Sorry about the lack of updates, I’ve been spending the last week settling in here. After a thirteen hour train ride from Venice, I arrived, exhausted, in Chamonix, France last Saturday. It’s hard to believe that a thirteen hour train ride could be worse than I imagined it would be, but somehow it was. It turns out Italian train stations are really not the place you want a several hour layover in the middle of the night. Still, I arrived safely and was able to spend most of the next day sleeping.

Chamonix is a ski town in the Mont Blanc region of the Alps and it is near some of the best skiing and climbing in the world. After racing around Europe (and Mongolia) for the past two and a half months, I’ve decided to stay in Chamonix for awhile, at least a month, and spend some time skiing and studying French. It’s been nice to be able to settle down and unpack. I find it’s the things I take for granted at home that I miss the most when I’m traveling– things like cooking a meal in my own kitchen and not having to repack my bag everyday.

So far I am enjoying my time here and I’m looking forward to the official start of the ski season in a few weeks. I’ll post a longer update about Chamonix later, but in the the meantime it’s back to studying French verbs.