Ouvrez La Voie

Zosia wanted to see the place where she was born and Dominik had work to attend to at the research institute there where he’s worked for lots of years, so we packed up eight pairs of skis and took a 7 hour train trip from Chamonix to Davos, Switzerland. Through the five train transfers, Dominik lugged two verrrrrry heavy ski bags on and off trains while the girls ran ahead onto each train to find good seats and I trailed behind overflowing with bags of food and activities for a day of travel.

Davos, was just as we remembered it: a small town full of friendly people and pretty mountains. The girls have gotten used to the huge mountains of the French Alps and when we got to Davos Zosia said about the Swiss Alps, “it’s beautiful and I don’t care that the mountains where I was born are small.” A highlight of the trip was seeing old friends and familiar faces. On one of the first mornings there, I walked into the bakery that we used to go to every morning when I was pregnant with Zosia and the same friendly bakery lady was there and looked at me for a moment to place me and then suddenly exclaimed, “ohne baby!” (without baby!) Dear friend Ladina, who has lived in the Davos valley her whole life, introduced the girls to aerial yoga and they’re determined to set up a silk in our living room when we get back to Princeton.

When the girls weren’t upside down, they were outside in the mountain air. The snow dumped on Davos during our trip so they got their first experience skiing in powder that came up to their hips. After a few puffy crashes in the snow, they got the hang of it and declared it was the best ski of the year.

Hi! Happy Winter, Happy New Year! Winter came early to Chamonix with some big dumps of snow in November. We spent most of the month of December sick with various colds and flus but came out of it just in time to celebrate Christmas with a tree our landlord brought to us and to start skiing when the resorts opened! The girls had a festive holiday time at school–Zosia performed in a dance show that her friend and classmate choreographed. Every Thursday afternoon during the school day, the dancers practice and put on a new show every quarter. Her class also organized a handmade Christmas gift market where we scooped up some Christmas ornaments, bracelets, and macrame key chains made by the kids. 

There are six ski resorts in the Valley and 4 different nordic tracks, so we are all getting lots of time on the slopes.  The girls don’t have school on Wednesdays, so on Wednesdays and weekends, we hop on a bus in our ski gear with lunches packed, and ride to one of the resorts where we spend the day. The girls are looooooving skiing and are having lots of fun skiing moguls and the long, hard runs that their mother won’t go near! 

Dominik had one of his favorite ski adventures when he skied from the top of Aguille du Midi, which involved taking a gondola to the top of Aguille du Midi, donning his climbing harness, crampons, and ice axe and traversing a highly exposed ridge by foot to get to the top of the ski run, skiing down and over the Mer du Glace glacier, and coming right back to our doorstep by an old rack and pinion train, circa 1910. When he’s not skiing or working, he’s been studying chess (to teach the girls, who have developed quite an interest in the game), and he became a member of the French Alpine Club (CAF) and climbs a few nights a week with French and Polish climbers so he’ll be ready to get on rocks again come Spring. 

Anne spent the month prior to Christmas in Yoga Teacher Training and is now a Yoga Teacher! She happily taught her first class out of our apartment this past week to one eager student! She got inspired listening to all the French gals at the training and has upped her commitment to learning French. She’s doing a weekly French group class, a weekly private lesson, and lots of time on Rosetta Stone. French films help, too! (C’est Tout Pour Moi and Fahim highly recommended). 

Dominik got invited to give a talk at the University of Ljubljana so we packed up our Halloween costumes and spent Halloween week in Slovenia. A colleague of Dominik’s hosted us and put us up in a visiting professor’s apartment on campus. We got savvy with the Ljubljana city bus system and found probably the bessssst playground we’ve been to in these 7 years of playground hopping and spent three afternoons there. (Parents: it’s worth a trip to Ljubljana just for this playground). Here’s a pic of the girls with new friends they met there. We were all inspired by these sisters who speak FIVE languages fluently (English, Slovene, French, Russian and Hebrew). 

We spent time in cafes and restaurants in the old town and along the river, saw a few great shows at the Ljubljana Puppet Theater, visited the UNESCO Skocjan Cave (where Kamila had to be carried for two hours because she was so taken by the massiveness of it!), spent a rainy day at the Ljubljana Climbing Gym, and improvised a Halloween celebration. The Slovenes carve pumpkins but they don’t trick or treat so we got dressed up and trick or treated with the six doors inside our apartment. The girls both declared it was the best Halloween ever! The next day we went to Zale Cemetery, Ljubljana’s largest one, for Day of the Remembrance of the Dead, a national holiday in Slovenia when all Slovenes visit the cemeteries. Hoards of people were streaming through that morning. The sidewalks leading to the cemetery were packed with flower vendors and nearly every tombstone was covered with fresh flowers. The girls placed flowers on some of the few that didn’t have any.

One of the highlights of the trip was a climbing expedition to Crni Kal in the west of Slovenia, about 20 minutes from the Italian border. From the top of the climbs we saw beautiful views of the Adriatic Sea. When the climbing day was wrapping up, Dominik suggested one final climb up the wall of an authentic old castle. As adventures go, there were unexpected elements and we finished the climb hungry, tired, and under pitch black skies, lit by the one headlight we brought. It was too dark to take any pictures at the top, but here’s what the castle looks like in the daytime. The climb started way at the bottom of the gulley (a mote to be precise) and went to the tippy top of the castle! Being a neighbor of Italy, Slovenia is known for good pizza, so we had some celebratory pizza after making it down!

We just finished SIX weeks of school today and whew, it’s been a rollllllller coaster. This is a pic of the girls in front of the school. A family owns the building and lives in the left side of it and donated the right half to the school. Kamila’s class is on the lower floor, Zosia’s class is on the second floor, and the third floor is an open space where they do yoga, theatre, and dance. They eat lunch outside on the upper balcony. The school is on the top of a big hill and looks out onto some big mountains. Here is a pic of the girls and the school’s view:

One of the big challenges of the past month has been figuring out how to get the kids from Chamonix up to the top of the hill where the school is. It’s an easy, 20 minute drive if you have a car, which we don’t. We started the year as part of a group of kids who were taken up the hill by one of the parents. It was perfect until a month into the school year the parents sold the van with one day notice. We scrambled and called and texted nearly every parent in the school and have come up with what seems to be the new system, which is a bit more complicated, but works. We walk 10 min to a bus stop, take a city bus a few stops where Kamila’s teacher picks them up and takes them to school. One day a week we take the train to the town of the school and a friend of Anne’s picks up Anne and the girls, squeezes us all into the tiny back seat, and drives all of us up the hill. Most afternoons Kamila’s teacher drops the girls off at our house but two afternoons a week Anne and Dominik take turns taking the train to the town and hiking up the hill to pick up the girls and then we all hike down to the train together. We miss walking 3 minutes to the bus stop at the end of Prospect Street!

Zosia is loving school! Some of her favorite parts are: not having to wear shoes in the building, the forest afternoons (every afternoon is spent in the woods), no school every Wednesday, learning cursive, math, her French class (twice a week she and a few other kids, including Kamila, spend an hour with a French as a second language teacher), and her new friends (Zoe who is French and Russian, Ariella who is British and Australian, Sofia who is French, and Leni who is British and French). This little group of girls welcomed her from day one and have become good pals. She has started correcting my pronunciation of French words and had her first play date with two French-only speaking sisters. When one of the little girls kept repeating a question to me and I had no idea what she was saying, Zosia said “Mamaaaaa, she asked if she could eat the play dough….” So, her French is coming along. She definitely understands more than she can speak, like all of us, I’d say.

Kamila has had a slower start to getting comfortable at school. She went from going to school three half days a week last year to four very full long days a week here so it’s a big shift and a lot of time away from us. Drop offs have been really hard with lots of tears–she misses us and we miss her a lot too. She is a little overwhelmed by the French immersion at school and often comments about how hard it is to not understand what other kids say to her. Her teacher is wonderful and stays in close contact with us as we work through this transition. Things are just beginnnnnning to shift for the better, though. Drop offs are still hard but she’s becoming more comfortable and happy during the school day and is beginning to make some friends. While going to school is really hard, she almost always comes home from school happy, so that is a relief. I often overhear Kamila and Zosia speaking simple French to each other when they play and Kamila loves to speak in “pretend Italian” and other pretend languages. They’re both surrounded by lots of different languages at school and around town. Kamila loves to play “the French game,” which is when all four of us speak only French. Below is a pic from school with Arwen, a little French girl that she’s become pals with.

Every six weeks the kids get two weeks of vacation, so we are now officially ON BREAK! In a few days we’re off to Slovenia for ten days where Dominik will be collaborating with a work colleague and we’ll be checking out the country. Anne is excited to be there for Halloween and Day of the Dead. Pics to come!

A week before school started (more on that, soon!) we hopped in a tiny rental car and drove 7 hours on some verrrry windy roads to Provence and the little town of Palud Sur Verdon (population 340). Our home for the week was a 400 year old stone farmhouse with a big walled in garden full of snails sunning on the brick paths. The girls were thrilllllllled to have a yard again and hardly came inside after the rains passed. We loved the early morning walks past cow and sheep fields to pick up croissants and baguettes in the village. And loved the deep quiet of the Provence countryside. The girls said that Palud reminded them of Princeton. 🙂

Palud is situated in the Gorges National Park, called the Grand Canyon of Provence. It is a rock climber’s paradise with huge long routes that start from way down at the bottom of the canyon.

Poland was food. Lots of good, yummy, yummy food. Plates of pickled herring, bowls of cold beet soup, blueberry and strawberry perogies, and paczki! Poland was family, Warsaw, cobblestone streets of the Old Town, magnificent city parks and playgrounds, hearing Chopin music at the Chopin Memorial at Lazienki Park, fountains, and meeting up with old friends. Dominik’s sister, Dorota and our nephew, Damitri came to meet us for the week and brought us all the things we forgot to pack. The girls loved being with familiar and well loved family members! Anne’s favorite part (aside from the food) was sneaking off to see a Frida Kahlo exhibit at Lazienki Park and a trip to the Ethnography Museum to see an exhibit of Pajaki. Dominik’s most meaningful part was sharing his Dad’s resting place with the girls for the first time.

We secured our apartment sight unseen, about four months before we arrived in France. We chose from three options available in the town and have been happy with the choice. Here’s a little tour:

Hi! We made it! We are just about a month in and have done all the important things: set up our apartment, gotten library cards and pool passes, learned how and where to grocery shop after eating mostly pasta for a week, watched the World Cup Rock Climbing competition, scoped out all the bulletin boards and pamphlets around town for kids’ events, visited the girls’ new school, figured out train and bus schedules, and got to know the French emergency medical system! After a week of exploratory adventures and cultural acclimatization, Dominik got an acute case of appendicitis and had to go by ambulance to a hospital down the valley to have an emergency appendectomy! He was able to make it through his hospital stay with enough French to understand that the doctors recommended no exercise for way too long, yikes! Before the surgery, the surgeon told him, “Pas de sport pour un mois!” After surgery, Dominik talked the doctors down to 20 days. He’s doing well now, mostly complying with doctor’s orders and walking slowly on the few flat (or flat-ish) paths in the Alps until he’s cleared to go back up hills.

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A few days ago we took the train about 45 minutes to the beautiful mountain town of St. Gervais les Bains. We hiked up a steep hill (against doctor’s orders) and then hopped on a gondola to get to the finish line of Stage 15 of the Tour de France. We inched our way in to the front row and by the end we were all pounding on the barriers and screaming with the hundreds of people around us as the cyclists went by. A few of them popped some wheelies as they cruised to the finish line. Impressive after cycling for five hours in intense sun and heat!

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The girls are settling in to their new rhythms and lifestyle. They each have said “Bonjour” to kids on the playground and are gradually expanding to asking their names, etc. Kamila likes to tap teenagers on the shoulder on the train and say Bonjour to them. My (Anne’s) French is at the level of a 2 year old so I usually talk to the children at the playground so the girls can see me fumbling along. A big success was one evening when the girls made a friend at the playground without using much language except for play! They had a blast playing together and mimicked each other’s play all evening. The girls love walking everywhere (we have no car) and know their way to the playground, pool, bakery, and library. They also love taking trains and never get on one without their pack of Uno cards.