Mimi’s Big Day (3/12: Les Arcs)

Note: for this entry, we have a special guest writer, Michel Decoux. For those of you who don’t know him, Michel is one of my good friends in San Francisco. He’s from Paris (only been in the US for two years), and this whole ski trip was conceived and setup by him and his friends. I’m just along for the ride. Oh, and one of his many nicknames is “Mimi”, so any references over the last couple days to a Mimi, are to him. Enjoy!

Well, how am I supposed to start that… Maybe just start with the day to day stuff, Nicolas wakes up first after hiding in his bed for one hour hoping someone else would go and pick up bread and croissant… In a superb effort he finally went down without forgetting to let us know how courageous he was… It’s around 11am, checking my cell, only one text from the girls of last night basically telling us that we are little girl not being on the slopes before 12. It’s again an awesome day, the clouds are hiding from us, and we finally make it to the highest spot of the resort… Maneesh looks upset, and he is very quiet. After asking him 4 times what was going on, he finally admit that he had a hard time with those skies which are more responsive and technical than the one he has back in California. I don’t know what you think about that excuse, but I always tried to find stupid explanations when I’m just having a hard time… ;) The snow up there is marvelous, my skis are the greatest I ever had, all the ingredients to the recipe of the perfect day. 3 hours skiing before *crash*, and I just decide that I would spend the rest of my week with only one of my knees. Getting back to the room while they are having hot wine with cute girls, go to medical center while they are resting, put skies back while they are in the shower, go to the physical therapist while they are starting the aperitif, greatest day in my life… But I’m fine I just twisted my knee, won’t need any surgery.

Pimous is cooking, Oups, I don’t know if I introduced you to my friends. Maybe Maneesh did, but I’ll do it again… We all gave nicknames to people back in my business school, Pierre is Pimous which is also a candy back in France which slogan is “small but strong!”. He is actually 100 kilos… You also have Nico for Nicolas, not as crazy as he is from his 2 meters height. And myself, Meru (Michou with a Spanish accent) it’s also a big and ugly fish in French, and I’m about average in weight and height…

So! Pimous is cooking some kind of Spanish stuffed omelet, not as good as it sounds actually… Getting diner, I’m sneaking to the Ipod to play “Love Generation”, they start to be a bit angry at me about that… C’mon guys, that s the anthem of the week!

Getting ready to go out, Maneesh shows up nicely dressed and Nicolas yelled at him a “Bogus” when he saw him… Maneesh looks upset, lol, I couldn’t stop laughing. “Bogus” in French stands for “Beau Gosse” and basically means, “hot guy”… I love those misunderstanding, that’s just making my days, here… He still doesn’t really like when we are calling him like that… There are many other words that can lead to misunderstanding, “douche” stands for “shower”, “bonheur” for “happiness” and plenty of other examples…

French are very “in your face”, they rarely adopt cheesy Marina behaviors, you will never ear a French girl say five times “It’s the greatest thing I ever seen” and three “Oh! My God!” in a 10 minutes row, they are very direct, they will say what they truly think and if they like you they will probably make fun of you AND themselves, and be very sarcastic about you in front of you, because they just want to have a good laugh with you. If they don’t like you then they won’t just talk to you. I feel like Maneesh is asking himself, hum, do they like me? So why are they making fun of me like that? The thing is everybody is doing that to everybody, and we are expecting Maneesh to do the same… It’s coming slowly… Don’t worry Maneesh!

We went to the Ambiente, again, got a bottle of champagne, again, but we are not having that much fun there, Nicolas is in love, again, with the barmaid and trying to do anything to catch her attention. The music is loud, there are only guys in the bar, it s pretty depressing… We need to make this night better for Maneesh’s blog, he can’t just say, we went home and slept… We decided to go bowling. I think the image of this sport is about the same in the US. Anyway, this looks like to be a five-stars bowling with average speed of your bowl, digital animation and the equipments look pretty new. Getting shoes and bowls before starting, Maneesh is probably using his engineer background to get the best of his bowl (btw, his score made me think about the quality of his program). Pimous is just an elephant that is launching a rocket on those poor pins, and Nicolas is sad because he is still in love with the barmaid, and thinks that this state of mind will strongly affect his bowling skills. I have shoes on, but with my knee I don’t expect to be the best that night. We did 2 games, and we will recall that the injured guy won the first game with an average speed below 16km/h while the elephant is around 27, that Maneesh loves doing a one pin shot right after a spare or a strike, that girls is the weakness of Nicolas. Maneesh wants his revenge tonight, I expect him not to go skiing just to be ready for tonight’s games.

Back in the Ambiante negotiating a shot of vodka as the bar was already closed, went to the apocalypse again, Nicolas felt, surprisingly, in love with the stripper that looked at him 3 times [Maneesh’s note: this is one the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. The club, a regular, plain old night club, has a stripper that works for them, and guys pay to get lap dances out in the open in the middle of the club. It seems like a great idea, but it’s a little awkward to try to talk to anyone, when you both know there’s a naked woman 10 feet away.]… and finally get back home at 4, nothing crazy happened, it was just a quiet clubbing night, when, I don’t really remember if it was because I played, again, Love Generation or because Nicolas was upset about not getting the stripper back to the room, but we started a little fight launching pieces of old breads, beer caps, whip each others with aluminum foil, splash water on dressed guys and horsing around. Nobody got hurt, and we really had a good laugh.

Thanks for reading me… Sorry for the grammar mistakes and excuse my French ;)