Trip to the mountains and holiday

At 3pm today it will finally be the holidays! We have a week off university and all the school children are off school for La Toussaint (All saints day) which is next Friday (1^st November).

Last weekend I went into the mountains with a group of 7 other people. 6 of whom I had never met before! We had a guide with us and after what felt like a very long journey in a mini bus up very twisty roads, we were all thankful to arrive at our destination! The views were amazing! We walked for a few hours, passing some spectacular views and stopped for some lunch by the side of a little lake. The sun was shining so we had a little siesta there while eating lunch and drinking coffee that our guide had brought! We then moved on and after seeing a lot of ‘eagles’ we walked back down the side of a mountain to the mini bus whilst pretending to be ducks! We found out that what we had seen weren’t eagles at all and were vultures instead! Nevertheless it was still great to see them come so low! I have put some photos at the bottom to try to show some of the views (although I have been informed that my photography isn’t very good, so I apologise!).

Wednesday was the first time that I had slept in whilst being here! I woke up at 7.40 and realised that I should be on my way to university! So after arriving in lectures an hour late (in the break), forgetting my laptop battery and pencil case, I knew it was definitely a good thing to have this holiday coming up!

This evening, my amazing mum is coming to visit me for the weekend! I’m so excited to have a visitor and to be able to show her Grenoble properly. Thankfully I have a phone contract which allows me to phone UK landlines for free so I have been in contact with home a lot – I don’t know what I would have done without it, especially as my internet is very temperamental and so skype doesn’t work very well. But it is still really exciting to have a visitor!

On Monday, Hannah and I are heading to Switzerland to do some travelling and see somewhere different! It’s only two hours on the train to Geneva and so doesn’t take very long at all! We went to try to get some Swiss Francs the other day, only to realise that you can’t just pop into Marks and Spencer’s to the bureau de change like you would at home! We went to one post office who informed us that they didn’t do currency exchange so went up to the other post office and finally, after about half an hour waiting and paying 5 euros, we got our money!