. Last week, Annecy won the national contest to see which French city could bid for the 2018 winter Olympics. Congratulations to everyone involved so far. I’ll keep my fingers crossed until 2010 when the winning city is announced.

2. Candide Thovex was noticeably absent at the La Clusaz Free Sessions. He’s been busy working on his new project, Candide Kamera. The first video is beautifully shot, with a great opening scene looking down to Geneva airport, lots of amazing freeriding, and just a few tricks thrown in during filming. There’s also some footage of him being dragged out of a snowy river by his perplexed-looking friend. I wasn’t too keen on the ending, which reverts back to his old style, but at least he kept the time lapse footage to about three seconds, and there’s only one ‘nature’ scene of some deer. Check out the vid:

Interestingly, Candide’s website has a ‘coming soon’ page for the Candide Invitational. Does this mean there will be more in the future?

3. Bruno. Who is Bruno? Bruno is my cat, and despite this week’s new snowfall, it’s clear that spring is on the way because he has brought me his first mouse for the year. Not bad for a fourteen year-old, but I’d prefer no mouse and more winter.

Ahh, the French: stereotyped as driving too close to the car in front (true), speaking with a funny accent (true) and liking a good strike (also true - as seen earlier just this week). However, they’re also stereotyped as being rude and a bit arrogant about their language. I guess it’s a case of a few bad eggs spoiling all the rest, because I’ve honestly found the French, at least where I live, to be far more polite than the people in other places I’ve lived, and proud of their language, yes, but always willing to help me learn new words or graciously try to understand my terrible, accent-ridden French.

And it’s not just me. An English visitor last week asked for some bread in a restaurant, except she asked for it in Franglais: “Je voudrais le pain”. The problem is that in French, “some bread” is actually “du pain”, and by asking for “le pain” the waiter probably thought she was asking for rabbit (”lapin)”. He looked confused, then spoke in perfect English to my now embarrassed friend. It’s not his native language, but he was happy to speak English to figure out what my friend wanted. Two French friends of mine are learning English from me because they want to be able to serve clients in the customer-facing roles better. It’s not a requirement of their job, but they are eager to learn and speak a foreign language in their own country. Top points to them.

The politeness of the French extends in other ways. On a chairlift the other day (once I was through the scramble of the queue, as I’ve discussed here and here), the guy sitting next to me asked me if I minded if he and his girlfriend smoked. There’s another stereotype: all French smoke. Well, yes, lots do, but lots don’t. The indoor public ban on smoking was accepted without the expected protests in 2008, and these two smokers checking if it was okay with me for them to smoke is just one example of how the French can really be surprising. Of course, I felt obliged to say it was fine, then had to find discrete ways of avoiding the smoke that seemed to waft in my direction despite their best efforts to stop it.

And then there’s politeness out of necessity. I was working from home yesterday when I heard a knock on my door. It was the neighbour from upstairs who had never said hello to me. She explained she had an IT need and can I please help. My wifi is open for others to use (the wifi connection in French translates to “pay me in cake” in English and it has worked: I’ve received numerous cakes and sweet things from grateful holiday-makers), so I presumed she was checking if it was okay. I was wrong. She had received a message on her phone about a photo sent to her phone and she needed to type in a web address on a computer to see it. So, we used my computer to access the photo — a baby with a bottle. She cooed and ahhed at the photo as if the baby was in the room with us, then thanked me a number of times. Her husband soon arrived and we all spent some time staring at this baby. They were cooing and I was trying to figure out if it was a boy or a girl. I’m still not sure. Their politeness extended to kisses goodbye and more thanks before they left my place. Their display of gratitude made me realise I’m finally getting the hang of the French language: I understood the nuances of politeness that previously I’ve only understood in English. Yay!

I direct you to the photos below. Click on the photos for the full-sized, uncropped images. Quick review below.

Last weekend marked the very first La Clusaz Free Sessions competition, which was a bit boring during the day (due to the fact that the riders were off-piste all over the mountain, and often out of view of the public), and lots of fun at night, with a jib session after the day’s video footage was shown. In the photos above, you can see how the competitors started with a road jump, getting massive height and doing all sorts of tricks, then moved onto some rails before hitting the wooden log at the bottom of the hill, pictured. People walked under the road jump while the road was blocked off to cars. There were only a few falls, but thankfully they were all minor, with the riders picking themselves up again as soon as they had stopped sliding down the snow.

La Clusaz is certainly better-known for its skiers than for its snowboarders, but I think it’s a bit sad that there were no snowboarders at all in this event. There’s certainly no snowboard-exclusive event in this resort, yet it hosts cross-country events and even a big telemark weekend.

Meanwhile, in the snowpark, an event for teenagers was held. I didn’t get to see much of the action, nor try the skis on offer, but the warmed sachets of Nutella that were being handed out with bread were very welcome! If I can use an extremely awful pun, the weekend was bitter-sweet. I’m so, so sorry for that.

I saw this advertisement for a carpentry business in a local paper recently, and I think it’s meant to be a clever play on words. The French word for building is batiment, which, with a French accent, sounds a bit like batti-mon. Given that their logo shows a man with a house on his head, I’m sure that the company has chosen to mix English with French to create a word that means house man. But I suspect the play on words goes further than that. Batman the movie kept its title here in France and Batman, lets face it, is a hero. What company wouldn’t want to be associated with a hero? I asked a French friend what he thought and he didn’t think it was a play on the movie title. I think it’s to co-incidental not to be. What do you think?

Each year, Annecy holds a procession of Venetian carnival costumes, run by an association that links the two cities. I found a place in the sun to watch the people in their beautiful costumes slowly and silently meander past. This also gave me an insight into how French people tell each other off, and how those being told off tend to ignore it. More than one person tried to stand in front of me and the small family next to me. The entire family verbally harassed each person until the left. One guy was more persistent, but he too gave up and gave up once the father in the family beside me changed his tone to be more aggressive. I think he actually threatened the guy. Meanwhile, up the corridor of people a little, a woman was shrieking at the top of her voice, telling another woman who had parked herself in front of everyone to move away. An argument followed before the woman left. Towards the end of the parade, some people blocked the route entirely, causing the costumed-up people to find a different route. When an official (a young girl) tried to get people to move aside to open the route—and there was plenty of room for everyone to have a great view of the parade—not only did they stay still, but they told her off! She gave up and went for help. The correct route was eventually reinstated, but only briefly before being blocked once more. The photos below are just a tiny subset of all the costumes.

Why is it that we lose our common sense when it comes to chairlift queues? A while ago, I was amazed at a single-file queue for a drag lift in La Clusaz and I got some interesting comments about queue mentality in different parts of the world. What I saw the other day was, in fact, the other extreme.

I made my way into the single queue at Le Cret du Loup chairlift in La Clusaz, allowing me to speed past the regular queue and fill an otherwise empty seat. As I passed through the electronic barrier, a French man in the slow, regular queue cooly and bluntly asked me where my instructor was. In dodgy French, I explained that the Ski School queue was actually on the other side of him, and that I was in a single queue. The man didn’t believe me until his friend pointed out the Ski School queue and said I was indeed correct. Err, thanks, tourists. Know your mountain. Queue mentality #1: everyone is righteous, whether they’re right or not.

As I approached the chairlift from the side, allowing easy access to get to an unused seat, I watched a father take his three kids onto the three-seater chairlift. That’s right, that’s four people. Now, this particular chairlift, like most, has three individual barriers that open and close in time with each new chair that rounds the corner. It is apparent that it is a three-seater chairlift well before the barriers due to lanes leading up to the barriers. And yet here was a dad trying to get all three kids on with him. Confusion ensued. A kid was pulled to the side by the man in charge of safety, but one of the other kids, concerned with the goings-on, fell over and the chairlift went over him. Queue mentality #2: it’s okay to ignore simple safety measures if it means you don’t have to wait for another chairlift.

No worries, they can get on the next chairlift together, right? WRONG. No, because meanwhile, at the barrier, a mother, child and stranger were watching all this going on, but still proceeded to go through the barriers, despite the apparent overpopulation of the previous chairlift. Once through the barriers, the mother and the stranger stopped, realising the next chair was taken. The kid was about six years old and continued on her way. The mother said half-heartedly: “Oh…wait…” while the kid kept going. Result? Another kid down, two kids crying that they’re not on the same chairlift as their dad, and a queue of people behind getting restless that the queue has slowed. Queue mentality #3: who cares about the welfare of those ahead when they’re holding the rest of us up!

I can understand why the man in charge of safety didn’t want to stop the chairlift: the first problem seemed simple, but it snowballed and turned into kid carnage. Someone slowed the chairlift for long enough to clear the mess of sprawled mini-people and the lift returned to normal. I somehow ended up on the chairlift with the little girl whose mum was now frozen still, unsure what to do without the reassurance of the barrier to tell her when to go and when to stop. How did I manage this? Well, I too believe in the three previous queue mentalities. I was righteous; I ignored simple safety measures; and, I was not happy that these kids were holding me up. Queue mentality #4: at the end of the day, we’re all sheep.