Chamonix Activity Report: 28th June 2006
Back To School
Being a 'Chamonix virgin' I decided to put my weekend into the hands of some old friends who live here. We hiked, biked, ate and drank out and it was a great chance for me to get to know the town (and the interiors of a couple of bars a little too well!), meet some new people and generally get a feeling of the remarkable atmosphere that seems to radiate down from Mont Blanc's high dome. Having had such a great action packed weekend it was easy to forget that I was not just here for leisure reasons.
As Sunday evening went on I started to get a strangely familiar feeling; that slightly depressing thought of having to get up early the next day and get your brain back into gear, forget all the fun stuff from 24 hours ago and wake up at “stupid o'clock”. Was I going to have to fight my way onto a sweaty tube or sit impatiently in an endless queue of traffic to make an early morning discussion with my boss on the assignment I'd been working on (and hadn't done)? Was I going to have to phone those clients that I'd been putting off for weeks to give them the bad news about their investments? Or just have to make those 80 calls to keep my account manager happy, 99% of which will be received with numerous and often colourful variations of 'go away'. (Looking back - ringing up a random person and basically asking on the off chance if they would like to spend £12,000 on a conservatory was stretching the limits of job satisfaction!)...............
All of these fateful tasks I had faced previously and dealt with far better than my next challenge. I was about to embark on something far worse, something I never thought I would be doing ever again. Yes it had been12 years but Monday morning was the most dreaded day of anyone's life........it was the first day of term at my new school!! And unlike before I was going to a French school.
Having gone to bed at a reasonable time I had a disturbed nights sleep wondering what the next day had in store. Memories of GCSE French lessons came back – an angry Parisian shouting at me using words I couldn't comprehend, worrying that the other students all know more than you and are going to laugh at you when you say the wrong thing. So nerves aside I headed for the school.
On arriving at Insted my schoolboy memories and adult fears were quickly banished as I was met by Adam, one of the managers of the French Language School in Chamonix. Introducing myself and the 3 other students to the school, talking about the aims and methods of the course, he tells us that “Insted is the alpine branch of the Stendhal University based in Grenoble. The language courses are given by their institution for French as a foreign language, Centre Universitaire d'Etudes Françaises (CUEF)”. Having looked up their website since, the CUEF are a nationally acclaimed institution, and recognised as one of the best organisations for teaching French as a foreign language in France – so I felt like I was in good hands.
Adam continued “The schools classes run throughout the summer, with students having the option of doing any number of weeks studying from a minimum of 2 up to a maximum of 13. The classes run for 3 hours each weekday morning, and as this was the first week of the summer we would be the only four students on the program (new students may join the course each week but to a maximum of 13 in a class, this is increased to 20 in the winter season).” So for now there are just four of us in the class, this sounded great as we would get a lot more attention from the teacher. Adam continued “a wide range of methods will be used to improve our conversation skills, pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and linguistic structure. Newspapers, commercials, cartoons, texts by well-known French authors and video recordings will add to our course literature”. Already I was realising that this would be a far cry from reciting verb tables from a white board or reading about the good people of La Rochelle in my copy of “Tricolore” (a popular text book in UK schools pre 1990 or even pre 1980!).
The school teaches all levels of students from beginner to advanced and sticks to a guideline of objectives it hopes the student will achieve over the course. Being exceptionally rusty and having spent two seasons in Val d'Isere and Morzine where I had managed to invent my own version of Franglais, I chose, when applying for the course to say I was a beginner/intermediate. “For the beginners and intermediates” Adam says “you can expect to work on adjectives, articles, the interrogative form, negation, present tense, and pronouns. With grammar elements studied including demonstrative adjectives, expressions of time, immediate future, the imperfect and passé composé tenses, and personal pronouns. The classes will also cover vocabulary, sentence structure and pronunciation, as well as work on written and oral expression.” This all sounded great but I was sure I'd never learnt about any of this in school, however…..and the next bit was why I was really here “The class will concentrate on developing a good grasp of basic/intermediate conversational French.” There's my motivation right there; the thought of being able to have a conversation with a French person without running away or asking them if they speak English.....in 6 short weeks!!
We were then introduced to our teacher Jerome, who immediately launched into 10 minutes of the fastest, most complex French I had ever heard. The “confidence meter” had just been dealt an almighty blow! I wanted to look around just to see if the other students were as confused as I was but I dared not look away from Jerome incase I missed some small hand signal or body movement which might throw some light onto what he was saying. Luckily for me one of the other students put his hand up and said that he hadn't understood 90% of what had just been said. I should point out now that Insted try with all of their classes to stick to speaking French throughout in order to improve everyone's standard faster; but I think, realising from our blank faces and the general air of the confusion in the room, Jerome went on to explain in English that we needed to be assessed in order for him to understand which level we were all at. Some short reading, writing, listening and oral tests were then conducted - some of which were easy and some were very hard, but I scored an intermediate grade so that is the programme that I will be working to. The other 3 students were rated as beginner so we would be taught to different agendas throughout the weeks.
Well midway through the first week I'm still there, I haven't run away yet, and more impotently they haven't thrown me out. I have discovered that there is some vocabulary lying dormant in my grey matter, and that those homework verb tables I toiled over as an adolescent whilst watching Neighbours might have somehow been absorbed into my brain. I've learnt some new things about speaking in the past tense and whilst reading some passages of “Around the world in 80 days” and “Robinson Crusoe” I now know the words for "hot air balloon" and "shipwreck". I'm pretty pleased with myself and feel that in a few weeks, if I continue to grow in confidence, I will be able to have a conversation in French. And you can guarantee the first thing I'll be looking to ask is “can I borrow someone's hot air balloon to search for my shipwreck?”
Insted have spaces available on their courses over the summer and also hold winter season courses. For more information take a look at Insted's Website
Watch this space for new information on walking, mountain biking and road biking around Chamonix, plus updates on how the French course is going.
Piste Maps for Chamonix (pdf format), Les Houches (jpg format), Cross-country skiing (pdf format), and Mountain-bike trails (pdf format)
Current status for opening of Pistes & Lifts
Chamonix Webcam Index
Useful Links
Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research
French Avalanche Research Institute
Meteo France - Mountain weather and avalanche conditions bulletins (in French)
Henry's Avalanche Talk - popular avalanche training sessions based in French Alps as well as translation of current avalanche conditions
PisteHors.com - Backcountry Skiing and Snowboarding News in English for the French Alps. Excellent coverage of avalanche safety and advice
Additional snow and weather information provided, with thanks, by meteo.chamonix.com and the Tourist Office
