Bella Italia

Ciao!

Come va?

Sooooo, Italy. I realise I've been a little remiss in the whole writing any blog about Italy so far. As you may have guessed, I've been somewhat busy since I got here. Definitely work hard, play hard. Now I just need to work on that balance so it's a little more of the play and a little less of the work, preferably with a smidgen of sleep thrown in too. This first month has flown by so quick it's unbelievable. The season's gonna be over in a blink if it continues like this.

I'm not sure where to start really. So, I guess, the beginning it is. So having all piled onto a coach in Mansfield, approximately 20 hours later we rolled through the Mont Blanc tunnel (all 11.6km of it!) and in to the Aosta Valley where the snow was, well... it wasn't. No snow. Anywhere. In all of the Alps. An excellent start to the season.

Our training week was set near Aosta where we all stayed in a very nice hotel, and got fed pasta and pizza at least twice a day. You know, just in case we were gonna miss it while we were in Italy... Goodness, I've never had so much pasta in my whole life. They serve a bowl

of pasta (larger than I would usually eat for a main meal) for a starter at more or less every meal we've had here. Although, bizarrely, I'm pretty sure I've lost weight since I got here, which is a beautiful mystery to me, but then again, the Italians are a pretty slim bunch, so perhaps they're doing something right...

Amongst the other, more job related, things I learnt that week was that the Italians understand the concept of vegetarianism even less than the French do. They tried hard, bless them, but 3 huge blocks of cheese and a couple of artichoke hearts is never going to be a meal however hard it tries... Having decided that with a bowl of pasta as a starter at every meal, I wasn't going to starve, I decided not to tell the hotel I'm currently in that I'm vegetarian, and just eat whatever is given to me (or not), but in any case, I couldn't abide 5 months of blocks of cheese for dinner... So that's over 10 years of being vegetarian well and truly ended this year, esp when all my tree planting breakfast bacon is taken into account. I even tried veal the other night... that was different.

I'm clearly quite easily distracted by food... Back to training week. Everyday we had various meetings and talks about how various things worked, but we also went out each day to do something related. On the first day we were given a tour of the valley in our minibuses. Basically Interski's operation stretched from Aosta in the middle of the valley, up to Courmayeur (my current home) at the top of the valley on the French border, and includes various of the little villages and communes in between, as well as La Thuile – a thirty minute jaunt up a mountain in a slightly different direction. The next day we go to go out again and drive it all in small groups so learn where everything was properly. While everyone else was a little disconcerted by driving on the right-hand side, I wasn't that bothered, having got used to it last year. What did take some getting used to was remembering that the clutch exists... Stop, park, shutter, stall. Did that a few times... However, I seem to have regained the used of my left foot when it comes to changing gears now, so that's alright. I guess that's what driving to Geneva one day and Turin, the next, will do to you... (nothing exciting unfortunately, just need to visit the airports in case we had to pick people up there occasionally).

Besides meetings and orientations/driving, we also had to set up ski hire in Aosta and Courmayeur. A difficult task in Courmayeur since the mountain didn't open until the day before our first guests arrived and the only way up there is the gondola. However, a timely fall of snow saw us through the first week, and was then joined by a ridiculous meter and a half dump at the

end of that week. The whole task was made more complicated because Pila (the resort in Aosta) didn't open the first week, and so we had to bring enough skis and boots over to cover the whole valley. This is ridiculously hard work when you can't just drive up and have to bring it all up by hand in the gondola. Hohum. Good pre-season work out.

Towards the end of the week, we were all given our final placements for hotels and positions and I was rather pleased to have ended up in Courmayeur. It's such a pretty village. If you think of an Italian alpine village this is probably more or less what you think of. We're actually staying in Dolonne, which is a commune if Courmayeur just across the river and has the quaintest little windy streets that are so thin that you can't really drive cars down them (not that it stops people). My commute to walk is a 10 minute walk down the hill followd by a gondola ride back up again. Not half bad really. I eat lunch up the mountain to a backdrop of the Alps, and most of the time with blue skies above. Molto bene!

It's not all blue skies and windy streets. There is some work involved too. In my first week I had a school group, who it turns out were all very nice reasonable people, which is always good. Thoroughly time consuming, but on the other hand, my evenings were mainly consumed with eating crepes, tubing and bum-boarding, so I don't have too much to complain about really. I also now appreciate in retrospect that there is very little organisation involved for the schools co-ordinators; basically you turn up... In week two I moved in to my proper job in Classics and gained some adults. I have some what more of a free reign here. I am classics for Courmayeur, so to a certain extent, I can arrange it however I like as long as it gets done. I also have my evenings a bit more free, in principle. On the other hand, adults and families have this n

iggly habit of turning around and saying something like “oh by the way we were wondering if we can 'blah'”, and usually this results in several hours worth of organising something or other, and with lots of different groups all doing the same thing, you quickly find all that time that was freed up now tied up in organisational knots... That said, i'm learning. Soon i'll have answered all those common questions for the first time and have figured out how stuff generally works, which will certainly make life easier in the long run. However, when everything is going well, I can turn up up the mountain at 9am and go out for a few hours most days, skiing or snow boarding – still being indecisive about that... And i'm set to do more of that next week having cut the number of classics I have this week by over 90% compared to last week! (Also seemed like more last

week because I was the only person in Courmayeur with clients, so everyone else was getting in rather more skiing time than I was!). I will gain a school again this week, but there's inly just over 20 kids, so hopefully it won't be too much like hard work *touch wood* !?

Annnwayz, I should probably stop right now, cos this is getting long, but I might blog again sometime soon. Bit more difficult to say stuff now though, since i'm not really doing much different each day. (I do still need to write up new York though, so perhaps I should do that!)