Living in a foreign country, it can take some time to discern the patterns and rhythms governing everyday life. When are the banks open? When do the grocery stores close? What time does the baker gently chide me for my careless pronunciation, lack of vocabulary, and diminished sense of fashion?

The answer to that last question is “every time I order a baguette”, though my prickly boulangere has eased up some on the couture tips since I started casually draping the new scarf Kristanne got me for Valentine’s day before essaying my daily visit. For the other schedule questions, France eases difficulties by using the same one for the entire country. Everyone starts school on the same day. They all take the same two weeks for fall break and the same days for Christmas break. It’s a little bit like living on the world’s largest college campus, right down to the abundance of righteous political causes, emphasis on constant intellectual and physical activity, and the incredible proliferation of bicycles. There’s a charming “all together now” aspect to this, actually. You feel like you’re part of something larger…like a big team with cool accents and nifty scarves.

For the winter break, the country is divided into three zones, conveniently labeled Zone A, Zone B, and, yes, Zone C. There may be times the towering French bureaucracy expresses its innate creativity, but apparently zone labeling isn’t one of them. The three zones take turns overlapping one another for their two week winter vacations, all while lamenting the fact that they don’t have better zone names. It’s surprising a strike hasn’t been called yet to demand better zone names — frankly, it’s just a matter of time given both the appalling lack of creativity demonstrated with the whole Zone A/B/C thing and the willingness of the French to strike at the faintest hint of a perceived slight or potential grievance.

For winter vacation, the entire country comes to the Alps and skis its collective backside off. The resorts are packed and for the duration of the school holidays, they charge high season rates while lift lines extend and everyone comments on one another’s scarves, each of which is draped at exactly the rakish angle calculated to best forestall the slings and arrows of outrageous bakers. I may be projecting a bit here.

haven’t we been over this already?

I’ve already meandered and digressed for some several hundred words on French ski culture in previous installments, so I don’t want to spend a lot of time belaboring, restating, or redundifying. Well, I mean, I kind of do want to do it, but I’m resisting the urge. By which, I mean that Kristanne is looking over my shoulder as I type this, occasionally dropping little “tsk, tsk, tsk” sounds and flicking my earlobe with her index finger. Subtle reinforcement is apparently the key to long-term behavior modification. That and bruised earlobes.

les pulls rouges welcoming le pink helmet

One of the time-honored traditions for les vacances d’hiver is a good old group ski class with the Ecole du Ski Francais. This organization is a living testimony to the French obsession with all things ski. Boasting a whopping 17,000 instructors, each with a sweater that is rakish and red enough that they actually nicknamed themselves after it (“les pulls rouges”, or “the red sweaters”), these guys know from ski instruction. That’s them welcoming Kinsey (in the pink helmet, natch) to her first class. Interestingly, I’ve been trying the “les pulls rouges” paradigm for myself, occasionally referring to myself as “the blue sweatpants” or “the rumpled ballcap” or perhaps even “les wrinkled trousers”, on the off chance that the French article will carry the day, but so far the family is having none of it. They may be in league with the baker.

got any sweeping cultural generalizations you can use to explain all this?

The ESF standardizes a dizzying nine levels of  official ski wizardry for kids, starting with the wee Piou-Pious and ascending all the way to the coveted Etoile d’Or (“Gold Star”). So, the way it works is that you get a little Carnet de Capacites en Ski Alpin when you’re a kid. This is like a skiing report card, except it’s way more important than that “Plays Well with Others” garbage, follows you your entire life, and holds the key to your eventual happiness as a French citizen. I may be exaggerating, but only slightly.

Each week-long group course is geared towards passing a specific test on Friday, after which you get your Carnet officially stamped for the level achieved. You can buy a little pin recognizing your achievement from the ESF office, and everyone celebrates while temporarily pretending that they’re not secretly enraged at the Zone A/B/C stuff. Then, everyone eats a big plate of cheesy potatoes, blows great clouds of cigarette smoke on one another’s children, and drives as unsafely as possible back to their homes. There may be some unfortunate cultural stereotypes in those last bits, though we actually are surprised to see how common smoking still is some 12 years after the last time we lived in Europe. Of course we’re also surprised that the “French Elvis Presley” is still popular 12 years later, too, so there are definitely some things we don’t quite get about European tastes.

Unable to resist the siren song of French tradition, we invested in a carton of cigarettes and hit the slopes. We weren’t quite ready to go whole cochon with the full week of lessons, so we did two instead. The kids have already done a couple private lessons earlier in the season, so this was a good way for them to solidify their skills. They’re both amazing with how much they’ve learned and how confident they’ve become, so it was a neat validation for them to pass their tests. Kinsey earned her Flocon (“Snowflake”) level and Quinn got his Deuxieme Etoile (“Second Star”). Those are the pins there below. Both their mother and Les Wrinkled Trousers are extremely proud. Not only is this an important step on their road to French citizenship, but now they also have something sharp to poke the baker with.

le flocon

le deuxieme etoile

There’s a similar system for adults, with levels and pins, but when I asked my last ESF instructor to validate my level he just mumbled something about “l’étoile de Chevre Chaud” which is not at all on the ESF website and appears to mean the Star of Warm Goat Cheese. Not only does that sound delicious, but it would also make an excellent replacement name for our zone here in Grenoble. No more “Zone A” for le G – it’s Zone Chevre Chaud from here on out. The French love me, man.

what about kristanne?

When you look as good as Kristanne does on the pistes, you don’t need no stinking étoiles…just blue skies and white peaks. And really strong earlobe-flicking fingers, just like the ones you see her slowly drawing from her mitten/holster in that picture below, likely in threatening anticipation of the very jokes I’m making right now. Uh-oh. Trouble.

She will flick your earlobes where you stand, pal.

can we all have some cocoa and go home now?

You bet. Just make sure you drive really fast. We’re off to Lyon for a couple days to see a man about some Beaux Arts. See you next time…on the Odyssey!

Let’s get this out of the way – I’m a terrible skier. I have balance issues, don’t negotiate sliding sensations with panache, elan, or any other French words, and my elephantine head gives my body the overall appearance of a titanic lightbulb once it’s been encased in the helmet that I rarely venture outdoors without, let alone onto ski slopes. Couple this with the day-glo orange jacket I’m possibly legally obligated to wear during all ski-related activities for the safety of others, and you know I’m cutting quite the dashing Alpine figure when I ascend le tapis roulant (ok, it’s the dang Magic Carpet) with the other five year olds. Ladies – swoon early, swoon often.

If you’re wondering why I appear to have sprouted a second head coming out of my left shoulder in that picture there, well, that’s something that just happens naturally somewhere around 10-15 years of marriage – you grow an “Extra Spouse Head.” Most people are able to disguise them better than me through a variety of clever wardrobe effects, but it turns out that Kristanne’s head is surprisingly persistent. Unfortunately for me, where most husbands seem to get the “Guardian Angel” variety of Extra Spouse Head, consistently advising caution and reminding their loved one that discretion is the better part of valor, I seem to have acquired the “Go Fast, Take Chances!” model. “Go off that jump!” it urges. “What’s the worst that could possibly happen?” The advice, I don’t mind so much; what I could do without, though, are the inevitable little “Bawk, bawk, bawk!” taunting chicken sounds that start to make themselves known somewhere around my 10th trip down the bunny slope of the day. What if I just really, really like the Magic Carpet, man?

I mention my relative Alpine naïf-hood by way of adding a few judicious grains of salt to what follows. Despite having rarely lived further than 45 minutes from good skiing, I do not boast the comprehensive array of schussing experiences that would allow me to form a carefully considered opinion on French skiing and how it fits into the larger realm of winter sports the world over.

To that, I say, “Screw it – it’s a blog.” Go hunt up Warren Miller and Jon Krakauer for the other stuff – I’m mainly going to crack a few jokes at the expense of French people and possibly myself. You’re welcome.

grenoble – they like to ski here

Skiing is a central part of the culture here in Grenoble, which is not surprising given the terrain. Le G nestles in a valley surrounded by three mountain ranges, all of which you can gawk at in the picture below. The Chartreuse massif is at the right in the distance, a gorgeous national park, full of scenic farm towns, familial ski stations, and lots of extremely good cheese. The Vercors is at the left, high place of the French Resistance during WWII and home to France’s best nordic skiing, as well as some positively remarkable cheese. The picture itself is taken from the Belledonne Alps, looking down on the Gresivaudan Valley below – the Isere River runs right to left between the Chartreuse & Belledonne before turning right and joining the Drac River and exiting out the back of your computer screen. These are perhaps not “map quality” directions but they are almost certainly good enough to let you find some darn fine cheese.

Vercors, Chartreuse, Belledonne, Oh My!

back when the winter olympics had snow

Grenoble hosted the Winter Olympics back in 1968, a gift that continues to pay dividends in the form of untold vacationing Brits (they fly in by the thousand-fold, trailing clouds of cigarette smoke and lager behind them), a questionable tradition of really bad semi-socialist architecture (the original Olympic Village seems to have begat an unending stream of conspicuously ugly cookie-cutter apartment blocks that would fire the passions of V.I. Lenin and probably no one else), and, importantly, Jean Claude Killy (three golds, baby!). That’s the top of the downhill Olympic course from 1968 at Chamrousse pictured below. No, I did not take this picture – Mark Tompkins did, because if I ever get this close to a black run on skis, I start to whimper and sob uncontrollably until they finally send the snowmobile with a proper array of sedatives and cart me down. Good lord.

Killy Was Here

If black runs reduce me to jelly, they don’t seem to have the same effect on the rest of my family. Because skiing is such an important part of what it means to be from this part of France, the public schools in Grenoble pay for every school kid to learn how during a series of six all-day field trips in January and February. The equipment and lift tickets are all on the city; if you can’t rustle up warm clothes, they’ll help you with that, too.

So, Quinn is 10 years old and gets to reap the benefits of this public largesse. For his first trip, they asked him if he’d skied much, to which he replied something along the lines of, “Oh, a bit, mostly greens and blues,” all of which was quite true. Somehow, when this bit of language was run through the French Experiential Transmogrification Machine, it morphed into, “Let’s strap ‘em on and bomb some blacks, baby!” Except with a French accent instead of the implied dude-speak, natch.

This sort of seems to be par for the French course – if you’re signed up to do something you haven’t really tried a whole lot of in the past, their approach is that it’s probably best to just skip any sort of warm-up, discussion, or safety-related measures and just go ahead and do that puppy. French people definitely have the Kristanne version of the “Extra Spouse Head” attached to their collective shoulder. It serves them well when it comes to feats of Alpine derring-do, where they typically excel, but somewhat less well when it comes to managing southeast Asian colonies and, umm, rap music.

Wait, I Have Vitesse?

We already dealt with this paradigm a bit in Quinn’s first fencing class where they skipped any of the introductory niceties and just slapped helmets on all the kids, loaded ‘em up with sabres, and let them get to hacking one another, sans rules. “Rules suck,” says the Extra Spouse Head. “They’re for sissies. Bawk bawk bawk.”

Quinn came through the fencing just fine, limbs intact, but skiing, despite not involving swords, boasts a somewhat higher degree of peril for the “No Risk, No Fun” lifestyle.

To his everlasting credit, Quinn remained more or less unfazed, pointing them downhill and surviving the first black run without even falling by simply trying to keep up with the other kids. He took a few falls during subsequent runs but pretty much came through the experience none the worse for wear…and a much better skier, too. See, this is the advantage of the No Risk, No Fun ethos – you can improve extremely quickly. Of course, that won’t be of much benefit to you if you’re dead, but the point remains. I guess.

wait, they have a nationwide school for this stuff?

In addition to the public school system’s support, there is also a nationwide Ecole du Ski Francaise (ESF) with a whopping 250 schools and 17,000 instructors standardizing and inculcating French ski culture for new generations. Kids learn it early, passing a series of standardized tests over time that lets them graduate from Piou-Piou to Ourson to Flocon (and a host of other levels) until they finally make it to the coveted Etoile d’Or, with each test passed bringing a new badge and possibly some really tasty cheese. Possibly not.

The French school schedule helps, too.Kids get Wednesdays “off” here, though in this case “off” translates to “a day for hell-bent, pell-mell physical activity of many different stripes.” So, during ski season, tons of kids take Wednesdays as ski days, either through racing clubs, ESF programs, or just with their families. The same is true for the holidays that fall during ski season…the two weeks during Christmas and the two weeks in February. They ski a lot.

One of the first things that hits you about the French approach to skiing is how utterly inclusive it is. Everyone seems to do it at some level, whether it’s alpine, one of the many nordic flavors, snowshoeing, biathlon, or this wacky snow scooter contraption. It helps that there are tons of affordable options. Sure, there are high-end French ski resorts with lift ticket prices approaching those at Squaw or Heavenly, but they’re not the norm. It’s far more likely to pay something in the mid 20s for a weekend day at a quality resort. You can also go low budget and hit the – ALERT: RICK STEVES LANGUAGE COMING – quaint and charming family stations of the Chartreuse. (ALERT OVER: RESUME NORMAL READING POSITION). Many of these only have a half-dozen runs serviced by t-bars, but it’ll only set you back about 10 bucks for the day. No food service, no ski shops, just a cashier and a little salle hors sac where you can warm up and eat whatever food you packed. Awesome.

So, yes, we’ve been skiing a lot. Kristanne was already good, the kids are improving amazingly fast, and, defying the betting lines at an online casino near you, I’m still alive. And I’d very much like some cheese, if you don’t mind.

See you next time…on the Odyssey!

Shouldn’t You Be Wearing a Helmet?