So, I’ve been to France – a first for me. The week went by surprisingly fast; I hope and suspect that that’s a sign that I’ve had a very good time. What have I learned from this little trip?

• French people’s English skills are on par with Swedish people’s abilities to say no to alcohol. I.e. theoretically possible in a vague fashion
• 30+ hour bus trips are a pain in the ass unless you have a bunch of friends to annoy, and just barely decent even then
• French people simply can’t stand in line. They’re missing the queue gene or something, and constantly try to push ahead. I think we Swedes have a double serving in comparison. “Hey, why are you standing here?” “What? Isn’t this the line to the bar?” “Nooo…” “Oh, whatever. It’s a line; I feel comfortable here.”
• After a few days of intensive snowboarding I don’t suck as badly as I did before. Practice really does make perfect!
• The French like their crepes
• If you fall down from a dragging ski lift, don’t let your thumb be the first bodily appendage with which you meet the snow. It hurts
• French people smoke everywhere

From the comments above you might have gotten the impression that I’m not too impressed with the French mentality. It’s not very untrue to say that you’re wrong. (Can I make that sentence any more negative?!) My slight aversion probably comes from the fact that I was the only non-French person in my snowboard (or surf as they call it for some reason) group. I became just a tad bitter at never understanding a single word of the conversations; things didn’t improve when the guide had a dubious vocabulary as well.

“We’ll all go down and do U-turns!”
“Uh. What? Sorry? U-turns? We gather speed, go down, and then see how far we can go uphill after a turn?”
“No no, we do U-turns. On the way down.”
“…”
Shortly after this he drew a sinous pattern in the snow.
“Ah. Yes. The U and the S are pretty similar, I guess.”

Note: I’m not expecting everyone to speak perfect English - I sure as hell don’t do it myself. But placing a person in a position of authority of sorts makes me expect clearer instructions. Oh well, it was all fun either way! I got to race down my first black slopes, I learned a lot about snowboarding, and I saw some breathtaking views of mountains. Speaking of which, time for the panoramas:

Bigger: 1280×452 or 3800×1343

Bigger: 1280×561 or 3327×1459

Bigger: 1280×490 or 3413×1307

Sorry for my crap camera. My crappera. I’m thinking of getting a new one. Anyway, this was my first experiment with making panorama pictures, and I’m pleasantly surprised by the results. I really want to make more of these, and Autostitch offers seriously awesome results. Try it yourself! I left the black borders from the resulting pics just like they were, so that you’d get an idea of the output quality. Nerd as I am I got the urge to try to write my own stitching panorama program, but after finding Autostitch I just dropped that idea. The output from the program is simply too great to compete with, in my humble uneducated estimate.

What were the other highlights of the week? I really cannot post the most weird pics I took, so I’ll have to be content with showing a few nice (or less nice) sights:

The Swiss town of Something-Something where we had breakfast on the way down. Lovely little place!

My gorgeous slippers that I ran around with all the time, to everyone’s amusement. Thanks Anna – they’re great!

That ugly face I’m making is something I thought would be suitably metal; I think my judgement was a wee bit clouded by the whiskey and beer that I’d imbibed to a great extent that night. Oh wow, I’m pretty sunburned. Either way, Guitar Hero II rocked like a big stone. That night we ended up playing on Normal until we got to the last “stage.” We went from sucky beginners to guitar-slinging pros in just a few hours. At least the others did, while I remained decently-half-sucky.

Sorry for the dull pictures, but it seems like every other pic I took either feature something obscene, something even more dull, or people who probably wouldn’t want their faces on the net. Or a combination of a couple of the above.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 6:34 pm and is filed under Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.