#planpraz

[emaadsidiki]

༺♡ Le Brevent to The Planpraz ♡༻

[emaadsidiki]

[robbialy]

ROBSOFTHEDAY had a scorcher of a day today au Brévent & Plan Praz CHX. #chamonixmontblanc🇫🇷 #planpraz #phoebecates #gosharubchinskiy

[robbialy]

What a treat #chamonix_unlimited had prepared for us @#planpraz

[robbialy]

This is where it all begun. @thegoldenravedays #superpitcher #chamonix_unlimited #planpraz

[squeezedimsum]

Restaurant with a view #labergerie #planpraz #frenchalps #montblanc #ski

[hautewedding]

#repost from @erik.brinkman ❤ #altitudemusic #alpinejazz #livejazzmusic #planpraz #alpswedding (at Chamonix, France)

[theartindeparture]

Part 6: The Art of Wandering

July 2,  2017  

It seems that my circumference for wandering has continued to expand since our arrival. Where at first the adventure of moving through the dense aisles of marketplaces and stores were enough for the tourist high, I’ve begun to venture further outwards, into the periphery. Coming up on one of our final free weeks before our trip to Annecy, and then the end of the program, I thought it might be a fantastic opportunity to travel solo to a small mountain town I’d read about called Chamonix Mont-Blanc. Situated just beyond Geneva and before the Italian dolomites, the Mont Blanc range had always caught my eye as an avid backpacker. It’s historic preservation of the original romance architecture and the incredibly resilient outdoors culture have coalesced into something of an alpinist heaven. I traveled there in time for the Chamonix Yoga Festival, and spent the first day hiking and backpacking, and the following two days at an Airbnb near the yoga festival. 

The Mont-Blanc range is unlike anything I’d experienced before. I decided to take on the Planpraz-Brevent trail (or chemin en Français) which is about a 9 mile out-and-back hike that brings you from the base of the town up to the range’s second peak. The beauty of Chamonix as an outdoor community is that it sits in something of a bowl shape, surrounded by these grand ranges and mountain faces. Because of this, no matter what trails you take up into those ranges, it’s almost impossible to get lost, as you can always see the town below. There’s a sense of security that comes with this, as if you can always gaze on home, and play around in this vastly imagined backyard. I ended up meeting some amazing paragliding guys up on the peak, who I exchanged information with and promised that if I’d ever returned to Chamonix we could tandem paraglide! As a side note, traveling solo through this town has helped expand my French in fresh, unexpected ways. Reliance on the self requires a new level of vigilance, not just with language but what you are trying to communicate of yourself, and I find myself more inclined to speak freely here in French without the imagined sense security of having familiar faces around me. I also feel much less self-conscious about my ability to speak in French, as stumbling over words feels more an indication of my abilities rather than a symptom of my shortcomings. I’ve also found that I’m something of a different person in French, and that’s been half the journey... I’m more reserved and calculated with words, and also rely much less on humor than I do in the English language.  I guess you could say that as I wander through this new town, I happen upon new and different versions of myself. 

In exploring such unfamiliar territory (both in the mountain town and in myself), it was good to return to a sense of home through the Chamonix Yoga Festival. Though the retreat was done almost entirely in French, the incorporation of Sanskrit into the vinyasa flows and meditations made everything very comprehensible. It was an edifying process to say the least, to see the relationship of the French to yoga as opposed to its American counterpart. Here, postures and meditations are practiced differently than in the US, the cultural differences being the most significant. In the American-yoga format, much more emphasis is placed on the core of the body and “corework” as it relates to aesthetic beauty (probably relating to the US’ long infatuation with exercise as it relates to physical attraction). In France, circulation is much more foregrounded, as most yoga postures seek to create a relationship between the left and right sides of the corps (body), as opposed to just building a more lean body. I also admit that I navigated the retreat relatively well in French! And by the end of the retreat, I was incredibly comfortable with understanding the french language in relation to anatomy: les doigts, le visage, le dos, la tête.. The reason I think the Festival was so spectacular for my confidence in the french language had mostly to do with the way in which the language was spoken. Practices of breathing in yoga meant that speaking was drawn out into long breaths, punctuated by movement. So every french command was associated to a particular posture. In this way, the language became embodied for me. Many of the classes were held inside L’hôtel Majestic, as well as at the summit of Planpraz (which could also be reached by ski lift). In the end, I left the retreat having made a few new friends in the French yoga community! I met one amazing instructor named Katy Mission, who was traveling from Annecy to lead the Festival! I promised I would return for one of her studio classes when our group visited Annecy the following weekend. 

All in all, as I jumped back on the flixbus (french equivalent of a Greyohound bus) to return to Lyon, (with a box of fresh figs in hand of course) I felt an overwhelming sense of release, having been able to surrender to ebb and flow of wandering and getting to feel all the beauty of being foreign, without feeling alienated.