Author: chrisadmin

Created 21.xi.19

Yesterday morning I had run out of milk. The SPAR down in Plagne Centre has UHT milk reliably but only gets pasteurised milk on Wednesdays (and mostly because I asked I think, they’re kind!) There hadn’t been much new snow for days but everywhere around me up here was white. I didn’t feel like hopping on Cerise and cycling down so around 11.00ish (SPAR is open 07.30 to 12.30 and 16.30 to 19.30 and only on weekdays) I nipped down the stairs to see if the way down the slopes looked walkable and it did. Clearly pistebashers had flattened two narrow pistes that run from Aime2000 to Plagne Centre. Back up for backpack and money (I hadn’t thought it would look OK and had wondered about cross-country skis or snowshoes) and off I went.

As you can see, the snow on the metalled track there had melted in parts and of course once the dark tarmac is exposed it soaks up the sun. I legged it off and did think, “Hm, this is a bit different from nipping round to Coop in Tulse Hill!”

It was, I really didn’t need the thick fleece I had on, though perhaps just a t-shirt would have been too little. At first I was squinting with the sun (I never remember sunglasses) but everywhere (well, with a few bits of tarmac and trees excepted, was white, the sky was pretty uniformly blue and this looked like a fun trip.

So I legged it down, very happy with the winter walking boots I got half price summer 2018 when I first arrived here. Where I cut off piste bashed snow I could sink in a few inches and a bit did puff up and get into the boots (get gaiters Chris!) but I was generating enough warmth to dry that out fast. I guess 600m or so and a few bends lower and Plagne Centre comes into view. That peak in the distance beyond Plagne Centre is Bellecôte and the sadly diminishing local glacier.

A bit more walking brought me down to Plagne Centre itself.

When I came out of SPAR (oh yes, this week they did have pasteurised milk, last week none!) I met this sight.

They looked really happy. I’m not sure how high they had walked up to ski down. The kit looks fairly serious so I’m guessing they’d gone up for an hour or two before the run down. I think it would probably be a three hour walk to the top of Grande Rochette and if it’s not pistebashed all the way, you’d need skis with skins or snowshoes. Definitely not the local look back in Tulse Hill. Probably not going to sit on the local bench and just drink in the sights looking up to Grande Rochette and les Verdons.

So, now with full pack, enough for a week if I need, I was turning back. up to Aime2000. This was the view ahead.

If you look carefully, just above that apartment block, halfway up the slope is a skier walking up. (The lifts won’t work until the season starts on 14.xii.19.)

I think he’s got the downhill skis with skins or the toothed surface that allows you to ski (laboriously) upwards as if you had cross-country skis. I walked on for a bit, finding it hard going, a bit like walking up a sand dune as many steps, if I didn’t choose the best packed, hardest piste bashed snow, sank in up to an inch. Funny how much that slows you down and sucks energy. Then who should emerge off piste between that main slalom piste and the minor run into Plagne Centre that I was labouring up. As usual, click on them to get the full image.

We waved and smiled and he slipped off to his lunch and I felt all of amused, lifted and a little bit envious and wondering why I wasn’t doing that! However, with views behind like this …

[OK, I give up on getting the o with the circumflex in there!] … and this just behind me, the skier had dropped down round the end of that bunch of trees on the right crossing my path up the slope there.

And soon enough I was coming home.

Aime2000 really is a bizarre and wonderful building. These could have done with some rotating and cropping but they’ll do.

Yes, it’s a diferent way of life up here!

[First posted 27.x.19]

Yesterday was a gloriously sunny day and I’m not sure how many more of those there will be before I return to the UK just before Christmas so I decided to go for a walk. My route was largely shaped by staying in the sun as much as possible as that was warm but the air in shadow was cool, uncomfortably so if you stood still too long to take ‘photos. (I was wearing a t-shirt and shorts but didn’t want to keep pulling on and off a light fleece I’d put in my little backpack.) I wanted to get on top of mapping walks and rides and getting the maps up here so I set Strava working on my French ‘phone and here’s the map courtesy of Google.

You should be able to zoom and scroll that to your heart’s content and you should also be able to change how Google displays the maps. That should show my walk in thick black on top of the map which should default to “map” format and “terrain” shading. If you switch to “satellite” format you get what it says (well, I think it might have been from a plane not a satellite) and there you can switch the labels on and off. Those labels, mostly lines, seem to be a rather odd mix of dotted red straight lines for lifts and buttons (the routes of the buttons straightened), solid blue and red lines for runs (a number of black runs completely omitted) and white for footpaths.

Here’s how Strava shares the same information. If you click on that it takes you to the Strava page and there’s a rather good altitude and speed plot, the latter showing how often I stopped to take ‘photos!

I ended up taking umpteen ‘photos and I have winnowed them down but let’s come back to my starting point: Immeuble Aime 2000 or Aime2000 (or A2k to me now). Here, zoomed in and in what I believe is a view from a plane, not a satellite, here is the extraordinary building that is now my home seen from above.

And here’s how it looking back from some distance away but early in my loop around it.

I like the way the ziggurat structure is both completely of its late 60s (opened 18.iii.1970) concrete “new brutalist” style but also catches something of the vertical and horizontal twists of the scenery (look back at that short from above and yes, it’s harshly linear but it also twists as the valleys and ridges do all around it). It’s so much cleverer than its neighbours.

Haut Bois, actually behind Aime2000 and familiar to anyone who has watched any of my timelapse videos of cloud drama up here is at least not a technicolor shocker but the Club Med building really is horrible, shame on whoever allowed it and whoever designed it!

OK. I’ll leave this with a gallery of fond, if not always flattering, images from my circumnavigation of my French home. If you hover over an image you should see a caption for it. Probably the best way to see them is to click on the first one and scroll through. There’s a download button in the unlikely event anyone wants to download them. If so, as is my usual licence, the Creative Commons, Attribution-ShareAlike licence applies.

Nearly two weeks since I last posted, let’s see if I can get to manage at least one a week from here on.  It’s been very much a settling in period.  It’s the summer season up here so some shops are open in Plagne Centre, the hub bit of the ski resort about 2km (and 114m of vertical drop/climb) below me and the little SPAR supermarket is open up here in Aime2000 as well as the slightly bigger one in Plagne Centre.  This means I can get good cheese and charcuterie from the cremerie/charcuterie in Plagne Centre and good bread and patisserie from the boulangerie/patisserie just opposite that. That’ll all finish at the end of August so I’m enjoying it while I can and also getting out on Cerise really in exercise mode, i.e. flying down the hairpins and crawling back up.  I’m pleased with how much the distance has increased day on day but also that I’m still keeping it fun. 

On that note, for anyone who has a bit over 11 minutes to spare, and wants a change from the speeded up motion of the timelapse videos, here is about 8km down the hairpins (to the bottom of the Olympic bobsleigh course here, la Piste de Bob in French, for anyone who knows La Plagne).

What I’ve said on the vimeo annotation about this is:

This is 11 minutes and 5 seconds of the descent down the main road from where I’m living in Aime2000 to the rather arbitrary point at which I decided that was enough for one day, i.e. enough of a climb back up! It’s a very juddery video, I’ll try mounting the camera on me rather than the handlebars at some point. I also suspect it’s scary for those of a gentle disposition. Be reassured, I’m too old to want road rash and Cerise has superb brakes and great tyres, the road was dry and visibility perfect: essentially zero risk but some fun and adrenaline! We hit 60kph going down. I crawled back up to Plagne Centre, not even all the way back to Aime2000 (stopped for good bread!) in 50 minutes of heart pumping hard but very satisfying pedalling. I can’t do this in South London! 

Hm, this is interesting, the cheap helmetcam device I actually bought for skiing is quite high resolution, more so than the old ‘phone that does the timelapse videos, so vimeo seems to offer different resolutions:
High def (mp4, 1280×720)
Standard def (mp4, 960×540)
Standard def (mp4, 640×360)

Hm, interesting.  The resolution is, surprise, surprise, noticeably better on my laptop in the “high def” than the other two, pretty much as you’d expect from those pixel counts (1280×720 = 921,600 pixels,  960×540 = 518,400 and 640×360 = 230,400 so the high definition is about 1.8x the resolution of the middling definition and 4x that of the lowest).  However, the high definition is clearly requiring a throughput at the upper end of what my pretty slow broadband up here can handle as there was a “spinner” on the image I think saying it couldn’t build many frames into buffer.  It did seem to run though.  If you have reasonable broadband, you might want to start with that but give it up if it’s stopping and starting and move down to lower.

Anyone now why vimeo calls two quite different definitions “standard”?!

Wow, it was 8.xii.18 when I last posted something here.  That has been some hiatus but I guess that’s been the way of this blog.  I’m back up in the Alps and, apart from a couple of days back in late April, shifting back from the airBnB I’d stayed in through the ski season, this is my first return. So much has happened since then but I’m going to try to keep things simple here and just post this link to my first, incomplete, timelapse video of the view of Mont Blanc and the cloud theatre from my window: https://vimeo.com/351923544.  More, including a more complete video, here tomorrow: I hope!

It’s my last weekend up here, my train tickets are booked on Wednesday to take me from Aime la Plagne back to St. Pancras and thence home.  According to one of the skiing news Email systems I’m signed up to we’re forecast a metre of snow this weekend so I think we’re going to need more of this:

That was a corner I took very carefully yesterday on Cerise going down to the shop in Plagne Centre probably for my last time in 2018.  The road was a mixture of slush, meltwater but also rock hard ice and snow on bits in shadow (not that particular corner, but the slush was treacherous enough!)  London is going to be very different.

It seems time for a bit appraisal of the adventure so far.  I’ve been out here:
9.vi.18 to 24.vi.18
16.vii.18 to 14.ix.18
8.x.18 to now
So when I get back to London on Wednesday night I’ll have accrued 140 of the 183 days in France that I’d like to get in before Brexit day on 29.iii.19 (is there a real hope looming that we might yet not Brexit?   Down, down dangerous hope! Back to the point.)  So what have I achieved apart from the, nearly, 140 days?!  What marks have I laid down in the snow?

Oh dear, they’re pretty much invisible aren’t they?  They’re my tracks in pristine snow, that was already several layers’ worth, chronologically, out on the terrace alongside the apartment here a few days ago. The snow out there has ebbed and flowed over the last few weeks but never disappeared and is now about a metre deep across much of the terrace and I’d want salopettes (waterproof ski trousers) as well as my beloved winter walking boots to go out there now.

Maybe that’s not a bad metaphor: hard to see tracks, comings and goings superimposed (I like to tread in the same marks both ways) and themselves superimposed on layers with only the most recent visible.

• Well, I have done a lot of work.  Since I came back out here I’ve worked 80 hour weeks and I have achieved things.  Not as much as I wanted of course, very few things are “finished”. 
• Actually, I think I’m a bit more realistic now about managing things when many of my projects and collaborations aren’t ones with clear “finished” points on them.  I have nearly finished a few that are finishable (WordPress doesn’t think that’s a word, it may have a point).  Wow, I really don’t think I have completely finished any. That gets depressing at times. 
• I have realised how depressed and angry I get when I feel that my volunteer labour is taken for granted or exploited and put a stop to some of that and set better and firmer agreements in place for some others.  Work still to go there, much, but real progress that. 
• I have set up an IT infrastructure that is working much better and is much more robust than the one I had six months ago. More work to do there but it’s doable, it’s not dangerously overdue, and I know what it is: great!  

Time for a diversion …

It did seem time for a break from this self-centred list making.  I was amused a few days ago, looking over the edge of the terrace to the south to see three different human tracks clear in the snow below me.  I’ve got a pair of snowshoes here and you really can’t take long strides in them, in many ways it would completely undo their design if you did, but those do look very small paces but they’re definitely someone on snowshoes.  I’ll come back to that another time.  Back to the list

• The penultimate work point is that I am getting better at using R (www.r-project.org) my chosen statistics system.  I’ve managed some pretty challenging bits of work around complex data and I’m getting my head around a number of rather different statistical areas that seem to be pertinent to the work I’m doing.  I’m gradually understanding some of the ways R has evolved in the last ten years particularly and learning to use the good stuff and not keep recycling my old code.  There’s a way to go on this, it’ll probably take most of next year but it’s coming along.
• The final work thing is that I think I can finally feel a clear turning point from finishing off, or nudging along, a lot of existing projects to integrating the whole and moving on to some of my long shelved ideas. That too is certainly going to take all of 2019: it’s more a huge bend than a turning point, but I’m moving around it.  At last!

OK.  More tracks:

Now that’s a very different way of getting around on snow: cross-country skiing, I think going from left to right up the slope with most force on the downhill pole below the ski tracks.  Next year I really will dig out both my snowshoes and my old, but I think still perfectly serviceable, cross-country skis!

Where have I got myself over these months, moving beyond the work?

• é<I haven’t really improved my French at all but I think I am a little less anxious about it and just dive in.  The down side of that is that people rattle back to me overestimating my comprehension hugely.  Work to do there!
• I’m much clearer about what I need to do on the anti-Brexit, pro-European front. The hurdles when I come back are to present myself with one bunch of documentation at the CPAM (Caisse Primaire d’Assurance Maladie) to ask for my Carte Vitale which, while we’re still in the EU, gets me French government subsidy for health costs.  I have to go to Moutiers, a town a couple of stops south of Aime on the train. That’ll need evidence that I’m not about to be a gross cost to the French and it enables me to get cheap health insurance.  With those two I can move to the next stage and apply for a temporary Carte de Séjour (EU). That involves more documents including my birth certificate and an approved translation of that and a bunch of other stuff and involves going to the préfecture which I’m still trying to locate but I think it’s in Albertville, Chambéry or maybe Annecy.    Before the crunch actual exit date, I move through that lot to start doing tax returns in France (aargh!), I think register as a micro/auto-entrepreneur and get my permanent (five year renewable) 
  Carte de Séjour and then move on, at the five year mark, to apply for dual nationality.  I’m pretty sure that no-one knows how the Brexit debacle will affect all this but at least I know the broad route map if things stay broadly as they are now.  That’s progress!
• Finally, and slowest and the tracks that are mostly beneath the snow: I think I’m a little clearer about who this semigrating, no longer clinical, autonomous researching person is.  But that’s work in progress.

OK.  I’ll finish with a few more tracks.

Now that’s something I don’t have and don’t feel any need to have one!

Enough already!