After our stay in Lisbon, Portugal, we had a couple of
nights in a cute town called Evora. Evora had castle walls and you weren’t
allowed to park inside them. We went on a few walks around the town, met a few
peacocks 🦚, and of course, ate a few too many Portuguese
tarts.
From Evora, we drove back to the airport and flew to Lyon, in France.
We caught the airport train and an Uber to our accommodation, which once again
following European tradition, was not on the ground floor. The apartment was
very big and it took us quite a while to find the cooking implements.
There was a little French bakery around the corner where I got to
practise my French, “Bonjour, quatre pains au chocolat s’il vous plait”. We
went for a few (socially distanced) walks around Lyon and on one particularly
wet day I got a hole in my shoe while out on one of them. Fortunately, we were
on the way to Decathlon, so I didn’t need to endure squelchy feet for too long.
We caught a bus from Lyon Airport to Les Deux Alpes (pronounced
“leh derz alps” and meaning “The Two Mountains” for all you non-French-speaking
folk) where we thought we would be skiing for the next month. We dumped our
bags at the accom, which, you guessed it, was on the 3rd floor, and
went for a walk around town to sort out our skiing for the next day.
We checked in at ski school to make sure we would be good for the
next day, got our ski hire ready and bought passes for the ski lifts. Also, we
got cold, like really cold, like Europe cold! 🥶🥶🥶🥶
The next day, we got up early and got ready for our first
day of skiing! We had to be at ski school by 10 o’clock. Since it was our first
day, we only went on two easy runs. The ski lessons only went for three hours,
but they felt longer since we had so much fun.
You may be surprised to learn that you can get seriously
sunburnt in the snow, but it’s true. The Sun’s rays come at you from all
directions because the light reflects off the snow, I found this out the hard
way🧴☀️.
You’ve probably heard the old saying ‘When in France, eat bread,’
(at least I think that’s how it goes) we did just that. Every day we ate at
least one loaf of delicious, fresh French bread, we had it with soup, with
salami and my personal favourite with cheese a.k.a fondue. YUM!! The apartment
had a fondue maker and Dad jumped right in (he was very keen, he didn’t
actually jump into the fondue maker), also we found out that Mum used to have
fondue parties (the things you find out when you don’t leave you parents for
months on end).
While we were at ski school, Mum and Dad were following the
news and, it wasn’t looking too great. There was talk of closing the ski
resorts and we thought we might even have to go home (back to Australia). Every
night Dad sat in front of the TV using Google Translate to follow the French
President’s speeches.
On Saturday evening, it was announced that the French ski
resorts would be closing for the remainder of the season and we would
have to return all our ski gear the next day, that also meant I wouldn’t be
able to ski on my birthday, which was on the Monday.☹☹
Well, this was the last straw, so Mum and I started to look for
flights back to Australia. After a bit of searching, we booked an Emirates
flight from Edinburgh, Scotland back to Melbourne. We had to go back to the UK
as we had left some bags there, but in the meantime, it was my 12th
birthday.
France isn’t such a bad place to have a birthday, even if you’re
in the midst of a global pandemic. For breakfast we had bacon, potato rosti and
eggs. We went for a careful walk through town to a bakery where I picked a delicious-looking
raspberry and lemon mousse cake. The bakery lady was very specific that we
couldn’t eat the cake before 5pm, (since it was frozen) she wrote ‘1700’ on the
cake box so we didn’t forget. The cake was 110% delicious and, considering our
current situation it was a pretty good birthday.
The next day was Tuesday, (as you would know if you had been
paying attention at school, and in the last 200 words) and that was the day we
left the snow, 3 weeks early😠(I googled really sad face to get
that emoji). On the bright side, we now owe ourselves a month in the snow somewhere.