Resort Living

We're staying in one of these places that's essentially a development. There's a mountain with a ski area and then they built a "town" around it. Part of it is called the old town, but it's hard to distinguish it. It's kind of Disneyesque, or if you've ever been to Vail it's like that. Nobody lives here. The actual town is about 20 minutes away and you go there if you want to go to a supermarket. Driving there was an experience because I went on Christmas eve and it was snowing heavily and it was very very busy at the market. It's also just a little bit stressful driving around in a foreign country (maybe Canada doesn't feel foreign if you're in Toronto, but here everything is in French). Plus we have one of the worst rental cars I've ever had- a Hyundai Santa Fe if you're interested. An SUV that handles abominably in the snow and shimmies if you get over 60 miles an hour. Ugh.

You get a very odd sense of time in these places. Because I'm captive of school schedules, I'm away a lot for Christmas day, so I can see different levels of observance. In Paris, everything stops and it's hard to find anything open or anywhere to eat out (though just like at home, the Chinese restaurants are open). In Costa Rica, they have some mild level of celebration, but it's not a major holiday. In a place like this, the only difference is that the people working in the shops wear Santa hats.

We're staying at a hotel with condo rooms, so we have 3 bedrooms and a little kitchen and a living room with a gas fireplace. There's a panel on the wall where you push a button and the fire turns on and then after an hour it suddenly shuts off. They haven't mastered the slowly burning down thing. The hotel is right at the base of the slope. You walk out the back door and the bunny hill is right there (fun to watch out the window) and the real lift is about 100 feet away. There are ski lockers by that entrance and signs by the elevator that say you can't keep skies in your room. You must keep your skies in the ski lockers. It's a bilingual sign and they spell it correctly in French.

The town is on a hill and it rained last night, which pretty much turned the main drag into a big ice slide. During the day they have like a ski lift to take you from bottom to top but it's closed at night, so it took us a very long, wet time to get back up to our room. This also made for interesting skiing today, because there was about an inch of snow on top of a serious layer of ice. You could go really fast. Stopping or turning, not so much. I only fell once and never crashed into anyone, which I count as a major success.