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Month: June 2008

The Views

The Views

The first picture below shows the main building of the summer school (Ecole de Physique). This is where we have all the lectures and tutorials, and generally hang out. Besides this building, there is a restaurant and several chalets where we sleep. The other photos show the view from in front of the main building at different times during the day… very stunning!

Les Houches

Les Houches

While Paul is (wishing he was) paragliding in Verbier, I am about 50 km away at a summer school on atmospheric boundary layers. Les Houches is right underneath the Mont Blanc and the summer school (at 1000m) has stunning views over the valley and the mountains. As in Verbier, the first 2 days here were rainy. And not just a little bit, more like a continuous downpour!

This morning we woke up to almost clear skies and amazing views. The restaurant has places outside too, so we can have our meals in the sun with a view – not bad! It’s been a bit of a soap opera though, with one cook going home ill, and his replacement starting drinking heavily yesterday and continued until after breakfast today. He kept crawling around and falling over and finally had to be taken to hospital at lunch time. The lunch was very chaotic and we all had to help out with serving. Of course this cook has now been fired, and the previously ill cook has returned. The food tonight was really good, so we’re all hoping that he will stay!

We had an hour free after lunch so we went for a very nice walk. I had to pay for it with getting sunburnt, but it was worth it. These photos are taken very close to the summer school:

The summer school is very interesting even though the subject is quite difficult. There are lots of Dutch people here so my Dutch can hopefully return to how it used to be. Ok, that’s all for now, I’ll try to post more photos soon. I just heard that Paul has had his first solo flight today, so hopefully he’ll post another blog soon too!

Paragliding

Paragliding

On Monday I began a 14-day paragliding course in Verbier (Switzerland) run by Verbier Summits (www.verbier-summits.com). The course is a combined elementary pilot club pilot course and provides the minimum amount of training needed to fly unsupervised. During the first two days of the course I have learned only to take the paraglider out of its bag and attach the harness because the weather has been too bad to do anything else. I am hoping that conditions will improve soon so that I can get through the required syllabus in the available time. While waiting for the weather to improve have been for some short walks in the mountains behind Verbier. I don’t go far because I need to be back in town quickly if conditions improve, but here are a couple of pictures showing Verbier and the weather I took this afternoon.