Friday: The end of full week 1

Friday, Feb. 10, 2017

First things first, as of Tuesday I was officially 100% healthy and so happy about it! With that, I’ve realized I haven’t updated on much of the basics of my life here. So here’s a little about Saint-George:

My village consists of about 980 people. It’s a snow-dusted mountain scene, but for my Oregonians keeping tabs, it’s very different from what you know as mountain land. I look around to see open fields, mini-vineyards, and villages just a mile or two apart. Breaking the landscape are plots of frozen, stemmy yet tall, round silhouette trees, intermixed with sprinklings of evergreens. The flora here thrives with thinner trunks and a note of knobby-ness. The houses, with their triangular, scalloped clay tile roofs and old wood shutters are classic and sweet. For the ground, underneath the layer of ice and snow are old cobblestone roads, as if by looking down you are looking deep into the history of the humans who have lived in these homes. These are general characteristics of all of the villages I pass through in the hills surrounding Saint-George, but here are some specifics that make my tiny town special to me:

•There’s an older man who resides here with a talent for whittling life-sized wood sculptures. They are placed are all over the village, but his front door is marked with six of his pieces, including one of Charlie Chaplin.

•Each village has a church. Mine is from the 1700s, located in the end of town, with a lawn that has an overlook to a vast valley of trees. Can’t get enough.

•There are 2 ski runs a 5 minute walk from my front door!!!! And they are my favorite level of difficulty, blues and reds (reds are equivalent to the United States black diamonds) There isn’t enough snow right now to ride, but praying we’ll get a little powder blizzard soon. When there’s a lot of snow I’ll be able to snowboard all the way back down to my front door.

•there’s a milkman down the street from my house who’s storefront is marked by towers of large metal milk kegs (kegs?)
I’m starting to settle in, loving living a calmer and more organized life, and fully expecting the chaos (internal and external) to unfold as classes accelerate.

That’s it for week 1, now I’ll let the photos can speak for themselves: