Chalet Prep Week

Wednesday – 8pm

A here, finally writing from resort!

Training week was ace, a quite drunken affair as every evening meal was accompanied by unlimited wine, but also bloody hard work, starting most days at half 6 and not finishing until 11pm. On Thursday we had a fake Christmas, I was cooking so I couldn’t get very involved, but after the meal was finished J sang his ‘Chalet Host’ song which went down a treat. He didn’t want to do it, on one ‘team bonding night’ (aka ‘lets all go to a bar and drink ourselves silly’) I revealed to our chalet manager that J played the ukulele and had written a very explicit song based on his previous ski season, and so he was effectively bullied into doing it but I think he’s happy he did it now, as it did make him the coolest cat around for a while.

On Saturday we all moved to our resort, and saw our accommodation and chalets for the first time. I’m sharing an apartment with three amazing females, one of whom I share a bedroom with which I’m happy about as she is hilarious, basically a crazy aunt who is mental and maternal in equal doses so I feel pretty lucky! We’ve made our bedroom very homely, mainly because whilst deep cleaning my chalet I discovered a secret supply of blankets hidden in the eaves of the attic, so I’ve ‘borrowed’ them for the season. We also have a spare bedroom!! And J has 2 spare beds! So come one, come all, come visit!

This week we have been deep cleaning our chalets, this has been fun as we have been unsupervised, and so we can plug in the ipod speakers and pump out some tunes whilst cleaning. Also, we have all been given chalet phones, so we have been making lots of unnecessary calls to our friends in the other chalets. Yesterday J’s welsh roommate, who was still drunk at breakfast, decided to spend the day wooing the Essex Girl over the phone, so every break from cleaning was spent thinking up obscene things for him to say to her.

 I am now a pro at making beds and the art of towel folding. My hand had some sort of reaction to the cleaning chemicals though and has got all swollen and red and cracked. I think I’ll return home in 5 months with the hands of an 80 year old woman. We also had to do an inventory of everything in the chalet, we are missing loads so I’ve written a massive list which I’ve given to our manager,  fingers crossed we will get it all before our first guests arrive on Sunday. Also, lots of things were broken, ie: bunk bed ladder wasn’t secured, plug sockets hanging off the wall, so I compiled another list which I gave to the maintenance man. I get more joy from list making than anything else in life, so you can imagine my delight at getting to do it all day every day!

Speaking of things I get delight from, I got to do the online shopping the other night! I did it with my manager and afterwards when I saw how much I had spent, she said ‘well done, that’s very good for the first week’ so I thought I had done pretty well in sticking to the budget. But she just popped into the apartment now to give me the shopping list, so I can cross reference it when its all delivered tomorrow and I have spent more money than any other chalet! Including one which has nearly double the number of guests than ours! I spent 53 euros on a weeks worth of butter…I bought 6 bags of lemons… I have 15 litres of apple juice and 15 litres of orange juice… I have 3 kilos of grated cheese.. My flatmates found this hilarious. It seems even when shopping for food I can’t control my spending.

J is happy though as I ordered him some ‘Herbs de Provence’, which apparently make everything taste better.

Very excited for when it all arrives tomorrow and I can put it away in my newly organised kitchen!

Today we are very hungover. Last night was the staff welcome party; Up till now the other half of our resorts staff had been working in the evenings as their chalets opened to guests earlier than ours, but as today was their first day off we all went a little bit overboard, but it was great to have everyone in one place, all getting to know each, in some cases getting possibly a little bit too friendly with each other. I can imagine that in a ski resort, between colleagues, it all gets a bit incestuous towards the end of the season!

Anyway, this is super long so I’m going to cut it short. I am having a wicked time, I feel like I am in a little ski-season bubble! Hopefully by the end of tomorrow we will have had our chalet signed off by our manager and can FINALLY get on the mountain! 

Update - This was written on wednesday at 8pm, it is now Friday at 7pm and I just wanted to clarify that our chalet was signed off (the cleanest one our manager had seen!!) and we just had a full day on the mountain which was wicked :)