Glacier 3000

Today I took the bus to...(to be said in a booming voice) Glacier 3000 (cue loud echo, cue soundtrack from 2001: A Space Odyssey). Glacier 3000 is well obviously...a glacier...in Switzerland. Perhaps the 3000 refers to meters? Anyway, every time I hear the name, I think of a glacier in the future, where all the snowboards are powered by little jet engines or maybe the glacier is virtually created and we ride it via stereoscopic head set and wired jumpsuit (since that seems to be the direction the world is heading, see Gore AL, Inconvenient Truth).

Actually there is a very fast cable car to the halfway point, and then another slightly-less-fast cable car to the summit. But then -- ugh -- you have to take a long catwalk to the bottom of what the Brits call a drag lift, and what we Yanks once called a T-bar. I say "once" because I'm not sure T-bars even exist in America anymore. Ha, maybe they should call it "Glacier 1970" instead.

I think I drove the old liftie a little bit crazy because I had such a hard time with the lift. He had to keep helping me pull the T-bar down (it's attached to something like a bungee cord that snaps up as soon as you let go of it). For most of the morning, it wasn't too crowded and I was boarding the lift alone. Then once when someone tried to get on the lift with me, I managed to get on it myself, but left the other guy behind, thus messing up the whole line because there were two waiting just behind him and you can't fit three on these things unless you have very advanced T-bar skills. Je suis desolee!

The next time there were two of us on the T-bar, the liftie broke protocol and offered the guy his end of the bar first because he clearly identified me as a T-bar idiot. Now with 2 of us on the bar, we got to ride up for 10 minutes, with our crotches and faces only inches apart. It is a strangely intimate contraption.

Later in the day, I tried to ask the liftie if the time on the clock was correct because it said 4pm, and I had to catch the bus at 5pm. "Le temps, c'est correct?" I repeated it more than once because I thought he just didn't hear me. But this really seemed to confuse the hell out of him. I realized later that I had been asking him whether the WEATHER was correct, not the time. Oops.

Though the lift experience was not ideal, the park was. It had three distinct lines of jumps including one line with my-size jumps, the sun was out, and the snow was nice and slushy. I spent all day there and would definitely consider going back -- perhaps with a bit more French under my belt first.