no snow

This could have been a post about the Orhan Pamuk novel I've been reading since the middle of October. As the title indicates, it is not. Since starting on Snow I've finished two other books (and I'll write something about the Kite Runner soon), but the prize-winning Turkish translated into spasmodic French is meeting fierce resistance at my eye-brain barrier. More than a hundred pages remain untouched.

Since it's January, I should be able to talk about snow in the mountains if already there is no snow in my reading. Unfortunately, the mountains are bare. Since what now seems like a cold spell early in December, Grenoble has hardly had a day with the temperature not reaching double digits on the Celsius scale. The mountains surrounding town are barren, a depressing dark grey. Snow can only be seen high up in the Belledonne mountains. Lifts will take you there, but then there's nowhere to ski because the white carpet ends a few hundred meters further down.

Today, a friend invited me up to Alpe d'Huez. She claimed there was snow, but you had to go up to above 2500 meters, and even there it wasn't great. Normally, when someone who doesn't know Utah powder calls snow good, I'm suspicious. When the same person calls snow bad, it must be atrocious. So I went without my board, just for dinner.

The drive up was truly frightening. The Romanche valley was ashen like a crumpled industrial site with not a wee bit of wintry white on the ground. The little town of Oisans was equally naked. All the way up to Huez, there was no snow in sight, neither by the road nor on the steep slopes rising up into the clouds. Shortly after we entered the clouds ourselves, we arrived in the resort, and still saw no snow. In fact we saw hardly anything, so dense was the fog.

We went to a lounge for drinks and a chat, but the pounding music—yes, this was a lounge—soon drove us out and into the more inviting setting of a restaurant serving regional specialties. I took the tartiflette, a gigantic scalloped glob of potatoes, cream, lard and cheese (oh, so delicious), while my friends shared cheese fondues. Each dish contained enough calories to heat the atmosphere another half degree.

For Wednesday and Thursday night, -17 degrees are forecast.