17. Hiver

"Is anyone going to Primark this afternoon, or is there still tear gas?", asked a post on the Toulouse English speaking forum last Saturday.

The extreme has become the norm. The weekly parade of the gilet jaunes and their accompanying destruction has not dissipated, but has now reached something of a rhythm. The protesters, the police and the general public have each found their place in the new normal, with coping strategies to allow the gilet jaunes to be greeted, like most things, with a resigned shrug.

Our personal strategy has been escape the city. Generally, each Friday night we head into the mountains - where there are still gilet jaunes, but more of the singing songs on roundabouts variety, rather than the throwing bricks through windows type.

We've been staying in a sequence of gîtes and chambre d'hôtes. The former are Airbnb like, with an additional stressful examination stage where the owner checks your cleaning and electricity usage while you're standing there, usually taking issue with both. Businesses (in at least this bit of France) assume that all customers are not to be trusted - and will steal your spoons at the slightest opportunity.

Chambre d'hôtes are entertaining but exhausting, as you eat meals together with the host. This has generally involved delicately tip toing around politics, and attempting to remain unfazed by, in the last case, the owner's goat who watched us continuously through the window.

The ski season has been non existent until this weekend, when the Gallic weather gods woke up and our local resort went from being barely open to having avalanches inbounds within a week.

We, along with most of Southwest France, boarded the train on Friday evening to the local resort at Ax les Thermes (a semi regular hangout at this point), got off the train with 2km to walk and realized that our stroller was completely non functional in the semi frozen slush pond. After a brief failed experiment of tying the skis into the bottom, we gave up and hid the stroller - slightly hoping sometime would steal it over the weekend.

Why doesn't everyone do this?

It was about 8pm by this point and sleeting, the shops and take out places were closed (who in their right mind would want pizza after 7pm?), so we looked for restaurants, carrying Sam who was increasingly not seeing the funny side of the situation. 

All the restaurants were full of people without skis and babies and 3 bags, and the looks from the waiters as we walked past implied that they definitively wanted to keep it that way.

Just as Sam was about to completely lose it, we found a crêpe place which was sympathetic. All willpower exhausted, we let Sam watch Wallace and Gromit on the phone and ordered a large glass of wine. (As an aside, perhaps the best event in parenting so far has been Sam's recent trend of reliably exclaiming "cracking toast, Gromit!" at breakfast time).

This morning, our plans to get to the gondola for first lift were ambitious by about 2 hours. We joined a queue which went half way around the town (with universally impeccable queuing etiquette).
It became rapidly apparent that French ski resorts have a rather different attitude to liability than US ones: there was an advert for a mass start downhill amateur ski race which presumably has about a 50 percent survival rate, and walking surfaces were kept steep, icy and frictionless. Insurance is sold as an option with your lift pass, implicitly indicating that your survival with limbs intact is not the resort's responsibility.

Even more true in France, mate

We took turns to ski. I skinned up the hill with Drew's skis (a waste of a powder day, I heard his voice say in my head as I climbed), and then telemarked, poorly, down the front face. At least in Colorado, there was usually some other crap Telemark people - rather than a thousand perfect French Alpine skiers who think you're both eccentric and unskilled. 

Rosie effortlessly danced down the mountain while I built Sam an increasingly elaborate sequence of snow sculptures ("Daddy, make snow DOG", "make snow MOTORBIKE!"). 

First of many snowmen

We returned to the train, apparently with 30 minutes to spare - clumsily maneuvering 17 separate awkward items onto the luggage rack, and collapsed exhausted (perhaps more from the snowmen than the skiing).

A large crowd began to amass on the adjacent platform, our initial response being smugly wondering why so many people were waiting in the wrong place (the line only goes to Toulouse), before inevitably realizing that our train was not going anywhere.

The actual train pulled into the station as we clumsily shuffled our huge pile of stuff over the train tracks through the sleet, and shouting for the train to wait. We tumbled through the closing doors and decided we should probably get a car.