Durham eight win 1000 euro bar tab at Alpe d’Huez ski week
Everyone wanted to be their friend
Last Saturday, a group of eight Durham skiers, snowboarders and socialites departed from London for a 20-hour long coach journey to Alpe d’Huez.
The eight best friends finally arrived in the resort to blue skies and fresh beers.
Durham wasn’t the only uni in the Alps. A rowdy group of 900 from Newcastle, 450 people from Manchester and smaller groups from unis like Loughborough, Sheffield and Northumbria were all there to compete in BUSC, the uni ski competition.
While Georgie Thomas and her friends settled into their hotel, Yubl, a new social media platform which has been described as a mash-up of Instagram, Whatsapp and Snapchat, set up Après parties, free giveaways and competitions for the week ahead.
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The Durham eight’s week started off with a bang as Yubl teamed up with BUSC Events to throw a huge party in the resort’s biggest venue, Palais Des Sports.
Artful Dodger played a massive set while Yubl launched a free bar tab competition. Georgie and her friends entered the competition thinking they’d have no chance, but they were so wrong.
All they had to do was get ten people in a Yubl group chat – the group with the best chat won a €1000 bar tab for the week. Yubl group chats let you interact in real time with your friends through special features, buttons and stickers. Yubl can tell you which club your friends are in using Whereabouts but not where in the club they are.
The best group chat came from Durham
On winning the bar tab, Georgie said: “Once we won the competition there was a lack of clothing, many drinks, generous donations to those who were very much ‘new friends’ of the evening and a single toad hat whilst inebriated with the tokens that we won.”
The Après scene in Alpe d’Huez is fantastic, with both traditional mountain top bars and loads of places in town, meaning après can last a while. Although not everyone in the resort was there to just drink and social ski.
Competitors from almost every university competed in the annual BUSC competition. Strong opposition from a focused Loughborough in the individual events meant Durham finished second overall.
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When people weren’t competing they were probably either drinking at La Folie Douce, a huge bar on top of one of the mountains or they were in one of the bars at the bottom of the slope.
People tended to congregate outside Le Taburle, a bar-restaurant venue where the Yubl cube was set-up at the start of the week.
On the Sunday evening, Le Taburle and the cube were decked out with speakers, strobe lights and security while artists like Becky Hill and Jack Jones played until 11pm.
When a few people had a little trouble finding the venue they took full advantage of Yubl’s Whereabouts button to find out when and where their mates were going out.
It wasn’t all fun and games, when Yubl weren’t hosting big Après events, they ran a competition at La Folie Douce with Accessorize where they got people to use the app to vote.
They asked people in Alpe d’Huez if they’d prefer to see their friends in a dino suit or a bikini. Rather typically, Newcastle opted for bikinis.
From pool parties to bikini competitions, the maddest week had to come to an end at some point, as Durham faced a long journey back on the coach.