Monday, February 27, 2006

Week of skiing drinking in the Alps

I'm back from a week of "skiing" in French Alps, accurately from "skiing" in Val Thorens. Of course I was not alone! A typical Erasmus group - Germany, USA, Slovakia, Czech, Mexico, Spain, France, Finland, Lebanon - rented a very nice "gite" (mountain house in France), brought several cases of beer (and everyday needed to buy another few), put the sauna on and was enjoying one week of university holidays.

On "skiing":
The resort was heaven! I did snowboarding as always and enjoyed it a lot. Back-country snowboarding (going off slopes) proved again to be one of the best things on Earth, when you float on the snow like a surfer on the ocean wave. Only bad thing - the victim of the week was Mike (the American) who has been stolen second snowboard in this season - at least it wasn't Burton this time!
On Torino Olympics:
Been there - nothing special. We passed 14km tunnel de Frejus between France and Italy (40€ return ticket!) and parked a car in Bardonecchia where snowboarding events took place. Regular tickets for the day were sold, we have been offered better seating for 90€ (oh sure) or to go and see curling finals (oh sure). So we better took train to Torino. City was quite nice, but I think Firenze or Venice have much more to offer. Nobody besides tourists spoke English (I wonder how could they organize Olympics there?), people were eating icecream and life passes as usually in Italy - no problemo. In the evening, Lou Reed ("Perfect Day", Velvet Underground etc.) throw in a concert and the atmosphere became much more appealing to me!

On "other activities":
I mean drinking of course! So many drinking games we played and they all worked out. One of the highlights would be "Night of Marco", the mexican boy. When we went asleep, he woke up, and stepped on Martin sleeping on the floor, not because he was drunk but because we were 15 instead of 7 in the house. Then he dropped a wooden ladder on him, Martin cursing in English-Czech already. Suddently, I hear Jeff shouting: "Stop it Marco, you cannot piss here, stop pissing!!!". Hehe, Marco, drunk as he was, went to the neigbouring room and started to piss on the floor next to sleeping German boy. In the morning, he couldn't remember anything, but he was for sure the first Mexican to piss on a German!


For this, he was punished by Lebanese commando everynigh since that by becoming their "charmutta" (a bitch) ie. been attacked by guys in bed, sauna, everywhere :)