Greetings from Grenoble

I really love trains. Airplanes I enjoy, busses and cars are still pretty good, but theres a sense of purpose, freedom, and direction I experience on a train that I'm not sure I experience any other place. So the trainride from Paris to Grenoble went by in a flash, and by the time I looked up again I had the Alps to greet me.

And Sylvain, as well. In contrast from my arrival in Paris, I reached Grenoble to find my host exactly where I expected him, waiting beneath the arrivals/departures readerboard in the train station. I was greeted warmly with a peck on each cheek, and we walked about 10 minutes to get to Sylvain's apartment. His friend Gaspard joined us, and we walked to the store to pick up some things for dinner. I'll have to ask him to remind me again the name of the dish we ate for dinner. It was fantastic! A gem of the Alps, qnd a hearty winter meal. It consists of boiled potatoes which become the base of the dish, a cheese (mild, its name I also can't remember and probably couldn't spell if I tried), and an assortment of cured and thinly sliced meats. Theres an apparatus a little like a fondue pot with a heating element and 4 tiny pans on which you place a thick slice of the cheese. After the cheese gets really bubbly you take out the tiny pan and put the cheese on top of the little potatoes and meat with a little wooden spatula: Leave it to the French to create an appliance specifically for melting cheese... Sylvain said this one used to belong to his grandfather, and this was the first day of the year they had eaten this dish. Yum.

After dinner Sylvain's other friends started to show up for beers. I kept up with Sylvain and Gaspard translating for a little bit, but after a while I didn't have much of a hope for understanding, and opted instead to sleep in preparation for snowboarding the next morning. Slyvain was kind enough to offer me his bed for the night so that he could stay up a little later with his buddies.


We got up a little before 7 the next morning and got geared up for the mountain. We walked to Sylvain's car and picked up Gaspard not much later, and then were off up the hill to Les 7 Alpes, one of the ski stations near Grenoble. They call the city the Gateway to the Alps--it's actually situated just at the junction of three different mountain ranges. The drive was pleasant, and actually quite different from the long, gradiated highways of the passes at home. Here the road to the hill is steep and winding, and passes through tiny little towns and farms as it ascends to the station.

The snow was great! I'm really glad to have brought my own gear, and was very pleased to find that my new board rides like a dream. My only issue was that my binding screws kept loosening throughout the day, and I couldn't find the right size screwdriver to tighten them properly. I can't be sure if it was the loose binding or something else to which I can attribute my fall, but a bit after lunch I managed to take what I can only imagine was quite a spill doing nothing in particular on a very easy run. I say I can only guess because...well, because I can't actually remember what happened. Heh.

That hasn't happened before. All I know is that, at some point, I opened my eyes to find myself on my stomach, with my head on the uphill slope. It took me a few tries to push myself to my hands and knees, which was troublesome, and things seemed a little fuzzy. After just a second I got up and rode down to meet with Sylvain and Gaspard. On the way down I felt a strange kind of confusion, and started running through a list of questions to myself about where I was, how I got there, why I was there, and how I intended to get home. The answers came pretty quickly, but I couldn't shake a foggy sense of...not knowing something. So I got the keys from Sylvain, got my book from the car, and sat down at the cafe to read while they finished out the day. I remember opening to my bookmark and picking up where I left off, and thinking to myself "Oh good, so I still remember how to read." Yikes.

Throughout the day I started to feel more and more normal, and yesterday felt totally right in the brain, though my body definitely protested. My neck is sore, and I have a bit of a headache. I'm still can't remember how or why I fell, and it seems really really odd that I could fall in such a way as to hurt my right hip, the back/left/top part of my head, and land face down facing up the hill, parallell with the run. Anyway, today I feel much better, with just a slight headache and soreness in my neck. I'll be hitting the slopes again tomorrow (I hope not literally) via Ski Bus from Grenoble, this time with a screwdriver of my own to eliminate that variable.




Right now I'm working on travel plans.

Cookie is in Copenhagen, and if he'll still be there like the last time we checked in, I'll likely be catching a train back to Paris, maybe drop my snowboard at Olin's, and continue on to Copenhagen by bus, arriving on the 13th. There'll be a party on the 15th and Cookie leaves on the 16th. After that I'll likely bus or train it to Amsterdam, Berlin, or Brussels. Not sure yet. I'm aiming to reach Paris again on the 21st.

I've been thinking (and feeling) a lot since I got here. The time since I arrived feels like a small eternity, and I feel a fresh perpective on where I am. The sights and experiences are wonderful, and seem to include a renewed passion for what I have at home. But for now, I think, I'll go for a walk and find a café somewhere to rest with my journal and some coffee. More on the touchy feely stuff later =P

I will leave you, dear readers, with one piece of advice:
Never smoke enough to keep up with the French >.<

<3 A