Le Franco Phoney

Snow. White cold stuff, right? In French, it’s neige. Snowflakes are called flocons de neige (or just flocons). In the past week, I’ve seen snowflakes, rain and bright sunshine. The rain down lower was heavy, and the French saying for heavy rain is “Il pleut comme vache qui pisse” (It rains like a cow that pees).

The pistes have turned from poudre or peuf (powder) to soupe (erm, soup). There are also icy patches underneath like a patinoire (ice rink). Conditions have gone from hard-packed to soft and mushy, to avalanche-prone, then powdery, and now back to soggy snow, all in less than a week. And if you want to have a chat with any French person about the conditions, you really do have to know more than the word for snow. Otherwise it’s plain confusing: “What’s that? You were stuck in soup? You hit the ice rink? Then a cow peed?” These are just a few examples of snow-related talk that you probably need to know.

This photo of an avalanche (you can figure out its size by looking at the big pine trees) shows how a thin the layer of snow can transform quickly from a patinoire to soup, and then collapse under its own weight. Apart from the obvious faux-pas moment of misunderstanding someone who mentions getting stuck in soup, it’s pretty handy to know from a safety point of view, especially at this time of year. If someone is talking about a fondue, chances are they’re talking about melted snow and not cheese. Snow fondue is by far the less attractive type.

Yesterday was very newsworthy for lots of reasons. Here’s a run-down.

Good news: local freestyle champion Candide Thovex, who switched to freeride just this season, has won the Freeride World Tour! I bet all the other competitors wish he’d just go back to freestyle.

Bad news: the La Clusaz Free Sessions have been cancelled due to dangerous weather conditions. With avalanches happening all over the place, the organisers decided the risk was too high, and with lots of new snow due this weekend, the competition would be quite difficult to judge. I guess that means that the road jump they’ve been sculpting in town will also be demolished.

Good news: my Carte Vitale (French healthcare card) arrived in the mail yesterday! Just weeks away from a full year since I first applied, it’s a great relief. Without it, each visit to the doctor, pharmacy or dentist involves additional paperwork and more costs. I paid €3,000 for the privilege of not having one last year, and this year they want €4,500, so it’s great to be able to use the card instead of paying even more on top of what I’ve already paid. I first wrote about the nightmare here, if you’re interested (along with various other posts).

Bad news: Viva La Clusaz, the custom motorbike show which was mostly rained out last year, won’t be held this year in La Clusaz. It’s moved south and is now called Punta Bagna Bike Valfrejus. Thanks to Dawn for the information. For anyone planning on going there on a Harley, your motorbike will cut out just by the toll booth exit on the toll roads in France. You’ll need to roll your bike along a bit before restarting. It has something to do with the big aerials near the toll booths and the frequency of the Harley’s anti-theft device. Thanks again to Dawn and to Simon, who learnt the hard way.

Visit bungalographics.com for more cool stuff

Good news: local artist, Charlie Adam, seems to be doing quite well with his great artwork, available from his website or his shop in La Clusaz. I’ve got a lovely cow-boarding print on my wall, but perhaps I should have got the one pictured, as my old VW Golf cabriolet has experienced this cow stampede more than once.

Bad news: the second full-moon skiing session has been cancelled due to bad weather (same reason the first one was cancelled). During my first season in La Clusaz, I think there were three full-moon skis, where they simply run a few ski lifts and don’t turn on any lights. The novelty of skiing in the almost dark wears off very quickly when you realise just how easy it is for others to run into you, even with the small flashing light they give each person. It’s mainly an excuse to drink at each of the four bars down the Cret du Merle piste. And that’s the mixed bag for today!

I was going to write something about yesterday’s carnival in Annecy, but I bumped my head on the snow on Friday and spent yesterday in front of the television, nursing a bad headache. French weekend daytime TV is as hit-and-miss as it is in any other country. The meerkat documentary was a welcome relief from the dubbed American travel shows and detective series. Alas, Saturday night TV in France rarely includes a movie. Apparently, the French are all too busy having social lives on Fridays and Saturdays or something. Wednesday nights are also usually void of movies because that’s the day that new films are released at the cinema.

So, what fodder do they fill French channels with on those nights? Celebrity panels. The French love a good discussion, and as I’ve mentioned before, it’s a national pastime to talk over each other. It doesn’t matter what the discussion is actually about because it’s really just an excuse to have a good natter. Last night, one of the channels broadcast the Top 100 Live TV Moments. Before I continue about the French show, let me give you an insight into how two other countries I’ve lived in tend to approach these shows. I think I like the French approach the most.

In Australia, such a show would take an hour. A ‘zany’ presenter would make a scripted joke and pull a funny face before or after each blooper, then move right onto the next one. There would be a canned audience laughing in the background. In England, they’d break it into two separate hours over two nights, usually some time near Christmas when the pickings are  a bit thin, and each blooper would be introduced by a faceless voice-over, then followed with a few recordings of some C-list celebs discussing how hilariously funny that clip was when they remembered seeing it the first time around. Those same celebs would re-appear on and off for both the hours of bloopers. They don’t bother with canned laughter or zany presenters.

Last night's presenters with their audience behind

In France, such shows normally feature two presenters, a panel of celebrities who have learnt their lines, and a live audience behind them. Yes, behind them. I don’t know why, but this approach is very popular in France. Last night’s show lasted for two and a half hours — more telethon length than silly blooper show length. The format was to run ten bloopers, then have the guests comment on what was funny about the bloopers (perhaps they think the viewers are blind?), and replay them at least one more time during the discussion. I watched again as the British home-shopping channel presenter fell off his chair in slow motion while the female presenter looked confused and laughed. After the first fifty bloopers, the celebs got up and left, and a new panel arrived, along with a dog. Pet dogs on TV are another really common sight on French TV, and something I love. Last night’s dog was a Labrador puppy, owned by the male presenter. The French version of Wheel of Fortune also has a pet dog, as do a whole swag of other shows. It reinforces the great flexibility of the workforce here, where dogs often accompany their owners to work (well, at least here in the French Alps — I’m not so sure about office jobs in Paris).

Other highlights, apart from the dog, included two men doing a stage kiss and a woman audience member from another show getting out a fake breast much to her husband’s embarrassment. There may have been more, but I took my headache to bed before the show had finished.

Last week, I discussed out-dated one-piece piste fashion. Well, you’ll be pleased to know that even those with the latest gear sometimes screw it up. The colours from the eighties are actually making a come-back, but there’s still a big difference between then and now. That difference is geometry. That’s right, back in the eighties, jackets were all about geometric shapes — a triangle on the centre of the jacket or a diamond on the back, with squares of different colours sewn together to make a patchwork jacket. In 2010, the fashion is more about either one solid colour making up a jacket, or a patterned fabric. For example:

On the left here is someone who has broken up the limeness of his pants with a darker jacket.  In the middle, proof that patterns can look good when coupled with a solid colour. The guy on the right has gone for mismatching colours, and thankfully, just one pattern. That’s all good. These sorts of combos are currently very popular.

Less popular, thankfully, is patterned tops and bottoms. This guy on the right, for example, is actually a really good skier (he’s easy to spot), but I can’t help thinking of pyjamas when I see his outfit. Talk about busy! I like the way he’s got his matching blue jumper tied around his waist, but I wish he’d stick it over his jacket instead. In the sparse five minutes I had yesterday to snap all these photos, I failed to see anyone wearing patterned ski pants with a different patterned jacket, but it’s the worst combo possible, usually involving lots of colours and totally clashing patterns. It’s a great sign that nobody was out and about in mismatching patterns, but it does sometimes happen, and to be frank, twenty-year-old one-pieces are kinder to the eyes.

Of course, all this is just my opinion, and this guy probably considers my chocolate brown jacket and bright blue pants totally boring and “so 2008″. (I feel like lending him my pants actually: they’d go nicely with his jacket and turn the volume down a bit.) Perhaps next year, I’ll be looking back at this blog entry and wondering how I could be so silly to think that anything less than matching jimjams on the piste is a good thing. But for now, I’m resisting. And I think I will next year too.

Following on from my last post about fashion, this one is about kids. I’m not a parent, but I was a kid on the piste, and I remember my parents wanted me to look cute, but more importantly, identifiable from a distance. It’s perhaps for this reason that very few kids are ever dressed in black. I had yellow plastic pants (it was before Gore-tex existed) and a red woolly hat with a massive pompom on top. It matched my red jacket. My mum could identify me as I cried the whole way down the nursery slope, and my dad could pick up my hat from the snow after each and every fall.

Imagine if there were half a dozen kids in yellow pants, a red jacket and a red hat. My dad would have been retrieving hats all over the place, and my mum would have probably been hassling another mum about hugging a kid she thought was me. Confusing! And that’s what it’s been like this year in the French Alps. It seems that loads of parents have opted for a kids’ one-piece in red, orange and white. Although I’ve seen the same outfit in the darker colour scheme of navy blue, I guess most parents have decided that they want to see where their kids are, and so, red is better. Below is a photo I took while eating a crepe the other day. There was actually another kid in the same outfit sitting in the creperie with me, but I couldn’t get him in shot. That’s four kids in the same outfit, and more kept rolling through as I later sipped on a hot chocolate.

So, what fashion advice am I offering? I’m not actually sure. I would say to parents to think twice before buying this particular outfit, but then, it’s not always a bad thing: last week in Avoriaz, I found a crying child wearing this same outfit. I asked him if he was lost in French, but he answered in another language. Luckily, one of my friends speaks Dutch and was able to find out that the kid had been separated from his mum and brother. He took him to the chairlift operator who put the word out. When a woman and another kid in the same outfit walked past a few minutes later, my friend recognised the outfit immediately and sure enough, that was the lost kid’s brother and mum. Family reunited thanks to the ski suit.

Compared with the average French woman, I’m a fashion disaster. I do not, at least, get out on the street in twenty-year-old clothes that are faded and out-dated. Nor do I get on the piste in ski gear from the eighties, but plenty of others do. I know, I know: ski clothing is expensive, and if you go once a year, you can’t justify buying new gear every year. But maybe even every ten years would do. I’ve snapped lots of bad outfits, but I’ve chosen these three as examples (unfortunately similar in colours, but different in other ways) of how not to style yourself on the piste.

One-Piece Number 1

This couple still use skis from the late eighties/early nineties. At least they match the outfits. The outfits don’t look like any others around them, but they haven’t seemed to notice. What really gives them away, apart from the colour distribution, is the big pocket in the front of her outfit and the giant triangle pointing down on his. Advances in both ski technology and waterproof material (Gore-tex, anyone?) mean that this couple are doing themselves a bit of a disservice: shaped skis that have been around since about 1999 really are much easier to use, and well-worn twenty-year-old fabric is never going to have the warmth or protection of today’s material. And if anyone wants to defend their choice of ski by saying it’s ‘real skiing’, then they should probably be on old wooden skis with telemark bindings. Ski technology moved on with fashion.

If you must wear a one-piece please pull the trouser legs down over your boots. This will keep your buckles and boots dry and protected, stopping the buckles from icing up on cold days (they’re difficult to adjust like that), and saving your feet from getting wet from that ice melting and seeping through the shell.

One-Piece Number 2

Here are more unprotected boots, but this time at least the one-piece wearer has tried to pull the trouser legs over the boots. Many older one-pieces (like this faded one) suffer from this problem and I really don’t know why. The leg tightness unfortunately extends to other parts of the outfit, and the owner, a lady would you believe (head cut off to be kind), has done that common eighties thing of attaching a bum bag to store whatever it is she needs to take with her for the day. Bum bags were indeed all the rage in the eighties! I had two: a pastel purple one, and one made of black leather. When they went out of fashion, I took them to the charity shop. What makes an every-day fashion accessory that lost popularity by the nineties timeless if worn with a ski outfit? NOTHING. I’d like to ask this woman if she wears it down the street, perhaps in summer when she has no pockets available (much like the result of this figure-hugging one-piece), and if not, why not. What’s the difference?

One-Piece Number 3

This one is actually a man (heads again cut off on purpose, and thanks to my friend Tom for the photo) who isn’t even on the piste. In fact, he’s in St Jean de Sixt, which really is a village down the road from Le Grand Bornand and La Clusaz ski resorts. So why is he wearing a rather scary one-piece? Maybe he went skiing earlier, but what I don’t understand is that if he’s bothered to leave the resort and change his shoes, why not change out of his one piece at the same time, especially when he’s considering eating in a restaurant. I’ve seen this often recently: people will be shopping in La Clusaz in their ski outfit and with a dog on a lead, but no sign of ski equipment. Maybe they’re worried they’ll fall?

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been all these people: I still have my 193cm straight skis in my shed, and I owned an O’Neil one-piece back in the nineties because I’d heard that one-pieces keep you extra warm, and, given Australia’s often wet snow conditions, I saw the value in that. Mine was a fluorescent mix of colours. I wore it once. It was badly designed (it didn’t keep me warm because the zip down the front wasn’t protected, leaving me with a wet line down my front); going to the toilet was very awkward; I was mistaken as a man by my own boyfriend at the time, and when I looked around even back then, I noticed that nobody else was wearing anything remotely similar. I’m not saying I want to conform, but at the same time, I don’t get around in Elizabethan dresses or Cindy Lauper hairstyles.

So, my advice, if you believe an Australian for fashion advice, is to throw away the one-piece and either buy a new one-piece if you must, or better still, settle on a jacket and pants. And if you’re still using your old straight skis, I dare you to hire some shaped skis just for a day and not love them.

Still to come: kid fashion, over-blinging it, and possibly something about novelty hats.

Shops here in the French Alps keep strange hours. For example, the supermarket in La Clusaz is closed from 12.30pm to 4.30pm, and rumour has it that the reason for this is so that tourists have to buy their lunch from the bakeries and restaurants and thus spend more money in town. In fact, most of La Clusaz closes for the inter-season months of May, October and November. And as I’ve written about in the past, convenience stores are more like inconvenience stores, while “fermeture exceptionelle” (unexpected closure) is a sign well used here in France, and one I’ve struck when attempting to go to a Chinese restaurant in Annecy, the post office in Bonneville and of course, the government office in Annecy for car registration. When I made it to the post office in St Jean de Sixt before it closed for the weekend at midday on a Saturday, I was then told that my item wouldn’t leave until Monday because nobody picks up the mail on the weekends. Shop keepers apparently have a comfortable life and they don’t need to open as often as I’d like them to.

So why am I still surprised to see this sign? Pictured here is a sign for a shop in Annecy called “Espace Déco” (a home decorations shop). The sign then reads:

Opening hours

Tuesday, Thursday, Friday: 12.30pm – 2.00pm

Monday, Wednesday, Saturday: by appointment or call (number blurred out by me)

So, that’s a total of four and a half hours per week for customers to just happen to walk past while the shop is open. Does anyone ever really bother to call a number just to touch an item for sale and discover its price? I’d feel kind of obliged to buy it if I hauled the shopkeeper out of bed or wherever just so I could browse a few serving trays. How are these shops still in business? The only reason I can think of is that people must think it’s more exclusive if the shop stays closed most of the time and then they make the effort to come back. I think I’ve found the most exclusive shop in the Alps.

This picture says it all. The French just take extra care with things. I’ve seen the painstaking preparation and presentation that can go into even the simplest of dishes served in a restaurant and the way that no roundabout can be left undecorated, but I really wasn’t prepared for this. Is there anything in the world more mundane than a drain pipe? Normally, no. This time, plenty.

If you’re curious, this drain pipe hangs from an equally ornate restaurant in St Jean de Sixt.