A pub crawl in Tignes

Night out in Tignes. Copyright Wendy Hollands

The great thing about visiting a ski resort that one of your friends lives in is that you get to be a complete tourist without having to worry about people knowing you. Of course, this isn’t so good for the friend in the resort, but when the group consists of four girls — two of them single, you can get away with quite a lot. Our first night in Tignes started off innocently enough, patting Oscar the giant dog (just 3cm shorter than the world’s tallest dog) at the Alpaka before having a few drinks at my friend’s place. We headed back out and were told off for leaving the door open at La Grotte du Yeti before deciding it smelt too much like a toilet to stay, deciding instead to chat up the barman at the Jam Bar who put up with us until we thought we should try to get some sleep before catching first lifts in the morning.

After a full day of snowboarding the next day, you’d expect us to be somewhat subdued the following night. Two of the girls went back to the Jam Bar and continued to chat up the barman, and by the time the other two arrived a few hours later, the first two were beyond tipsy — one becoming very giggly while the other one spoke loudly over a pizza dinner about all sorts of odd, but entertaining, dinner topics, such as squat toilets. Before we had paid the bill, we were asked not to come back to the pizzeria, but that wasn’t even related to the drunken girls.

Add into the mix a boyfriend of one of the girls, who arrived in Tignes just in time to take us away from the pizzeria of our disgrace, and who was happy to ferry the girls around while doing handbrake turns in his van even though he only has one passenger seat, and you’ve got a party in a van right there. More like a fun-park ride than a drive to Val Claret, we eventually arrived with three girls splattered in the back of the van, giggling after their joyride. We stuck our necks into Daffy’s, but continued onto a bar that has an @ symbol in its name (which I’ve forgotten) while our bloke driver faffed around at his car for another few minutes.

It was in this particular bar that a French man came over to take our order. He didn’t work there: he just wanted to chat us up, and it worked. With our driver finally finding us seated in a corner, he explained to this guy at the bar that two of us were single and two were not, and that it was up to this guy to figure it out. He chatted up one of the non-single girls first before moving onto a single one. He told her he had not had a girlfriend for four months, yet he had told our bloke mate that his current girlfriend had cheated on him. Was this payback? Who knows. He didn’t get the opportunity despite some great efforts.

My Tignes friend wanted to check out another bar, le Couloir, so she and I ducked out for five minutes to find it and see what it was like. We didn’t make it through the door for two reasons:

  1. some posh kid who had just arrived in the resort kept trying to talk to us; and,
  2. a dog came and sat on my foot.

So, we eventually slipped away, with one very warm foot, and a posh kid imploring us to stay for a chat. Meanwhile, back in the bar, a guy attempted to drunkenly ballroom dance with one of the others, which proves that no matter where you go in the world, alcohol makes men believe they are Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing. They never are, but they’ll never learn.

We demanded that the DJ play some 80s music for us, then left, as you do when drunk, just a few minutes later. We did some more handbrake turns on the way back to Tignes le Lac before finally piling into my friend’s very small bedsit (around 20m² including spacious bathroom) in the early hours of the morning, ready to attack the mountain in daylight the following morning. Luckily, the subsequent snowstorm kept us in bed long enough the next morning to fully recover first.

About

I'm a technical author, journalist and writer from Australia who has been living in Europe since 2000 and exploring the world from there. My passions are writing, snow sports and travel.

1 Comment on “A pub crawl in Tignes

  1. Sounds quite tame, given that I know three (possibly four) of the main particpitants 😉 Glad you had fun!