Suited, booted and duck-footed*:

bienvenue a l'Arc 1800. I've managed to find a pub with internet access (the genius of this pairing has only now struck me), after being told in the last place (a laundry) that they don't have access at the weekends. From Monday only, apparently.

Strange.

Anyway, we're here, and have been for a week. The weather is almost exactly as it was last year: sunny to a fault. It's warm enough during the day to melt the top layers of the snow into a slushy mess, then cold enough at night to re-freeze it into a treacherous crust. My (short and inflexible) board is happiest on groomed pistes with nicer snow, so it's a bit of a challenge to adapt to slipping and sliding around on hard-packed ice and then barrelling into a sticky, choppy, slow patch of crud. Still, I seem to be doing reasonably well. I had my first real lesson yesterday - last year, the instructor for my solitary previous lesson turned up 45 minutes late and then had to leave early - and I really enjoyed it. This year the instructor, having established that I'd never done any serious off-piste stuff, nor visited the park or tried riding switch, made sure that I A) did some rather steep off-piste B) rode switch for a while, and C) tried a route through the park.

Turns out A) steep off-piste in icy, crusty semi-powder is astonishingly difficult; B) switch is easy, and C) jumps (small ones, anyway) are also easy. I declined the offer to try a rail slide or a 180. I value my health.

It's difficult to stay on the slopes as much as I'd want...running and cycling are good for general stamina, but the muscles used for boarding would appear to be long-forgotten, vestigial ones last used by our aquatic ancestors. My right calf and left quad are permanently aching, so I think today, when we move to a different apartment, may be a day off. We also seem to be embedded within a cloud layer and the whole place is enveloped in a misty rain.

Anyway, I've slipped into that lack-of-responsibility mode that comes with being forcibly removed from contact with home by dint of huge mobile phone costs and expensive internet access, and I'm having trouble writing anything other than a sort of monotone recollection of day upon day of blissful boarding, so I'll be off.

A plus tard! (My French sparkles like a linguistic gem, n'est-ce pas?)

* Okay, okay, another contrived title: suited because I'm clad in full-on boarding kit, booted because I'm wearing my bad-ass Salomon F's and duck-footed because the instructor that took my lesson yesterday was of the opinion that my binding angles (rotated in opposite directions, hence duck-footed) are the right way to go. I'm sorry. Really I am.