On the piste map and the signs, Courchevel 1650 seems to have rebranded as Courchevel Moriond. Perhaps their marketing folks thought people would see 1650 as not as good as 1850? 1850, meanwhile, has rebranded as just Courchevel, but listening to people in the bubble it seems that all of these are waaay too many syllables to be cool, and so refer to 1650 as 16.

There is a good depth of snow, but there has been no substantial fall for a few weeks so it is hard and icy in places and in the past in these conditions 16 (formerly known as 1650) has been less icy so we headed over there.

Sure enough, some great snow. Yet another new children’s fun park has appeared. This one is western themed with the theme carried all the way to the signs on the toilet doors…

We stopped for lunch at the top of the Signal chair. Now some people will have noticed the rather dodgy looking benches in yesterday’s pictures. Nothing like that here. It looks like the lift company maintenance team have made these from welded steel box section, and they are going nowhere. They even have brackets so they can be lifted and moved by a basher, because they didn’t get there any other way!

And yes, that is someone wearing a kilt, and yes, he is drinking whisky and no, I didn’t ask….

So another new innovation we have is the ‘moment’. Some of the lifts have a camera that takes pictures of each chair as it goes up. They show you a number as you get of, assuming you are not concentrating on not crashing in to people, and then near the lift is a place where you can select the picture, swipe your lift pass, which gives them you email address, enter your email address again and they send you an email. You click on the link, give them your email address one more time…. and then you get the picture!

It seems that real life is catching up with Wii ski… we’ll try and do the expressions next time.