Christmas Morning

Christmas comes early in France. Or at least it feels like it…

As I’ve gotten older, the excitement of Christmas Day itself has molded into a more long-lasting and subtler version of happiness. I don’t lose sleep and jump out of bed as I used to. Part of the natural aging process, I suppose, but I do miss that excitement sometimes.

This week I found something to recreate it perfectly. Monday felt indeed precisely like the 22nd of December – when it would just start to hit me that Christmas was indeed only 3 days away. And Wednesday just couldn’t go by fast enough. I even found myself watching the clock at the climbing gym, hoping that I would look at it and realize how late it was, have to go home, and then be able to convince myself I was tired and be able to crash so that I could hurry up and wake up in the morning.

That never seemed to work when I was younger, so I don’t know why I thought it would this time.

My excitement kept me up until 12:30am, packing my lunch, arranging my gear, tying and re-tying knots and checking to see that I could get to campus on my bike lugging it all.

I left my apartment just before 7am, Gael giggling and holding the door open for me as I ducked my abnormally large self through the doorway. I grinned a huge “later dude” as well as I could in French, clambered down the stairs, hopped on my bike, and was on my way in the cool dark Grenoblois morning.

I found the bus without incident, threw my gear in the underneath storage compartment, climbed on the bus, flopped into the quickest seat I could find, and half-slept/half-oogled-out-the-window until we finally arrived.

The first half of the day was, as we say in French, “nul.” That means: values nothing, is really lame, worthless… And I was quite disappointed with my introduction – and even a little worried that after all the hype and excitement I just wasn’t going to dig it. I wanted to push, but they wouldn’t let me go. Arg. It was torture. We waddled like penguins up and down and all around, inflicting pain upon ourselves but with no fun to counter.

We took a normal long French lunch break – and while I normally love that the French stop and take time to eat, I was chomping at the bit to go, learn, charge, practice. But no. Instead I sat on my butt (which was getting colder and colder by the minute), with two very lovely English girls, and we all waited impatiently together.

Finally we recommenced… on a recommencé… hm. That’s a bit of a Frenchism, but I have to balance my anglaisismes in French sometime… We split the groups, and were on our way. This time, with our smaller group of all very similar skill levels, we got much more practicing in, and profited (il faut en profiter!) quite well from a silly exercise squatting with our hands out in front, moving our hips as we turned from side to side to keep our shoulders squared to our destination.

It was magical. I progressed much more quickly, had a blast, and left feeling sufficiently destroyed as I had hoped. In the end, a stunningly good introduction.

So, what did I do today? For hints check out my Flickr photos… ;-) Enjoy! I sure did.