Competition de Snowboard

Yesterday afternoon the kids and I drove up to Chamrousse to see if we could watch any of the Snowboarding festival.  I was skiing up there on Thursday (side note: hard to beat skiing with a friend who has an extra ski pass) and we saw this massive snow park that they had set up.  I looked it up online -and found some rather sketchy info, with very little details - but it was a beutiful day to be outside, the kids finished their homework in the morning, and Susan was at a retreat all day - so we figured we’d give it a shot.

We drove up - and found out that we were allowed to hike up the hill to the snowpark.  Sounded easy enough - walking uphill in soft, slushy snow apparently can wear down small children.  But when we got there it was quite impressive. There were dozens of competitors - in what seemed like it was more of a ‘friendly festival’ than a real competition.  Tonnes of people sitting around, music pumping out (pretty sure my kids heard more english language gansta-rap over an hour or so yesterday than they have cummulatively thus far in their lives. Also pretty sure if it was an english-language environment -you wouldn’t get away with playing those lyrics in a public setting….)

We sat in the sun watching these guys - who came in teams of four - and some of them were quite amazing.  It was +10 up there, and the sky was crystal clear - so it was a pretty nice day just to sit and watch.

Tis True.

For those who have not yet heard..we do have some very exciting news…We are in fact expecting. Yes - that’s not some tricky code for something else…Susan is pregnant

The little one is due mid-September (this would be a good time to NOT remind Susan about 35 degree days in July and Aug here)

We told the kids last weekend and they are pretty excited.

Lots of questions - from where is the baby going to sleep (hmm…good point actually), to names.

Matea suggested Hope Joy  if it’s a girl  - and in an unrelated conversation Micah suggested Zach Pope  if it’s a boy.  Zach - after his stuffed animal - which is named after cousin Joy’s dog - and when I said “what?” he just replied: “Pope! You know - like in Rome” mmmmkay.

Strange that it looks like we’ll have two kids born at the same hospital in Grenoble - and two in the same hospital in Edmonton. 

Spring

Let me just say this upfront…if you are a person who is inclined to get bitter at the good fortune of others, and you currently have over 1m of snow on your grass….maybe just move along.

There is an incredible amount of daffodils that grow in our yard (OK -technically not “our” yard - and no, not even our landlord-next-door’s yard -but hey…we’re all friends here)

They have been blooming non stop for a few weeks now - in fact today I noticed that as soon as you get a couple hundred meters down from our village - (where it’s fairly consistantly warmer) the daffodils are pretty much done - and the crocuses are as well.

There is a massive Magnolia tree in our yard (ok - again, not really “our” yard - but at least this time the Ribo’s - so kind of our yard) that has had huge blossoms on it for a bit over a week now that look like they have plenty of latent color  just waiting to bust out.  The magnolias - and most other flowering trees - are completely in full bloom down in Grenoble.  In fact the other day waiting for the bus there was an almost overwhelming scent of fruit tree blossoms in the air.

It’s supposed to be sunny and up to 20 by Thursday -  so things should really start growing now.

See - there is hope for the future - those of you who thought perhaps you were caught in the next ice age.

I thought we already had that.

So today  we have done the last step - en principle  -to get our carte de sejour. That’s right - we may actually get a visa.  We are one step closer to not being illegal immigrants! What a thought. 

The last step was just to pay for them.  For some reason the kids have 1-year renewable visas that were issued in Vancouver - so they’ve been fine since before we got here.  I will get a ‘researcher/scientist’ visa - and Susan get’s a ‘spouse of a researcher’ visa. Both apparently are a type of work visa - and will be good for 1 year at a time.  So by the time we get our one year visa - we’ll only have a few months until we need to start the renewal process.  Honestly - it’s been pretty much a complete gong show.  No one seems to know if I’m a student with a small stipend, or a really-poorly paid employee who takes classes. Is it a work visa or a student visa? Do I get social security with the temporary one - or wait for the real one.  Do I go to the Marie, or the Prefecture?  Is Susan’s a work visa or not? Do the kids need an additional document?  Are we entitled to this benefit or not?  Can anyone even tell me who to talk to or where to get an answer? 

I can’t even start to explain the number of trips to different offices that I’ve been to since last August. It’s taken so long that we’ve missed out on all kinds of benefits, have been without health coverage, and a bunch of other stuff.

But I digress….

Today - was the last step.  I had to pay €340 for each.  In order to do so - I needed to get some timbres fiscaux.  Some type of ‘financial stamps’ that are a kind of government money order.  So I had to find a Tresor Publique  and wait in line to buy them, so that I could bring them to our Marie, for them to send by mail to the prefecture in Grenoble, for them to release the cartes that are ready to our Marie, who will tell us to come and pick them up.   So ignore the 8x back and froth - and you’re still left with les timbres fiscaux.  It’s a small paper document issued by the government, to create a secure and portable way of transferring wealth from one place to another. Yeah - pretty much the exact thing that currency is.  So I went and paid with my bank card, to get these stamps, to bring to the Marie, to go to the prefecture, so they can turn them back into the currency from whence they came.

The French administration  may be tonnes of redundant paperwork -  and highly frustrating - but man is it ever slow!

I just don't get it

Sometimes - scratch that….. often, things happen here that I just don’t get.  That’s just what happens when you live in a culture other than the one in which you were raised. I get that. However - it seems with our kids in school - this happens a lot.

Perhaps it’s because they still don’t really get what’s going on - plus we don’t really get what’s going on - yet we depend on them for info…it’s kind of the blind leading the blind.

Over the vacation, Jonah had a note in his yellow notebook (where all parent - teacher communication happens) that was one of those things.

I understand the words that were written - but I have no idea what’s going on.

It went something like this:

“The kids went to an art exhibition where they were invited to artistically take part. For this, they decorated a cheese box on the theme of an apple.  For the first day back, have your child bring a cheese box with them.  However, it must be a cheese box that has a sense of meaning to them.”

uh. ok.

ROMA - DAY IV

On our last full day in Rome we ventured out to find the remaining quintesentially Roman things to see.  Basically - all those things that you see in every guide book, that we hadn’t seen yet and would feel like we lacked something if we missed.

We got on this really cool mini-electric bus to ride through town over towards our first stop, the Spanish steps.  The bus ended up being a pretty cool way to see a lot of the city. It was so small that it bounced along many twisted narrow cobblestone roads (that I wouldn’t have thought a car could even drive down) and see so many parts of the city.

From there we wandered over towards the Trevi Fountain. Since this was really the only sunny day we had in Rome, we stopped for some Gelato just before we got to the fountain. I’m pretty sure we spent about as much time deciding on flavours as we did actually consuming them.

We also got to the Pantheon.  It was commissioned by Marcus Agrippa (hence you can still see his name on the outside) and was build in the 1st century as a temple to all (pan) the Roman gods (theos).  It’s been a Catholic church (at least in theory) since the 7th century - meaning it’s been in constant use for 20 centuries - and also was spared when so many other pagan temples weren’t.  The only thing that I’ll say about it is this: the dome is made of concrete, and was the largest unreinforced concrete dome when it was built —-and IT STILL IS - 2000 years later.

We wandered through some more piazzas, and it was starting to rain and get colder - so we found the same bus route, and took our little mini-bus back towards the apartment.

After we warmed up and dried off we weren’t sure what to do next. We had seen all of the major items that we wanted to, and didn’t have tonnes of time left.  There was one more church that had some kind of archeological dig underneath it that we had walked past a few times, but we thought perhaps we should check to see if the kids were up for it.  So I asked “who wants to go see another old church…” - I didn’t even get to the “..or who would like to do something else” part before I was interrupted with “Yeah” “ME” and “I Do”.  Kids after a nerd’s own heart.

San Clemente was this AMAZING church where there is the ‘new church’ (built in the 12 century) - which up until just 150 years ago they though it was the original church. Then an Irish priest started digging under the church and found the 6th century church - incredibly intact.  Then under that - they found a 2nd century building! I have no idea how they ever get Metro lines dug under this town.  It seems you can’t stick a shovel in the ground more than a meter before you hit some 2000 year old treasure.

San Clemente was on the street that lead right up to the colosseum - and it was just starting to get dark when we came out, so we thought maybe we’d head back over to look at the Colosseum one more time.

Early the next morning we headed for the airport and back home.

All I can say is - if you can get return flights to rome for €50 each (including all taxes and charges) - I highly recommend you go.

ROMA - DAY III

On Wednesday we decided to set our sights for the Vatican. (which technically was the third country we were in since leaving home on Monday)

We decided to take the Metro to the Vatican as it was pretty much clear across the other side of the old city, and rainy.  That plus the fact that the kids love riding on trains, metro’s etc - its like a game. Not unlike the other popular Rome Metro game: “lift the wallet out of the tourist pocket”   that we’d heard so much about.

St Peters is a pretty impressive place. The square itself really sets the tone for the immense size of it all. There are so many works of art inside, and the whole things is really one huge piece of art. But I must say that I felt much the same that I did about the remains of the Roman Empire.  Except that with Rome the conspicuous opulent show of power was done in the name of the Empire - here it was done in the name of God.  St Peter’s was built just around the time of the Reformation, which to me says two things: 1) it was a huge piece of counter-reformation propaganda (look how much power, influence, riches the pope has….don’t think about falling out of line) 2)it was financed with Papal taxes as well as indulgences (telling people they cold buy their way into heaven). The 10’s of millions of dollars that the Roman Catholic church collected during this time, it used to build a church when many working poor all over Europe saw their lives increasingly grim.

The Vatican Museum was second on our list. It is a very impressive museum - which it seems a great number of people view as a mere obstacle between them and the final room in the museum: The Sistine Chapel.  The museum starts with ancient Egyptian, Roman, Greek all the way up through the Renaissance, and beyond. There are multiple rooms that have every wall and the ceiling painted by Raphael, works by da Vinci, Caravaggio, and of course, Michelangelo.

The Sistine Chapel in some ways is like the Colosseum  - I’d seen pictures of it probably thousands of times, but to actually be inside it was something quite different.

We had pizza for lunch around 3:00 or so and then headed back to our apartment.  We warmed up, dried off, and then went back out to see San Giovanni cathedral which was just down the street.

We had supper at our apartment - some more bizarre kids TV - then off to bed.

SKI DAY

20 min drive from our house to parking at the side of run so we can just put on our skis at the car and go

+

Not a cloud in the sky, around 0 all day long

+

Bumping into the kids friends from school on the hill

+

spending the day with my kids and watching Matea soak up a new skill

=

one very content Papa

ROMA - DAY II

This was our first full day in Rome. It was cool and rainy - but that was the forecast for the length of our stay - so we thought since it wasn’t really raining - it may be as good a time as any to go do some outdoor things: the Colosseum and the Forum.

There is really no way to describe the impressive magnitude of the Roman Colosseum (technically: The Flavian Amphitheater) - it’s one of those things that you have seen probably thousands of times in pictures and movies - but when you are actually standing next to it, it suddenly takes on a whole different scale.

The kids loved it  - which was great as we were still a bit hesitant as to how much touring ancient architectural sites was going to be considered a great vacation for a 4, 7 & 9 year old.  Of course these are the kids who had a afternoon with me in Grenoble last week, were told they could choose what to do — and they couldn’t agree - so we went to both  the art museum and the archeological museum.

The Roman Forum - could be considered the remains of downtown Rome from about 2,000 years ago.  Amazing. Strolling around the remnants of so many massive and complex structures, and amazingly carved marble statues that remain some 20 centuries after they were made.

Of course the other thing that strikes one about the Roman Empire is: wow. This was all pretty much built with spoils of war, on the backs of slaves, taxing millions of ‘citizens’, to build up an infrastructure that was mostly for the benefit of the few incredibly rich.

By the time we got back to our apartment I have no idea how many kilometers we must have walked around Rome, and the kids were amazing.

We had eaten a huge lunch at about 2:30 - so we made a smaller supper at our apartment, the kids watched some incredibly strange/poorly done Italian over-dubbing of some really weird Japanimation and then it was bed time.

ROMA - DAY I

Rome.

The Eternal City. Cradle of the great Roman Empire - and the Republic before it. We had never been to Rome before - so we (all 5 of us) we’re pretty excited for our trip during the first week of the kids 2-week vacation.

It seemed like perhaps our trip was off to a bit of a rough start. Around 5am we were up with a vomiting child, and I don’t think what he really wanted to do was drive through the mountains to Geneva, get on a plane, then have an Italian taxi ride into Rome.

Luckily we didn’t have to leave the house until close to noon- and by that time he was at least a bit stable.   Micah perked up - actually slept a bit on the plane (which our children seem to have a genetic disposition to be unable to do) and the trip was uneventful.

We made it to Rome, got to our apartment where our lovely host Giovanna was waiting for us. She gave us a bit of orientation, suggested what we might want to do with the kids - and had already even stocked us with some food for breakfast since she knew we were getting in later in the afternoon.

We settled in - got a feel for the neighbourhood and just relaxed for a bit. We got a real feel for the city just by looking out the kitchen windows and staring at the 1800 year old defensive walls that were built under Emperor Aurilian.

Giovanna had directed us to a wonderful restaurant within walking distance of the apartment - so we waited for them to open for supper (7:30) and enjoyed some GREAT pizza.

Home - bed - ready for the sites the next day.