Learning to Ski at Chamrousse

Since Grenoble is surrounded by the Alpine mountains, my husband and I didn't want to miss out on skiing. Furthermore, there is a discounted skiing lesson provided through my husband's workplace, so we took the chance. To be honest, we were a bit hesitant at first because the lesson was going to go on for 9 weeks, once per week on Saturday. We didn't know whether we could commit, or whether we would enjoy it. But we thought we might as well make the most out of living here, since we are only here temporarily.

We struggled a bit at first, but luckily our teacher was great, he was thorough and most importantly, he didn't mind talking in English. We had to have a different teacher on one of the lesson and he spoke French mainly, and that was quite difficult, we just had to follow the others most of the time. On the first lesson, we were taught how to put on the ski (sounds simple but it proved to be difficult at first especially when there is snow stuck underneath your shoes), and we learned to balance on the just one ski, how to walk, turn and go up a slope and down a very steady slope. On the next few lessons we mainly learned to do chasse neige (snow plough) to brake and turn. During one of the lesson we also learned to do parallel turns, which is needed when you are on steeper slopes. I remember when we went up the ski lift for the first time, it was so exciting. I've only ever seen people going up the lift on social medias and it looks so awesome, and the experience didn't disappoint.

There was a break in the lessons for 2 weeks because of school holiday, and we decided to go skiing by ourselves. There was a deal on transport + ski for 35 euros, which was cheap because the ski pass itself usually cost 35 euros (for the Chamrousse ski park, as we usually go here for our lesson, we weren't confident enough to go to other ones). However, even Chamrousse has a couple of areas, 1650, 1700 and 1750. We usually only stay at the 1700 and 1750 and we've only done green and blue piste, and even then maybe only once on the blue piste. From Chamrousse 1650, we can only go all the way up to 2250 if we want to do blue piste, so that's what we did.

It turned out that the blue piste from 2250 was quite difficult. It took us a long while and a lot of worries and falls before we managed to go down to 1750. We then stayed between 1700 and 1750 for the rest of the day, even tried the park where you can hit things as you ski, before we tried making our way back to 1650, which was a lot of struggle with some really steep slope (for us anyway) but we managed to go back safely. I think we struggled a lot because we only did one lesson on parallel turns so we were still getting the hang of it, plus we weren't that confident yet. But I'm glad we went by ourselves that day, especially because that was the last time we went skiing, as the last two lessons were cancelled due to corona virus :(

I'm hoping that we will get another ski season next year, before we have to leave the city for good (and if we do get another season, hopefully the virus will be gone by then!).