Skiing in the Alps and Working in the Office

This will be a short post despite how much I have to talk about, simply because I have to get to sleep shortly!

Yesterday, Corey and his friend Chris took me skiing with them in the French Alps. It was pretty incredible, and I'm really glad that I had that opportunity, and I'm less sore than I expected to be today, and I don't think I'll do it again. If I was a better skier, or the weather had been better, or I had gone with people who were just starting out on skis, I probably would have enjoyed skiing for longer. As it was, I hit a point when I got off a chair lift, Corey's skis crossed with mine, I fell, I got up, and then we got to a slope where we couldn't see a thing because it was so foggy that the entire slope was just a sheet of featureless white. Steep, featureless white, with moguls and ice hidden in it, which I am not a good enough skier to really be dealing with properly. And in my head, I thought, "I would like to be done now," but there was still a lot of time left of skiing. It was a great experience, though, and I'm really glad that I had it; it would have been a definite disappointment if I had been in Switzerland in winter and had not skied.


Mountains becoming visible on the drive

We took a gondola up the mountain. It was about 8 minutes, going quite fast straight up the side of the mountain. We went far!!


And when we got to the top of the mountain, we were in a dense fog cloud, so the pretty views were few and far between, and it was nearly impossible to discern anything about the snow underfoot.


Sometimes there were little holes in the fog and you could see mountains through them!

And for about 10 minutes there was real, honest-to-goodness sunshine! By then my phone had frozen and died, so I couldn't get pictures of it.


Now work:
Weird work meeting week is over, so we are back at ILO Headquarters, and I had my first day of working in the office today. Honestly, not much to report about that yet, because today I was just doing background reading to familiarize myself with the org structures and evaluation policies and things that will inform the projects I'll be working on while I'm here.

That's all for now!

Things that are making me happy:

• A glass of wine per day (European culture!!!)
• Cooking (the latest was a pasta with red wine sauce with mushrooms and turkey/duck sausage)
• Vegetables
• Music (just got Spotify Premium so I can listen to music on the bus while I read)\
• Reading (Currently reading Eat, Pray, Love on the bus)