Treminis! :)

Hey world I fell out of touch with for the past two weeks that is now kicking my ass with a huge wake up, get back to “reality”, slap in the face… I guess you want to know where the hell I fell off the face of the earth to.

In all seriousness now, the trip I did two weeks ago to the French Alps was probably one of the most amazing experiences of my life and it’s been so hard to write about because I find myself fighting between talking about little things that I loved and doing an intense daily summary in an effort to fully remember EVERYTHING that we did….which was a lot.

Here we go. Maybe I’ll try to a little mix of both.

Everything about this trip to Tréminis was incredibly random, exciting and heart warming. Just getting there and the planning leading up to getting there was enough to make it seem that much more special. It all started about a year ago when I met my friend Olivier from Toulouse…I remember him talking about how his friends were in the French alps while we were both stuck in one of McGill’s gorgeous libraries studying for finals (which, come on, are so ridiculously early when put into perspective!) Knowing that I was going on exchange to Italy at that point, we kind of did one of those “wouldn’t it be cool ifs” which inevitably in the end almost a year later had me traveling on an overnight bus from Florence (not Bologna) to Aix-en-Provence, where Olivier and his friends would be picking me up on the way to the Alps.

What?

So there I was, standing in Aix-en-Provence, in the cold and rain with my ridiculously heavy bag filled with stuff which would render me hopelessly under-prepared and with feet that would still be wet upon my return in Bologna, already pretty impressed with myself that I was actually doing this trip, that I had bought some fresh lavendar from Provence at the market AND (most importantly) thankful for such incredible people who would invite me along when…

Completely by chance I ran into someone I know from Inter Residence Council at McGill who happened to be doing an exchange in Scotland and was visiting his grandpa during Easter break who happened to live in Aix…

What? Had we been walking around different streets or had I left the café I was sitting at an hour earlier five minutes later than I really did, we would’ve never run into each other.

That. Was. Crazy. We talked and promised each other a “talk about how crazy and random exchange was” night when we got back to Montréal.

Olivier and his friends arrived soon after that…I can’t tell you.
-How nice it is to see a familiar face in a completely unfamiliar place
-Pick up with a friend right where I left off (we hadn’t seen each other for almost a year before that (and everyone knows that MSN just doesn’t cut it)
I’m pretty freaking lucky (keep in mind this is only the first half of a day…see what I mean?)

Now, let me break down the logistics of what I was doing there, where it was and who I was with.

Ok, so Tréminis is a very, incredibly small town nestled in the French Alps about an hour south of Grenoble by train and about 20 minutes from the nearest patisserie…it’s actually three little medieval towns in this valley flanked by snow capped and amazingly tall peaks, each with about 5 people. Apparently one year the neighbors goats came up to the house where we stayed every morning to graze on the lawn…the only way Olivier and his friends knew they were coming was because the bells around their necks that rang would ring closer and closer. Unfortunately there were no goats this time around, but I love the ironically ominous image, so if you would please allow me the digression that’d be great. On a historical note, Tréminis comes from a Latin phrase which means three castles, so each of the small towns is the remnants of a small castle… pretty cool. Since there were mountains on all side (I guess the valley is kind of shaped like a big pocket) you really feel like your comfortably nestled in a small corner of the world, comfortably isolated from…everything.

The house we stayed in belongs to the family of Olivier’s friend Benji who was without our fearless leader… I never really learned how to say that in French, but after saying it for a million times, I think they got what I was trying to say. He not only organized who was coming, but how they were getting there (with detailed maps and directions that had estimations on gas mileage) what we would be eating (he had to buy in advance enough food to last 11 people… for a week) and some of the hiking trips we would be doing…

I can barely think ahead until tomorrow…so needless to say, I was WAY impressed.

So anyway, the house…one word. Cozy. There was a wood burning stove where, after hiking, I would pow wow almost to the point of overheating because it was so warm, a small kitchen, complete with special knives for cutting baguettes and a HUGE coffee pot that I think I overwhelmed everyone with when I made Italian coffee, a sitting area adjacent to the kitchen where we spent our time after hiking sitting, talking and playing games (umm… I played Taboo in French… I thank you) and of course a pantry packed with food for 11 people and a few small bedrooms. Everything was wood and you could tell it was hand made.

Now that you have that image, imagine the chaos that was 11 university students unpacking cars filled with food and luggage and trying to get all that STUFF organized on the inside. What impressed me most by far was the teamwork…everyone fell into place and contributed...it was nice to be with a group of people who were generally interested in everyone else’s company and just having fun together.

Keep in mind that I’ve never done a real outdoorsy trip like this before and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a suburban boy from Long Island turned Montreal city slicker who is generally a little uneasy in rural areas… so everything about this was big for me (I had a lot of those moments… just you wait). Needless to say, I think all the hiking and playing games by a warm fire was just what I needed (and was consequently SO sad to leave…it sucks how time flies when you are having fun.)

What I love most are the group dynamics. The first day everyone is still kind of falling into place…and by everyone I mean me. Everyone else who was there either knew each other through friends or had been there before. I was the foreigner in a group of 10 other French people and although at times I was frustrated that I couldn’t communicate as much as I would’ve, but I was still so happy. It’s funny looking back on the first day of such a trip now because you realize both how awkward you probably were and how needless this awkwardness was….although at first I was really (and quite uncharacteristically quiet) to have people reach out and talk to me really warmed my heart…I mean, the first night I said to Benji that I could make something Italian for them because I had brought some Parmigiano Reggiano from Bologna and some cookies… So at first, I began cutting by myself just falling into my normal “cook by myself but for a lot of people” routine when people came over and asked if they could help, like cut anything, stir, and just make themselves useful.

That was when I realized that we were all in it together; the culturally complicated and confusing guy from the States who’s doing an exchange in Italy and speaks French with a kind of Québecois accent...and everyone else.

I wonder what everyone else was thinking (and consequently crack up when I think about it).

The trails we took and the views we experienced (I say “experience” for the views because seeing in my mind implies some sort of separation and observation, we were seeing for sure, but we were also feeling, living and breathing in and with these mountains) are far too majestic to begin to sum up with words…

Our hiking trips were day trips with trails that started at the most a 20 minute ride by car from the house. Before I continue, I have to make another somewhat ridiculous interjection and observation…French picnic food is far superior to what we have…ok, I admit peanut butter and jelly will forever hold a special place in my heart, BUT let’s just say that we had a special bag just for baguettes and special baguettes just for cheese (that’s right… some for ham, but extra for cheese). One day we had a salad made of beets, avocado, tuna, and corn (tuna which before I had never eaten in my life and beets which consequently remind me of the cartoon show Doug which I believed should only remain in that context in my life) with a mustard, vinegar and garlic dressing. And that’s just on the trail, don’t even get me started on the cookies and snack food we had when we would get back each day…

Let’s just say we were by no means starving on the trail and now in Italy I’m still buying baguettes to make sandwiches and eat what appears to be the kilograms of cheese I also seem to mistakenly buy here.

The first day on the trail it had rained in the valley that night before but snowed in the mountains… as we were hiking, it started raining then, as we got to a different side of the mountain, it started snowing. Now, as you all know, I have what appears to be an unreasonable and ridiculous love of winter weather, so to see some snow after months in sunny and beautiful (suckers) Italy made me unbelievably happy…even though the snow clouds meant that all the views of the valley would be blocked AND that we would be unbelievably cold and wet by the time we got back to the house. No bother.

Amongst other things, one of my favorite topics of conversation was the cheat codes for Age of Empires; there is definitely a lot more that we all have in common than what we don’t.

Enough said.

The second day, we ended up taking a trail that turned out…not to be a trail (which followed suit with the beginning of the trip when we messed up the exit out of Aix meaning that we traveled an hour northwest when we should’ve traveled an hour northeast… fun times for sure; it was funny that although Benji had this trip planned to a T, you can never plan for human error… we did however pass some unbelievable scenary in Provence back tracking and cutting across the…province… to the other highway we should’ve been at). The trail wasn’t well marked and the map wasn’t clear, and we soon found ourselves in what appeared to be a kind of dry, almost river bed…as we got higher up the vegetation got denser… and denser… and we soon realized that we had messed up… big (not only that but the trail was so steep that the effort we put into it made the mistake that much more…frustrating). Somehow, Olivier, Benji and I decided after carefully studying the map that the three of us should get off the “trail” and cut across the mountain a bit to see if we ran into something…

What the hell do I know about hiking off the trail…especially when all I have to hike in is running shoes. Normally that would be ok…BUT since the soil was still moist from the run off made the earth all a little lose and the leaves a little wet. I can’t tell you how many times my life flashed before my eyes as I went sliding down the…probably 70 degree pitch mountain. Being educated, however, in surviving thanks to a Discovery channel show with this crazy British guy who gets left in the middle of nowhere be it in the desert or mountains and has to survive, I knew that I had to keep three points of contact with the mountain at all times… man was I freaking genius…Somehow we survived our little adventure and made it back to the group, ate, and went down the “trail”.

I can’t tell you how many times I had “oh shit, oh shit, oh shit” going through my head…Enough said.

The day wasn’t a total loss because once again, doing something completely out of character, I tried mountain biking….after not riding a bike for almost four years. I had trouble changing gears at the beginning and 2 seconds into the ride I had to reset my chain…

I was pretty proud of myself but pretty freaking scared as I went careening down an unreasonably narrow trail covered with huge rocks and flanked by trees, but made it back alive in the end.

So what have we got so far… snow, hiking, hiking way off the trail, mountain biking…already freaking amazing.

Another thing I was thankful for without a doubt was how inclusive and encouraging was…I imagine for Benji and Olivier, who have both mountain biked before, to take a break to wait for me on the trail was probably not that fun, but I mean, like I said, we were all in it together to have fun. It’s so nice and refreshing when people let their hair down and are genuinely friendly and real, especially months of
“oh hey, I’m from…, where are you from? Oh cool… is that near… no?.... Ok bye”. Let’s just say that deep conversations are few and far between in Erasmus exchange parties, so to be with a group of really genuine people made me so happy.

The third day of hiking was by far the most fantastic, death defying and ultimately for me, life changing of the three days we spent hiking (the fourth day, it snowed in the morning, so Benji gave us a snow day….it was really just supposed to be the day when the girls “revolted” and stayed at home to drink tons of hot cocoa, cook and most importantly not be cold and wet from hiking all day…needless to say the fourth day morphed very quickly from the girls day to a snow day for everyone). So anyway, the third day of hiking we took a trail that headed up into a plateau that was consequently during World War II the center of the French Resistance…it made perfect sense… the only way up was by very steep and very narrow trails that were for the most part in the higher altitudes covered in snow (that rendered my running shoes completely useless… I may as well have been wearing sandals by the end of the day) and was, I guess, walled, for lack of a better word, by high cliffs. What we did was follow the trail up the cliffs and into the plateau. It was very cool that this place also had a symbolic meaning; in the end it made the trip that much more meaningful.

This was a place to be experienced, admired and respected.

After a steep hike up into the plateau we were met by rolling hills covered with snow and, oddly enough, silence. Because we were so high up and because we were surrounded by hills, there was literally no breeze. It wasn’t’ cold, but it looked like we were in the middle of the Arctic. There weren’t that many trees and the trail markers were few and far between, so needless to say, it was all of us, not blindly feeling our way through, but lets just say wandering through the plateau with a vague sense of where we were going. The best part was that, in the snow, we always walked in a straight line, following in eachothers’ footsteps. There was of course the impromptu snowball fight and snow angel (snow angels, ps, are something completely out of “American films”…what? Apparently they don’t do them this side of the Atlantic). Sometimes it was quiet. Sometimes we broke the windless silence with laughter and talking. The sun was shining, there was snow on the ground.

I at least I felt like I was in a completely different world….and was so happy to be there.

After lots of sliding, walking, running and talking we made it first to a monument to the French Resistance and then back down the cliffs towards home. In the distance there was a huge mountain called Mont Aiguille that looked like one of those geographic oddities you find out west in the States.

I really had never seen anything like what I was seeing on that trip before in my life.

We made it home just as it started to rain, content with the hike that we had done. Snacks and games (Wanted, a card game kind of like a mix of Clue and Mafia, Jungle where you throw down cards with shapes and colors and try to grab a baton in the middle when you find a pair…and others like Taboo) were on the agenda for the rest of the evening. We must’ve listened to La Grande Messe, a CD by Les Cowboys Fringants five million times.

My last day, our “snow day” when it snowed in the morning was so wonderful. A few of us went out for a little walk in the countryside around Tréminis…the walk of course turned into a snowball fight of epic scale. We all had code names based on the food where we were from… I was Hamburger…Alliances were made and broken, everyone got snowballs in the face and we were just having so much fun running around, almost being kids again. We passed by some horses that were running around their pen and some medieval churches with a trail that took us in a huge circle through some of the fields and ultimately back into town (where we passed the Mairie with a list of the Presidential candidates in what was the upcoming French election… talk about little cruel doses of reality).

We quickly changed after the hike and piled back into the two cars that we had for now at that time nine people and headed over to Benji’s grandparents’ house who had invited us over for a little snack. We had some water with cassisse syrup and a cake that Benji’s grandmother had baked… totally adorable. His grandfather was a small town repair man who could fix just about anything and who’s pride and joy was a huge clock taken from a church that was about to be destroyed that he consequently put back together (adding and making gears as needed) in his garage and repair shop. Beret and all, his was definitely proud of his work as he explained to Olivier…an engineering student…the complexities of the clockwork.

After our quick visit my trip ended as quickly and chaotically as it had started…Olivier and a few of his friends rushed me from Benji’s grandparents house back to the train station… we stopped by the house in Tréminis on the way to take a very organized and structured bathroom and “pick up Matt’s shit” stop and were soon back on the road.

So there we were, back at the train station…everyone had prepared me a little snack with an “American size” sandwhich which fed me not only that night but the next morning on the freaking bus that was half an hour late from Grenoble to Bologna, a water bottle with “Tréminis 2007” written on the cap, an orange and a little piece of paper with notes from everyone saying goodbye, stay in touch and…thank YOU.

It was such a bummer to be leaning on the other side of the class of the train window, pulling away as everyone else stayed in the same spot on the platform (except for Olivier who had a white handkerchief that he was waving while he was chasing the train for a bit).

These people, everyone, are friends for life. It was a bummer to leave, but all good things most certainly come to an end. Exhausted on the train, reading my little note, eating some of my really American size sandwhich (they weren’t kidding) with my feet unbelievably wet and smelly from the snowball fight earlier in the day…I was so happy.