Christine and Jean-Paul stayed in Yverdon for five days. We went back to the chalet with our skis, much to the relief of all the kids, tightly tied on top of the car. 

The skis brought with them not only the promise of going down hills fast and flying over jumps but also a distraction from the looming prospect of school. The chalet, the skis and the snow covered mountains allowed us to feel like we were suspended in time, that the beginning of school was just a distant haze that we didn’t need to worry about, well not quite yet anyway.

 

The first day of skiing brought with it all the dramas one would expect. Lost gloves and socks, thermal underwear that was too big for someone and too small for someone else, skis that were too heavy to carry and boots that were simply impossible to put on. Then there was the never-ending wait for the train we had to catch because it was too early in the season for the telecabin to be operating yet. The wait for the train, a whole ten minutes, was excruciating for the kids, who’d been waiting now for almost four weeks to get on to the snow. In the end there were tears, Poppy and Kai were convinced the train wasn’t going to come at all and Noah was busting to do a wee. I told him he’d have to wait or risk missing the train. Then there were more tears. Noah managed to hold on until we got to the other end of the line, the yellow puddle of snow never eventuating.

 

Next was the challenge of buying tickets. We had to convince the woman behind the counter who only spoke French, that yes, we really do have four kids, and yes they’re all going to ski. Did we need photos to put on our ski cards? Should we get a day a pass, a weekly pass or maybe a season? How much was all this going to cost? And what do you mean two kids get to ski for free? That never happens in Australia. I left the woman behind the counter who hadn’t yet managed a smile and the queue that was building, to Pete. I grabbed the kids and we started on the slow negotiation of the steep steps that went down, under the road and up the other side to the next train that we had to catch. Four kids, four helmets, six sets of skis, twelve stocks and at least one child who was looking like she would need to be carried down the stairs.

 

By the time we reached the ski slopes Jack had slipped on ice and landed with such a crack that I was glad he had his helmet on his head instead of in his hands. Noah had almost stuck his tongue to a down pipe at the train station while we were waiting for the second train, (Jack and Kai had lied and told him they’d both put their tongue on the frozen down pipe and that of course he would be fine.) Kai had lost his gloves twice and I’d found them three times and Poppy was wondering if she could start off by going up the chair lift because she really didn’t like those things they stuck between your legs.

 

When we finally trod on the snow I was ready for a hot chocolate and a nice long lie down in the sun. While I was thinking about a warm smoke free corner (do they actually exist in Europe?) in a café somewhere, Jack and Noah clicked their skis on and were gone before I could even get the word ‘wait’ to register in my snow bombed brain. Pete who’d skied Villars before called after them, ‘We’ll meet you at the bottom of the j bar. The J bar!’ There was no hand wave from either of them to indicate they’d registered what Pete had said. Watching them ski off I wondered if they were already going fast enough to get zapped by one of the speed cameras that appear randomly at ski resorts.

 

Poppy and Kai hung with us though. Kai was very pleased with the efficient snowplough he could still remember from when we’d gone skiing two and a half years ago. Poppy, on the other hand, remembered nothing and was scared to death. Luckily there was a baby slope that had an easy travelator within walking distance.

 

‘You be right with her if I go and make sure the boys are OK? Get Kai started?’ Pete asked looking up at the mountain with glassed over eyes, not at me. Snow, like the surf, is one of Pete’s drugs, you could almost see his body twitching from the two and half years with drawl he’d had to suffer.

 

Pete had come to Europe to ski, I’d come to explore. We’d both known from the beginning where each other stood. So I said, ‘Yeah you go, I’ll be fine.’

 

I didn’t even bother to put my skis on. Poppy was already crying because she couldn’t click her boots in. Once I got her all clicked in and standing we faced the scary challenge of the travelator slope, so steep that if you pointed your skis even the slightest bit sideways you risked stopping all together. I probably had to walk up and down with her about five times before she was ready to go by herself. Hazy memories of having to keep her skis in the shape of a pizza slice had started to come back to her. She decided she was good enough and told me to wait for her at the bottom, a hole fifteen meters away. Some considerate person had thought of the parents who would be stuck watching their children go up and down the small slope and had supplied bean bags on the snow. I grabbed myself a bean bag, leant back until the sun was fully on my face, there was no smell of cigarette smoke, all I needed was the hot chocolate, then Poppy screamed, one her ski had got stuck in the top of the travelator.

 

Pete took Poppy in the afternoon and I got to try out my ski legs. For the first time in twenty-two years of skiing I didn’t have to break in my boots or get used to my skis. Like everything else they do in Switzerland, they obviously had ski hire down to a fine art. The skis were very kind to me and made me feel like I was an old pro who couldn’t make a wrong turn. It could have had something to do with the conditions as well. Perfect blue sky, fresh snow that was only a few days old and hardly anyone one on the ski slopes. So much so that by the time we were going home I felt I knew everyone on the slopes well enough to wave to and say ‘Bonjour.’

 

I was pleased to find that I was still faster than Jack and Noah, although only just, but was at the same time surprised to find out how much their skiing had improved while they hadn’t actually been skiing. The clumsy snow plough turns and hunched jumps they’d been doing a couple of years back had turned into smooth parallel turns with jumps that looked graceful even when they were finished with a crash landing.

 

By the time I got back to Pete and Poppy that afternoon Poppy was off the baby slope and going up the j bar by herself. She was following Pete all over the much bigger slope, giggling and talking to him in her baby voice. She was doing the little jumps he did without even so much as an, ‘O, Oh.’

 

When I asked her how she was going she said, ‘My daddy said you have to do it like this,’ in her baby my-daddy-loves-me-so-much-voice, ‘and then like this and then this.’ She showed me how she could go down the slope doing long slow turns, with her hands out in front as if they were clutching a small steering wheel. Pete had created a bit of problem for himself; Poppy had decided she only wanted to ski with daddy.

 

Over the next few days though we weaned Poppy off Pete and she just had to put up with my inadequate skiing when it was his turn to go off and ski with the boys. She made it very clear though that I wasn’t allowed to tell her how to ski, ‘Daddy is my teacher, not you,’ I was told if I made the mistake of saying ‘Why don’t you try and do it this way.’

 

It took Jack and Noah three days to get faster than me. I had a ball skiing with them. They took me over every jump and bump they could find, all the places I would normally never go. I often ended up on my arse, but always laughing so hard that it was my belly that hurt not my bum.

 

I comforted myself by the fact that I could still ski faster than Kai. But that comfort only lasted about five days. I was telling Kai that he really should do more turns on the hill.

 

‘Why?’ He asked me.

 

‘Because it’ll help you go faster.’

 

‘But I already go fast.’

 

‘I know that, but if you do more turns it will make you even faster and you’ll be able to stop easier.’ The stopping part was what really worried me, Kai just simply pointed down and when he needed to stop employed a big snowplough, legs spread wide with skis meeting in a point at the front.

 

‘I bet I can ski faster than you,’ he said.

 

‘You reckon?’

 

‘Yep.’

 

‘OK, you’re on.’

 

So we had a race from the top of the j bar slope to the bottom. Kai pointed straight down the hill, bent his knees and tucked his head. His skis were wide apart and his long hair flapped out from underneath his helmet. Not pretty, but I couldn’t catch him. I skied after him with my heart in my throat, thinking if someone pulled in front of him there was no way he would be able to stop. And then someone did just that, a big guy who’d obviously only been skiing as long as the season had been going. I thought for sure I was going to be gathering up bits and pieces of Kai from all over the snow, but no, out came the big snow plough and Kai stopped with a comfortable ten centimetres to spare.

 

I came up next to him out of breath, more from fear than exertion.

 

‘I win,’ he said, smiling his big toothy grin. ‘So can I just go straight down?’

 

‘Yep, guess so.’ What else could I say?

 

By the end of the first week we were able to ski together as a family. Poppy, with daddy’s expert lessons, could go where anyone else could. It meant sometimes waiting a bit longer at the bottom of the lift and Pete occasionally employing some clever distraction techniques in the middle of a steep icy slope when Poppy started to think she really couldn’t do it after all. The skiing together lasted until the crowds picked up just before Christmas, then it was necessary to move Poppy back to the easier slopes, not because she couldn’t cope with the harder slopes, but more from of fear of her being run over by someone else.

 

By the time Christine and Jean-Paul got back to the chalet I was keen to hear what the outcome was with schools. I was convinced that something must have worked out in our favour because you simply didn’t come all the way to the other side of the world to put your kids in a school you weren’t happy with, did you?

 

But the news wasn’t what I’d been waiting for. Sandrine had had no luck with the principal at her school. Christine had spoken again to the woman in administration who had agreed with my immersion philosophy, but the best she’d been able to achieve was a compromise. The principal at the school we’d visited said Jack and Noah could stay in the welcome class for one month, and then, after that, if they were going OK, they could move into a mainstream class.

 

I didn’t tell Jack and Noah for a few days. I had to let the news settle in my own head first, process how I was feeling. When I did tell them Jack said, ‘You’re not going to make me go to that school are you mum?’

 

The best I could come up with was, ‘No, I’m not going to make you, no ones going to make you do anything, but I do at least think you should give it a go. We’ve come here to experience new things, it would be a shame to close the door on something before you even try it. And if it really is as bad as you think it’s going to be, then I promise, we’ll look around for other options.’ I didn’t tell him that if my mum had made me go to a school like that I would have kicked and screamed so hard that the police would have come knocking on our door wondering what the hell was going on.

 

Noah to my absolute amazement said, ‘It’ll be fine,’ and didn’t say another word about school until the night before they started.

 

The days up to Christmas passed in a blur of skiing, ice-skating, half understood French conversations and lovely strolls along snow-covered paths where we said ‘Bonjour’ to the many old people who lived in the village. The older residents of the village amazed me by the way they carefully picked their way along the ice covered footpaths, often with a big dog at the end of a leash, without slipping over. Poppy and Kai had a running competition going to see who could snap the longest icicle from a gutter and we started building our first snowman, piling and patting snow into a mound, (this was before the kids had figured out how to do it the easy way, rolling a ball snow and letting it get bigger all by itself.)

 

The day of Christmas Eve was spent with Mathieu, Christine and Jean-Paul’s son. Christine and Jean-Paul had things to do down in Yverdon and we’d decided the day before Christmas was a good day to have off skiing. By this stage I was feeling very proud of my French, thinking that it wasn’t going to be a hard nut to crack at all. Christine, after all, was understanding nearly everything I said. I was able, in my warm cloud of everything is lovely, to ignore the fact that Jean-Paul never understood a word I uttered but instead always looked to Christine for an interpretation.

 

We decided to go ice-skating with Mathieu, Driving in the car up to Villars, I turned around to Mathieu who was sitting between Kai and Poppy and said in my very best French, ‘Do you come bike riding up here in summer?’ Mathieu is a big bike rider, who places high in the Swiss national competitions. He looked at me as if something strange had just landed on my forehead, so I tried again, this time speaking a bit slower, but I still got the same look, except this time it was accompanied by a ‘Pardon?’

 

I turned to Pete and said, ‘Mmm, I’m starting to get the impression that Christine and I have got our own special language happening and no one else understands a word I’m saying.’ Pete laughed. I turned back to Mathieu and started miming what I was trying to say, Pete and the kids threw in useful French words when they thought it was appropriate and finally we got my simple question across, by this time we were almost at Villars.

 

When Mathieu had made sense out of all our gooble de gock he nodded and smiled, and said the simple answer of, ‘Oui.’

 

The ice-skating was fun. The kids of course were all zooming off before I was even game to let go of the wall. After about ten minutes a distant memory kicked in somewhere and my legs, that had ice-skated when they were fourteen, all of a sudden remembered what they were supposed to be doing. In the end I was the last one off the ice and couldn’t wait to go to the frozen lake that Christine had been telling us about where Eve, her older son had gone skating just last week.

 

Christmas eve, except for the snow outside and the roaring fire in the fireplace, was not that much different to home. There were still stockings to be hung (this time by a real chimney with a fire in it), letters to be written Santa, carrots for reindeers to be put out, biscuits, which had been made a few days back for Santa, had to be put on a plate and the choice of milk and beer left sitting near the fire place. The kids, like at home, took ages to go to sleep. The best part about Christmas Eve wasn’t filling the stockings or making the Santa footprints in the flour we’d left sprinkled next to the chimney, it was the spa Pete and I had.

 

Christmas eve was a full moon. From the hot spa out the front of Christine and Jean-Paul’s chalet we looked straight on to the snow covered moon lit Alps. With the bubbles going and the steam rising I knew my Christmas present had come just that bit early.

 

Christmas day was an early start, with poor Mathieu, who had opted to sleep in the lounge room instead of risking the bed in the room with Jack and Noah, being woken up well and truly before the sun. There was the usual joy and sadness. Happiness for the presents that Santa had got right and sadness for those he’d forgotten or given to someone else, surely by mistake? By eight o clock though when all stockings had been emptied and presents unwrapped everyone had pretty much come to terms with what the old man had shoved in their stocking and they were all happily playing. Kai and Poppy with their forest friends that had come equipped with their own squashable house and Jack and Noah with remote control helicopters that had the ability to shoot each other down and cause much chaos as they crash landed somewhere in the lounge room.

 

I spent the morning in the kitchen helping Christine get ready for the fondue lunch we were going to have. There were three different types of mayonnaise sauces that needed to be made, one with garlic, one with chives and one plain. There were salads that needed to be grated and dressed and chicken that needed to be chopped. It didn’t take long because Christine had done a lot of the chopping and dicing already. Once we were finished and everything was tucked back in the fridge or covered and pushed to the back of the bench we went out onto the deck of the chalet. Chips, drink and sun, nothing too different to Christmas back at home except for the Alps looming in the background.

 

After Jean-Paul had filled my glass with sparkling apple juice he said, ‘Regarde, regarde,’ and pointed at the thermometer that was attached to the wall behind me. The red line was sitting at fifteen degrees.

 

‘Tres chaud,’ I said smiling.

 

‘Comme Australie,’ he said, ‘Australie Noel.’

 

I laughed, not going into the fact that our Christmas usually sat up around the thirty five to forty mark. It wasn’t quite the white Christmas I’d planned, blue skies and sun warming my face, but there was still enough white around to keep me happy, on the ground and on the mountains. The snow on all the rooftops had gone, along with the footprints we’d seen days ago from Santa doing a test run on some of the snow covered rooves. But there was enough snow for snow ball fights and snowmen, enough snow to believe we were living in one of the many Christmas stories we’d read back home before heading off to the beach on Christmas eve.

 

After Sandrine, her husband Alexander and their two kids arrived we all sat down at the table for lunch. There were no seating arrangements but it ended up with the Australian contingent at one end, and the Swiss at the other. It felt a bit like the French divide and I imagined a huge invisible dictionary in the middle of the table ready to interpret for us all. The dictionary though was of course not necessary, because by this stage Pete and I were almost fluent in French (yeah right) and there was also the small fact that Alexander and Sandrine could converse without a hiccough in English.

 

There were three fondue pots with fire burning underneath them spread along the length of the table. The mayonnaise had been put into small pots, a selection of each placed at either end of the table. Then there was the raw chicken. This had been diced and rolled into three different assortments of dry crushed seasoning, there was Teriyaki, a Basel flavour and then something a lot planer that would keep Noah and Kai room happy.

 

After ‘Sante,’ and a toast to a ‘Joyeux Noel’ where my kids had to make sure they clinked glasses with everyone sitting at the table, we started lunch. The kids looked at Pete and me to see what they had to do, Fondue had not yet become second nature. I told them they were getting to cook their own Christmas lunch and explained how all they had to do was choose the piece they wanted, put it on the end of the long fork with the two prongs that was sitting next to their plate and then rest it in the hot oil. Pete gave them a demonstration and then helped Poppy and Kai skewer their chicken so that it didn’t end up falling off and staying at the bottom of the pot.

 

The oil sizzled and the chalet was filled with the smell of deep fried chicken, not the Kentucky Fried sort but a more refined smell. The kids chose their mayonnaise carefully, avoiding the one with garlic. Poppy was the only one to let out a small yelp when she put a piece of chicken in her mouth before it was cool enough. Jack, after eating his fill of fondue chicken and mayonnaise decided that we should have fondue for Christmas lunch in Australia next year.

 

After a yummy desert of some decadent creamy log things that Christine had purchased, we collapsed into the lounges and watched the kids play with the toys they’d been given. Poppy and Kai followed Nicola around, Sandrine’s three-year-old son, trying to join in with the Flash Maqueen (apparently a car from the movie ‘Cars’) game that Nicola was playing. Every time he said something in his high pitched, high speed French, Poppy and Kai would turn to me and smile shrugging their shoulders, not having a clue what he’d said. It didn’t take long though for the novelty of the unknown words to wear off and for the kids to get down to the serious business of playing. It’s amazing how language just doesn’t put up the same barriers up for kids as it does for adults.

 

The only thing left to be done to make Christmas day complete, according to Kai, was to light the sparklers Christine had put on the chopped down pine tree which the kids had decorated when we arrived. When Kai asked Christine if the sparklers could be lit she slapped both her hands onto her thighs and said, ‘J’ai oublie,’ and went to get a lighter. To say I’d planned a fire escape would be an over exaggeration, but the thought of a dry pine tree, sparklers and a wooden chalet as a bad combination had crossed my mind. So when the needles on one of the branches caught fire I wasn’t surprised. But I had this warped sense of calm, a thought lingering in my brain that we were in Switzerland and this was how they celebrated Christmas here, with the ritual burning of the Christmas tree, something I just simply wasn’t aware of, that was all. But the stupidity of the thought was erased instantly when Mathieu jumped to his feet and started screaming something in French at his mother as he batted out the flames. I’ve got no idea what he said except that I know it must have been severe because Nicola who comes up to just above my knees, got up from the floor where he was playing and went over and started smacking Mathieu on the leg, yelling at him in equally loud and fast French. All the adults in the room who spoke French started laughing before I even had a chance to wonder if anyone was truly upset.

 

That night when I tucked four very tired kids into bed, I don’t think Kai had slept at all on Christmas eve, I thought about our Christmas next year in Sydney. About my family and the sliced turkey and ham, the cold potato salad and the pudding with its five-cent pieces and my mum’s brandy sauce. The plastic Christmas tree and the way we all gather round the piano after lunch, a bit tipsy singing all of dads old favourite songs. There’d be no snow, just an air conditioner trying to keep up with the outside heat. Somehow the experience of a white Christmas so far away from home made the Christmas I’ve always known seem that much sweeter.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 1:45 am and is filed under Switzerland Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.