More Switzerland
Trip Start
Oct 10, 2005
1
11
16
Trip End
May 24, 2006
Torino,
Italy
Monday, May 1, 2006
another castle, lower down on the piedmont, italy
Well anyway over the course of my stay I heard Madlaina speak perfect French, and apparently she also speaks Italian, and is a science teacher... busy busy lady! Roadtrip to the Czech RepublicAt the language school I made a few friends and got invited out to have Italian food with some people on the Niederdorstrasse, the cool little (narrow) pedestrian street in Zurich that is lined with bars and restaurants. While out I met Petra and Tsonam... a cool couple. Tsonam is Tibetan, and Petra met him in Tibet during her travels. After a few years of phone tag while Tsonam lived in California with some of his family they got married and she brought him to Switzerland. So Tsonam is basically the closest to an American that Ive met since Ive been in Europe... and not just that but a Californian and it was strange to hear the way he talks and thinks like a California kid. Well upon going out later in Winterthur, about 20 minutes outside of Zurich, Petras twin sister Marlen invited me to go on this random weekend trip to the Czech republic. So Marlen, myself, and her friend Maria got in this little Finnish car one Saturday morning and drove about 9 hours from St. Gallen, Switzerland, through Austria, Germany, and into the Czech Republic. We stopped in Munich for an hour or two just to check it out and our jaws dropped when we saw how cheap the food was... I had forgotten how incredibly expensive it is in Switzerland. A doner kebab (like a burrito or gyro, basically a meal in a tortilla) in Switzerland costs like 8 dollars but in Munich they were going for about 2 dollars...I didnt really like Munich much...
jono
but whatever. By the way on this whole trip (at least in the car) we didnt speak English and the Swiss girls were nice enough to speak High German for me instead of Swiss German which was cool. I ended up driving most of the way to the Czech Republic, which was fun because on the freeway (Autobahn) in Germany theres no speed limit... so we were going as fast as that little Finnish car could go (160 km/hr or about 100 miles an hour)... and all the BMWs and Mercedes were zooming past us. Wow! When we finally got to Pardobice (Par dO beee chay) in the Czech Republic east of Prague, it was nighttime and we were trying to find this bar where Marias boyfriend was playing. The girls were all scared because they think its really dangerous in Eastern Europe but we finally found this place and went inside. Wow were we underdressed. In Switzerland I had gotten used to dressing down. Well in the Czech Republic the people are kind of poorer but they take real pride in looking good. And all I can say about this bar is that Ive never seen so many blond and blue-eyed supermodels in my life. Wow... The people there are unbelievably beautiful...Swiss Hardcore Punk Rock in the Czech RepublicWell we were trying to surprise Marias boyfriend who is the drummer in this Swiss and German hardcore punk band called Mr. Willis from Ohio. The band had been touring Germany and Poland for a few weeks so Maria missed her boyfriend. Turns out that we were in the wrong city (Pardobice) so we left the posh supermodel party (we all felt a little bit plain after that) and started driving towards Nachod (Nahhhod) which is on the border with Poland.
Lorenzo
To ask for directions, I made a lame attempt at speaking Czech, which ended up being some mix between Slovenian, Bulgarian, and English. Actually I understood what the people were saying because to my surprise a lot of Czech words are the same as Slovenian words... Well finally we found this little public hall where all these European hardcore bands were playing and it was a totally different scene. Whereas in the supermodel bar in Pardobice there was no mistaking that I was in Eastern Europe (no bars in America are that nice and clean inside), as soon as I entered the public hall I was right away back in California at some underground show. All the skater kids and metalheads in Nachod were out at this punk show, and Czech people have this really neutral Caucasian look so they could definitely pass for Americans whereas that doesnt work in Switzerland or Italy or Germany or wherever... The music was really hard and really cool. It was funny to hear perfect English while the German guys were singing, but then when they would talk between songs it was in the middle language of English (not Czech or German) so they had fluent bad English.... All these blond girls were following us around (meaning all the German and Swiss people) wanting to talk to us... I wish I could know some language as well as all these people speak English... Well anyway the show was finally over at 2 am and we were all exhausted and checked into this public hotel on the town square in Nachod. Turned out to be the nicest hotel Ive ever stayed in in my life...
on Mont Blanc
honestly because everything was absolutely brand new. Apparently the European Union had given some funding to the city of Nachod to boost tourism revenue... When we woke up and had breakfast and the old guy who served us surprised me with no English but German... so it turns out that old Czech people usually speak some German but young Czech people usually speak English as their second language... so I guess its good to have a little artillery of languages sometimes...And when we went outside we were shocked to see this beautiful castle looming above the town square, and this old church, and all this amazing stuff... in this no name town in the middle of nowhere, Eastern Europe. 5 countries in 1 dayWe had to turn around and go back to Switzerland that morning because we all had school or work the next day... but we looked on the map and saw that we were only 5 km or so from the border with Poland... So we just had to go to Poland to say we had been there. We crossed through the border, drove around, were kind of disappointed and came back. They took a long time with my passport at the border control because I have this confusing mess of stamps in the back of the booklet... so they check it in the computer and have to wait for that. The funny thing is that going into Switzerland they just basically look at the blue cover and hand it back to me... I dont know what theyre so worried about in Poland.Well we stopped in Prague for lunch, which was cool and packed full with tourists like Disneyland...
skiing bumps in the vallee blanche
quite a difference from those little cities we visited out in the country. 5 years ago when I was in Prague before I stumbled into this dark, hidden restaurant for lunch and had this amazing dish for like $2 with dumplings, beef, this secret sauce, and a dollop of jam on top of the beef. It was awesome. So from time to time for the last few years Ive really wanted to have that Czech dish again. I didnt know what the heck it was called, but just by chance I happened to order the same thing again... it was soo good. Except this time it was about $10 instead of $2 since things are on the move in the Czech Republic.Oh yeah so in conclusion we ended up driving through 5 countries that day: Poland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Whoop dee doo. Bottomless Powder, back in Interlaken!After my month in Zurich I went back to work with Skiing Europe again in Interlaken. This time it was way less stressful because I was the veteran and knew that I basically had no responsibilities whatsoever except to teach skiing. Life is so much better when you can just cruise through it. Plus I managed to get a few lunchtime powder runs in... The thing about skiing in Switzerland is that the mountains are really huge, and most of the time the snow is only so-so at best. And the weather can be cloudy and windy for days on end... But then every other week or so a cold storm would come through and drop some powder. The day after these storms were always the clearest. Information about snowdepths tends to be really hard to come by so you never know how much new snow there is unless youre actually on a mountain somewhere...
skiing in the vallee blanche
which so many times this winter ended up being a pleasant surprise. On the Schilthorn (about 10,000 feet at the top) I had a good 4 or 5 days this season where at the bottom of the mountain there was maybe 10 inches of snow but at the top there was 3 or 4 feet of snow, enough to call it bottomless... Add to that the fact that the Swiss do not like to ski Off-Piste which means off of the marked runs and trails. I hear that its actually illegal to ski outside of the colored poles on the outside margins of the ski trails unless you have some special guide certification... which is really kind of silly in the end. But the end result is that in a ski area with tons of open powder in a high alpine bowl, and a marked piste down the middle of it, most the Swiss wont even touch the powder on the sides because they honestly believe that something bad will happen if they do. Plus they dont really know how to ski off-piste... So skiing the Schilthorn, for me, has meant skiing more untouched powder than I have ever experienced in my life! If you dont ski, its this amazing floating feeling... Right after finishing up the last classes in Interlaken I headed with Jon-o over to Aosta, Italy. We taught for a week in Courmayeur, and got thoroughly baked in the southern sun, ate antipasti all day, and both decided that we were going to marry italian women and sit on the piazza in the center of Aosta drinking caffe all day long the rest of our lives.
Working for Interski in Courmayeur, I met Lorenzo and we decided to ski the Vallee Blanche on Mont Blanc together and he invited me to his home near Torino for a while.
some castle in the italian alps near aosta
His mom's cooking is AWESOME. Skiing Mont Blanc marked the end of the ski season for me, so I left my skis in Lorenzo's basement. I am going to pick them up soon... like I needed an excuse to return to the Alps!
Italy
A few of the ski instructors for Skiing Europe mentioned that another British tour operator, Interski, was desperate for instructors in Italy. So I found their website, sent an email and my resume, and got myself a job teaching skiing in Italy. Italy!
One of the other guys with Skiing Europe, Jon-o, was going to the same place so we traveled together to Italy from Interlaken. Jon-os cool, and not a big drunk like most of the English guys. The last six months hes been teaching snowboarding in the Snowdome, the UKs Premier Indoor Real Snow Slope. What a cool but silly job to have.
We took trains over the Bernese Alps, then down into the French speaking part of Valais, Switzerland. From Martigny we had to take a bus up and over the Walliser (valliser) Alps and into Italy... at the border we switched from a Swiss bus to and Italian bus... and whoa you could smell it. Things are a bit more run down in Italy than in Switzerland.
Anyway as we descended into Aosta we started to see some spring leaves, and Mediterrenean plants... getting warmer... It was pouring rain as we were dumped out at this random bus station on the industrial side of Aosta... luckily after wandering around with our super noisy rolled luggage we finally got directions to the tourist office and from there got a little one star hotel room.
some of the zurich crew
Food is way cheaper in Italy and we had this amazing huge italian meal for like 8 euros apiece. The next morning, in Aosta, was something that Ill remember for the rest of my life. Nothing really happened, but the sun was shining, it was on its way to be in the 70s, which was the first really warm weather I had felt in a long time... All the families and people were out on the street and on the main piazza... So Jon-o and I sat for a long time sipping cappucinno and eating pastries, in the sun, surrounded by beautiful old buildings, somehow an atmosphere that I cant imagine experiencing in Switzerland, or England, or the US... we just dont know how to do it the same way as the people south of the Alps.
The Courmayeur Life
The next week, working for Interski was in the end pretty cool. Courmayeur is a pretty good ski area right in front of the Italian face of Mont Blanc (the 15,000 foot highest mountain in Europe). Really an amazing place. And the sun was shining like crazy. That was the best part... now Im really brown. After work we would take the tram down to the town and go the Bar Roma, where Interski employees got half-priced drinks and a huge table full of vegetables and antipasti... theres no way I can convey how nice it was to have a table full of delicious salads and bruscetta with a drink after a warm day in the sun skiing... only in Italy.
Jon-o and I had been eyeing this chute that came down through the cliffs at the very top of Courmayeur.
the vallee blanche
Skiing in Europe has kind of made me timid and paranoid... mostly because skiing at European ski areas is really tame... though the mountains are really huge somehow the ski pistes are always laid out with super safety in mind so you never have the really steep stuff that you can have so easily at an American ski resort. Well anyway Jon-o and I finally got over our stupid paranoia and just went for it one morning. We had to give our names and phone numbers and were only allowed to do this run because we were ski instructors (apparently the general public is not allowed to go without a guide). Well the run was really amazing, the snow was nice, it was really steep... but really just like all the stuff that is fair game inside a ski resort like Kirkwood or Squaw Valley or Snowbird. So Im just convinced that Europeans are really really paranoid about skiing off-piste in a way that I cant really understand. As in whats the big deal? There was one Italian instructor working for Interski at Courmayeur, named Lorenzo. The three of us would take morning warm up runs, super fast, before our lessons. The thing that irked me about working with Interski was that all these drunk ski bums had this big attitude about them, like they were really something special. Its this cocky attitude that people develop sometimes when a hierarchy develops. So there were these guys who had been working in Courmayeur for several weeks and were just cocky as hell because they had the BASI level 2 certification instead of level 1 (BASI is the British ski instructor certification organization)... or they thought they skied better than everybody else.
Well the truth was these cocky guys did ski better than almost everybody else (most of the other English, that is) because the whole of them arent very good at all. They just dont have enough experience, living on their little island, unless theyve spent a season or two at a ski resort... But nevertheless they really felt like they were something special...
All I know is that these cocky guys who wouldnt talk to Jon-o and I on the first days were suddenly friendly after they saw that we can ski 5 times as well as they can because weve spent whole seasons skiing and riding whereas your average English ski instructor can only count the weeks that he has practiced... so of course we were better... and I was completely uninterested in talking to these cocky guys who were suddenly nice to me... so does that make me cocky?
Skiing the Vallee Blanche on Mont Blanc
Somehow Lorenzo and I had cooked up this scheme that we wanted to ski the Vallee Blanche, which contains this huge glacier (called the sea of ice, the Mer de Glace, in French) that descends from Mont Blanc. There is a cable car that goes from the valley floor on the Italian side of Mont Blanc, all the way up to 11,400 feet at Punta Helbronner, on the ridge that divides France from Italy. From there it is possible to ski on the glacier down to about 6,000 feet, then take a train down to Chamonix, and then a bus through the Mont Blanc tunnel back to Italy. The ski run is something between 10 and 15 MILES long, with a mile of vertical drop. It is crazy.
There is a business on Mont Blanc of guides offering to take people down the Vallee Blanche from Punta Helbronner, and if you ask any tourist or tourist officer or guide, it is deadly dangerous to do the Vallee Blanche without a guide. And if you go to the guide society or tourist office in Courmayeur and ask for information about the ski run, they refuse to tell you anything except that theres crevasses and avalanches, and you dont know the way, and you need a guide. Minimum of 100 euros for a day, including all the tickets. Expensive. Ask any of the English ski instructors, the tourists who may have skied the Vallee Blanche with a guide once, they will say you really really shouldnt do it without a guide, its very dangerous.
But if you ask anybody who actually knows, as in an experienced ski instructor or a local skier, anyone who has lived in the area and knows it well, they will tell you the truth, that theres a well-beaten path, you can see the crevasses from a mile away, the slope is far to flat to have any avalanche danger, and that its a really fun run, you should do it, ive done it several times! So there is risk, but quite small compared to what it is described as. Its just paranoia...
So theres this myth that is partly fueled by the guide business and partly fueled by a fear of everything that isnt paved and groomed, that a guide is required...
One day at Courmayeur I happened to bump into two ski instructors that I knew from 4 years ago, at Heavenly in California. A total crazy small world coincidence. Well they were in Chamonix for a PSIA (Professional Ski Instructors of America) conference, and over the course of their conference they had skied the Vallee Blanche, with a guide. When I shared with them our ideas of skiing the Vallee Blanche without a guide, we were sternly warned not to do it... the same canned answer...
Well Lorenzo and I really werent sure what to believe, so we looked for pictures on the internet, descriptions on the internet by people who had skied the Vallee Blanche before, and were lucky enough to be sitting in a cafe one time where a guide was making arrangements with a client to take her and her 8 year old son down the Vallee Blanche. So we tried to weigh the evidence, and finally decided just to try it! Our plan was that if we were ever in doubt, we could just wait for a guided group to come along and just piggyback on them. Sly.
When we woke up the morning of our trip it was raining, with thunder. So we decided to wait for another day. But then within an hour it was clear, and the webcams on Mont Blanc showed blue skies with some lingering clouds around, so we ran out to the car and headed up the mountain. Turns out that the Punta Helbronner ridgeline was socked in with clouds when we arrived, but we decided to just go up anyway and try to wait out the weather. The guy at the ticket counter told us to have a good time...obviously a local skier... but then on the ride up in the cable car Lorenzo got chastised (in italian) for going without a guide by some random guy with a big camera. But take note, the man was a non-skier, and in my opinion was just giving the canned, paranoid answer.
Well when we got to the top we felt a little stupid because it was really foggy, and as we looked around we couldnt even find the way to get out onto the glacier, let alone ski it. I definitely felt the altitude, as in I felt light headed, short of breath, and a little sick. Whats strange is Im quite used to being at high altitudes, even up to 12,500 feet, but Ive never felt that way. And Im in pretty good shape now. This 11,000 foot ridge was about the highest I had ever been in Europe... so what Im thinking the explanation is is that Europe is quite a bit farther north than the mountain peaks I had been on in California, Utah, and Colorado... ive learned before that the rotation of the earth causes the atmosphere to be basically thicker (depth-wise) at the equator and thinner the farther north or south you go from there... So 20,000 feet on Mount McKinley in Alaska has the same amount of oxygen as at 23 or 24,000 feet on the Equator. So maybe, 11,000 feet in France and Italy is more like 13,000 feet in California... or something... i dont know.
After a few minutes I felt better, but the clouds were still thick around the top station at Punta Helbronner. Lorenzo and I were completely comfortable with turning around and not skiing down the glacier if it was foggy. Too dangerous if you cant see the path or the crevasses.
Turns out there were quite a few people waiting out the weather at the top station, all without guides. Some Italian 20 somethings and some American guys. The Italians were just in their old ski clothes and cheap skis and the Americans had like harnesses and brand new high-tech jackets and boots... just goes to show that both methods work!
Well the Italians had a walkie talkie and were talking to some people down lower on the glacier who said it was absolutely clear and marvellous just a few hundred meters down... so we just waited, and then suddenly a break in the clouds, sunshine, and blue sky. It only lasted for about 4 or 5 minutes, but we decided that if another break in the clouds came we could at least make it down below the level of the clouds. Well as luck had it we had a good solid 10 minutes without fog so we were able to make it a good way down before it fogged up again... Then it was a complete whiteout for a few minutes and we just waited. We skied around one big crevasse and then the whole run was cake after that.
As it turns out probably the most dangerous part is the Italian side because far fewer people ski from Italy into France. And really it was just a matter of skiing around one big crevasse. Almost everybody who skies the Vallee Blanche skis from the Aiguille du Midi, which is a ridgeline above Chamonix, France. At the point where the French route converges with the Italian route, the run became a lot like Disneyland... with literally hundreds of people skiing down from high above. It was even crowded sometimes...
Well as soon as we were in the Vallee Blanche itself the weather was far better, with blue sky... The Italian side had clouds because there the wind was blowing upslope, but in the Vallee Blanche and the French side the wind was going downhill so it was dry and clear.
The run was really a lot of fun... so many people had gone over it that there were mogul fields...
All told the skiing took 1 hour and 45 minutes.... but think about it, skiing downhill, continuously, for more than an hour and a half. What a great run, and when we finally arrived in Chamonix we got a hamburger and a beer with the hundreds of other skiers who had done the Vallee Blanche that day, without a guide.
Torino, Italy
So now Im staying at Lorenzo's family's house in San Gillio, which is a town outside of Torino, Italy. The weather has been really warm. The first day when we drove out of the Alps away from Mont Blanc and down the Aosta Valley, it was over 80 degrees in the plains that are called the Piedmont. It was a gorgeous drive, with waterfalls and huge mountains, all the leaves on the trees beginning to come out. Whats cool about Aosta is that it is a valley surrounded by 13 and 14,000 foot mountains, all with glaciers. Some of the best ski areas in Europe are just an hour away, like Chamonix-Mont Blanc, Cervina and Zermatt (where the Matterhorn is), and Monte Rosa. Unfortunately Ill have to ski those places another season, but now I know where to go...
Torino (or sometimes Turin in English) is just warm enough to have a few palm trees, which is really astounding to see since this is still so close to cold Switzerland where I spent the winter. The Alps are right there all the time, and it is very green here. Torino's a bit industrial and lacks jobs for the educated and everyone I talk to seems to really want to leave... but it is a nice place anyway.
Now I'm learning some Italian and I absolutely cant believe how in the world I am able to understand so much Italian... I cant really say much except what is that and he is over there and this food is good and stuff like that but I can actually follow peoples conversations... after 2 weeks in Italy.
Here in Torino Ive been enjoying Lorenzos mamas cooking which is amazing, and catching up on some of my grad school readings. Waiting for the next adventure...
conclusion
Well I know this is long but I can't even scratch the surface of all the stuff i've been doing this winter and spring in europe. and especially the amazing people that i've met like tom, sophie, jono, lorenzo, celina, marlen, tsonam, petra, maria, castriot, erica, doug, galeg, madlaina, jan, and... so here's just a sample of the things i've been doing and what i've been thinking and stuff...
