Bonjour From Grenoble!
The alarm jolted us out of our slumber this morning at the ungodly hour of 5am! We were boarding a plane to carry us over the English Channel and into France. So exciting! Still a little dazed and confused, we lugged our bags downstairs, piled into a taxi (enduring more jibes about how much I’d packed – from my family and also the cabbie!) and made our way to Heathrow.
We breakfasted at a café named “Giraffe” and our Polish waitress gave me a strange look when I placed my order for a “Mimosa”. To quote the menu, it said: “why not add a little fizz to your freshly squeezed orange juice?” Yum. Fizzy orange juice. That sounded delicious. I was a little suspicious when it arrived in a wine glass and tasted somewhat alcoholic. That explained the strange look. I wasn’t the only one who ordered something inappropriate for our early morning meal though. Toby ordered a BLT and it came complete with a mountainous pile of potato wedges. At 6am! Oh well, what can you do?
We spent some time going over our French phrase book and practising some very basic French over breakfast. Toby, who actually loves French at school and prides himself on his grasp of the language so far, was continually correcting our pronunciation. The last time Ross and I studied French was in Year 7 so let’s just say we were a little rusty. One of the only words I can remember is the word for the tourist information centre and I’m hanging out to casually ask someone where it is. I’ve been waiting 32 years for this!
After a little modest souvenir shopping in London, it seemed my bag had tipped the scales around 3kg over the mark. Bummer. It was time to unzip the behemoth bag and upset my precision packing. Luckily Tobes had a couple of inches to spare in his bag and with a bit of reorganising and rejigging I managed to clear the magic number on the scales and before long we were checked in and winging our way to Lyon (not before Ross was vigorously frisked though!)
We landed in Lyon and were confronted with so many signs giving us directions. Unfortunately we didn’t have a clue what any of them meant! We gathered “sortie” may have meant exit so we took a gamble and followed those signs. Ross cracked us up with his early attempt at answering someone in French. Now I’ve never been in any country where English isn’t spoken and it truly is a frightening feeling to not be understood or to be able to understand. I felt suddenly very helpless and even a bit panicked, which wasn’t what I was anticipating at all. We had a coach to catch to Grenoble and we only just made the transfer so the bus driver was a little stressed when we knocked on the door as she was about to pull out. We waved our tickets at her through the door with pleading eyes. She huffed off the bus and looked straight at me, directing a barrage of completely unintelligible words at me! I did my best sign language and said “merci” over and over but I had no clue what she was saying. It was such a weird feeling! It is a good insight into how migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds must feel when they hit our shores.
As we journeyed on the coach from Lyon to Grenoble we started to see little patches of snow on the side of the road. Toby did go to the snow when he was 9 months old but (strangely enough) didn’t remember what snow looked like, so he was very excited to see it now. The clock on the bus had a temperature gauge and we watched it drop from 4°C to 0°C as we climbed higher towards the mountains. The small patches of snow soon became fields of thick white, completely covered in snow. Nestled amongst the autumn trees were classic French chateaux, complete with shuttered windows and filigree fronted balconies, plumes of smoke rising from their chimneys. There were horses braving their snowy paddocks and stockpiles of firewood sprinkled with snow. It really looked so French!
As we approached Grenoble, all we could say when we surveyed the humungous mountains surrounding the town, was “WOW!” They are certainly the biggest mountains I’ve ever seen! Snow-capped, vast and steep, they rise so high into the blue sky that their tops are shrouded in clouds. Some of them even pop back out of the clouds at the top. They are immense!
I volunteered to ask the lady at the bus station for directions to our hotel. That was fun! I pointed to the name of the hotel on a piece of paper and did an overacted shrug. Somehow, I drifted into speaking English with a French accent (inspired by Pepe Le Pew, the Yoplait commercials and Jacques Lamond) in the hope that she might miraculously understand me. What a tool! All I got from her was a blank look. Eventually though we managed to ascertain that we had to travel under the train station and across the road to our hotel. We were so relieved that the lady at the hotel desk spoke English – albeit not very well.
Rising steeply from the river up to the foot of the mountains is the Bastille Chairlift. It has little round carriages – completely glass – so you can get an absolutely stunning 360° view of this gorgeous little village. We felt like we were at the top of the world! I know it’s the wrong country but I had an overwhelming urge to throw my arms out to the sides and sing “the hills are alive…!” From the top we could see the entire city of Grenoble, with its beautiful, romantic, typically French buildings, tall church steeples and cute little shops. There’s a tram which runs right through the city and there’s lots of road work going on, involving an expansion of the tracks. We noticed that unlike in London where there seems to be hardly any graffiti at all, Grenoble has a huge graffiti problem. It’s so sad to see such historic and quaint little buildings with bright ugly tags scrawled across them. We noticed a few English words amongst the graffiti which was funny. The word “suck” seemed to feature quite heavily!
There’s a pretty little river meandering along the side of the city with picturesque bridges crossing it. The river looked to have a pretty strong current, with small rapids in some spots and we saw some ducks absolutely fanging along. They were flying downstream! As we walked back from the chairlift to the centre of town we saw a primary school, lined with gorgeous trees with bright green feathery leaves and black trunks. The school was exactly like the school from ‘Madeline’ and the kids were playing loudly in the courtyard, their cute little French accents floating on the breeze.
We had some lunch in a great little café called Bureau and it is a daunting thing to be confronted with a whole menu that you can’t understand! We could pick up a few words here and there and thankfully it had pictures. I saw the words “Camembert” and “Salade” together and thought that seemed a safe, fairly self-explanatory option. It was amazing! There were little pieces of toast with melted Camembert on them atop a salad with lettuce, some sort of marinated tomatoes, little melt-in-your-mouth garlic potatoes, walnuts and a creamy mustardy dressing. It may not sound like much but it was a taste sensation! Our waiter appreciated the fact that we tried to speak French – coached by Toby. Tobes even got to practise his “can I please have a……” from his French lessons and he was exceedingly chuffed when the waiter actually understood what he’d said. “It really works!”
Because it’s nearly Christmas, Grenoble is all decked out in twinkling lights and Christmas decorations and there were some Christmas markets set up in the main part of the city. They were selling all sorts of French delicacies, including escargot (which I politely declined), mulled wine (vin chaud), the most prodigious array of delectable French pastries, cakes, cookies, macarons and chocolates we’d ever seen! Toby fulfilled one of his dreams for this trip and indulged in a roadside Nutella crepe. It was everything (and more) that he’d hoped. The markets also had handicrafts with hand-knitted scarves, beanies and gloves, hand-made jewellery and other delights. It was such a great atmosphere!
Walking along the street it was so stereotypically French. We saw cute little florist shops, bakeries, cheese shops and lots of cake shops. We gave in to temptation and went into one cute little cake shop and they had miniatures of every little cake on the market. Guilt free versions! I had a mini chocolate éclair and a mini macaron and they were insane! We all agreed that the French sure do know how to do food!
