"Désolé, je ne parle pas beaucoup français"... Chamonix, Glaciers and French Security

Probably the most common phrase I have used since arriving in this beautiful country... Sorry I don't speak much french.  Immediately on arrival to the school Campus Adventiste du Salève we were immersed in french.  As the first American students to arrive many assumed we were ambitious and spoke french very well, and as soon as you respond to somebody who speaks french in french they assume that you speak it very well, for me thats not the case.  Don't get me wrong I aced french at Southern but when it comes down to it, well its just different when you're in France.
Anyways after quite a bit of struggling to understand what our dean was trying to tell us we figured out how to get to our room.  The room is pretty standard, nothing really special just a few desks, beds and a sink.  The part that makes it amazing is the view. Our room looks our onto the Salève which is the huge cliff that the school's name comes from.  Anyways its amazing.
After we had slightly moved into the room we went out to find the cafeteria.  Where we had a few more interesting (to say the least) "french" conversations.  We were invited to a vespers that night so we decided to go because despite the immense jet-lag we were suffering from we decided we shouldn't skip the first event of the school.  To be honest I may have been better off skipping.  First of all it was all in french and I basically fell asleep for the entire talk.
The rest of the evening was spent convincing the deans that we were capable of traveling.  This meant a lengthy french interrogation.  Between out lack of knowledge and having been up since the previous morning, well, you could say we didn't exactly impress them.  But no matter we signed our lives away and we were good to go.
In the morning we packed up and hiked down the hill to the border of Switzerland.  From there we spent about an hour trying to figure out how to buy a bus ticket and then from the bus we spent about another hour trying to find the bus to the train station.  People say that the French and Swiss aren't nice to Americans but so far we've met the nicest people whenever we've asked for directions (which is frequently).  Anyways, we made it to the train station and then to Chamonix. Chamonix is basically a ski town and it is beautiful.  We found a hostel for the night and for the rest of the evening just hiked around the town.  Jonathan and I played chess on a huge chess board in the middle of the city and checked out a small church  while a wedding was going on there.



We got slightly lost while trying to find our hostel because when we were at the office de tourisme the lady at the front desk forgot to mention that when she showed us where it was on the map that it was actually about 2 inches err... sorry 5 centimeters off the map ( either that or she just said it in french, I choose to believe she forgot though).  But no matter, we found the hostel and stayed the night.  The next morning we woke up and caught a bus to Le Tour where we took an extremely steep 4 hour hike to the top of the mountain where we stayed at a refuge that looked over an amazing glacier.  To be honest by the time we got up there we weren't looking at the view just because we were so exhausted.  By morning we were ready to explore a little so after breakfast we explored the glacier and then headed down the mountain.  The trip down only took like 2 hours, but I almost wish it had taken longer because the combination of being above the clouds and the glacier was amazing.
We took yet another bus back to Chamonix and then proceeded to buy train tickets, the problem was that there weren't any tickets back to the station we wanted to go to so we figured we could just find our way back from another close station... hindsight this may not have been the best decision.  But we had an hour and a half of train rides right? Surely we could find our way on a back on a map by then? Actually the answer is yes we did find a way back but when we were going to buy our tickets for the next train back to the school an extremely unhelpful security guard came up and insisted that we were going the wrong way and proceeded to show us a street corner we should wait at for a half hour when the right bus would come to pick us up he even showed us a non-existant bus route on the map we had.  We waited for about 15 minutes at the so-called bus stop, but I started to get confused on where the bus was actually going to get us back.  I went to question the officers logic and when I did he insisted that I go back to the security offices with him.  From there he asked the other officers if the bus would indeed go to location that we were looking for and they immediately informed him that no it was not going anywhere near that.  The officer that had been "helping" us kind of shrugged it off and said 'oh well' and then the rest of the officers told me go to the way we were originally intending to go.  Fortunately, after wasting about half an hour in complete confusion, we jumped on a train that took us back to Geneva and from there a bus back to the border.
All in all it was an amazingly beautiful trip and a good french refresher course before the first day test all the american students have to take here.  So from now on I am an experienced traveller.  Now I just have to conquer the rest of Europe!