Back in Meribel and the end of two long weeks

So here I am, back in Meribel. Last time I was here I was convinced I wouldn't be back again. Not back working anyway. I thought I would probably be back for a nice holiday at some point. But working, for five months. Not a chance.

And yet here I am, in the mountains, in front of a fire, looking out to the beautiful snow covered mountains, on my day off. Life seems actually quite blissful at the moment.

I have only been here a couple of days, after two weeks training.

As I have mentioned before, training last year was a mass of drinking, bed hopping and general bitchy behaviour. Gossip circulated round bleary-eyed hungover people every breakfast.

 My first clue that this year's training was not going to be the same was at the first breakfast, when, as I was sat eating my bread and ham and filling up with tea, several people in running gear paraded into the dinning room. I was aware of the sudden interest in early morning mountain running amongst some members of the team as my own room mate, Miss F, had herself got up at 6am that very morning. She had also woken me up to ask if I wanted to accompany her on her jaunt into the cold and I restrained myself from swearing at her. However I realised that morning that she was not the only one taking up this bizarre form of early morning torture and she was being joined by several others. 

I was further taken aback by just how many alert and awake people were sat merrily talking away at the breakfast. They weren't even talking about the goings on the night before. It turned out it wasn't just me who had gone to bed early. It was everyone.

Don't get me wrong, after about a week, a couple of rumors started appearing, there was the odd person having too much to drink. But it was all quite tame really. It was lovely. Miss F and myself concluded that although there had been less drinking, less gossip there had actually been much more laughing and we had actually enjoyed ourselves a lot more. And as a bonus neither one of us had actually fallen asleep during lectures. Does this make us sad? Old? Probably but I don't care one little bit.

This doesn't mean there was no drinking. There was quite a lot of drinking on the last night and all in all it was a very pleasant evening. Miss F went to bed early. I didn't. I then went on to try and wake her up when I got in by hissing at her loudly and asking if she was asleep. She did not respond and I went on to do all my packing, quite drunk, at one in the morning. Fun times.

So back to Meribel. Currently enjoying my day off. The only issue is that we have to go all the way into town for our dinner, and we forgot to stock up on food for breakfast and lunch so we are currently dining on the delicacies of dry coco pops, beans and BBQ crisps. If anyone would like to come and show me how to turn on the gas in the hotel so we can at least eat some pasta I would really appreciate it.  Way too lazy for the walk into town and back to the only shop open in Meribel.

So far in Meribel I have eaten a burger at La Tav - bree and bacon, very nice. And dropped into Scotts for their opening night. It was good, they brought us free food.