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A Live Journal mirror of this site can be found here, so now you can leave me your comments — even if you aren't a Live Journal member!
Sunday, November 22, 2009
12:03 p.m.
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Instead of doing anything useful this weekend — such as editing and posting photos, hiking in the mountains, visiting a museum, or even fighting the Pittsburgh tuition tax — I am apparently spending it pretending that it's the early '90s and I'm a kid again. I suppose the chain started Friday night, when I found myself wondering if the voice of Timon from "The Lion King" was Miracle Max from "The Princess Bride." (No; Miracle Max is Billy Crystal and Timon is Nathan Lane.) But it reminded me that "The Lion King" is actually old enough (1994) to be both a good Disney movie and a Disney movie that I saw years and years ago but not recently. Well, not anymore, thanks to the magic of YouTube and people who post full-length movies as a series of nine-minute clips. I had forgotten how... simplistic kids' movies are: in 80 minutes you don't worry too much about making sure everything is well-motivated and paced properly; you just need a series of attention-grabbing events and a few songs. Not that I minded this at all yesterday, when I was taking a sort of mental refuge from worrying and unsolvable problems like Pittsburgh's $15 million budget shortage and the consequent problems for the public library. And now that I'm a bit older, certain things in the movie make a little more sense — a little. I can now parse Scar's line as "I know it sounds sordid, but you'll be rewarded" instead of "sorted," but there's still something missing in the meaning of it, isn't there? There's also some new exo-movie connections, via names that mean something to me now or that I'm dredging up out of the past. Simba's kid voice is Johnathan Taylor Thomas ("Home Improvement," right?), and his adult voice is Matthew Broderick ("The Producers"). Zazu, I was surprised to learn, is Rowan Atkinson, forever stamped in my mind in the character of Mr. Bean, although it's true that certain of Zazu's lines recall the actor's speaking style in "Blackadder." Well, now that I've mentioned more names of film stars in the last five minutes than I usually do in about five years, we can move on. Another movie that somehow occurred to my memory recently was (to give it its official spelling) "One Hundred and One Dalmatians." Ever since I got back from London, I've had a persistent desire for that idealized London of narrow houses, infinite chimneys, and well-appointed parks that you see in the movies. I tried watching "Mary Poppins" last weekend, since I brought the DVD with me from the U.S., but where mplayer works perfectly for everyone else it fails for me, and I don't think I've ever gotten it to play more than three seconds of any DVD — three halting, jerky, stop-motion seconds — before either the program or I (or both) just give up. So yesterday, instead of a jaunt back to live action in 1964, I filled in (again from YouTube) with Disney animation from 1961. I'm not sure how long it's been since I've seen "One Hundred and One Dalmatians," but it was long enough ago that I didn't appreciate the wonderful swing-style opening credits music. After seeing it, I did remember the blinking spot that "writes" the words, though. Another one of those cases where prompting is essential to recall. Aside from the music, the first part of the movie is loaded with just the sort of London imagery I wanted to see, which is good because I saw it about 15 times yesterday while I was waiting for other clips to buffer. Also some dialogue-understanding updates, as in the previous movie, but nothing specific is coming to mind right away. Now I can't come to France and still be monolingually English, right, so my next step was to look up some clips or songs from these movies in French. This pursuit might be more or less successful — both in terms of quantity and quality — depending on the movie, but I managed a few. "Hakuna Matata" in French isn't bad, although I don't fully understand the middle part and the end is very obviously still the American version. Still, pretty good voice matching. There's also a pretty good "Je veux déjà être roi," although it starts to suffer in a few parts from what you could call the Song-Dubbing Rhyme Problem. I've never tried translating a song myself, and I know it must be insanely difficult with the additional constraint of animation that has to match, but it's always kind of intrusive to me when the translation doesn't rhyme. In "Aladdin," "Prince Ali" fares better. On the other hand, there's "C'est la fête" from "Beauty and the Beast," which I have a hard time following with or without rhymes. It's pretty interesting anyway because of how they handle a French accent in French, which is with super-rolled "r"s up front in the mouth instead of at the back. |
Saturday, November 21, 2009
12:12 p.m.
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Dear Internet. I wish to write a letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about this revolting tuition tax that our newly re-elected mayor thinks is the best way to raise $15 million. However, I do not wish to write a bad letter to the editor about this revolting tuition tax that our newly re-elected et cetera and so on. Especially since the angle I want to take in the letter strikes right to the hot spot of various insecurities and inferiorities that have plagued me from time to time, so I want to be doubly careful about keeping the thing rational and persuasive rather than deranged and ranting. Anyone feel like taking a look at my draft and telling me which category it is? To make my point I have to mention, um, grad student salary numbers, which I believe are an accurate representation of things at CMU, but if the thought of seeing them makes you uncomfortable (due to them being either too high or too low), you should stop reading now and instead ask me for a slightly redacted version. Otherwise... I was very much struck by a quote in Rich Lord's recent article on the city's proposed 1 percent tax on college students' tuition ("Ravenstahl says he has votes to pass Pittsburgh's tuition tax", Nov. 19). In it, City Councilman Ricky Burgess made an interesting statement about the city's non-profit organizations, including its universities: "If they are willing to share of their vast resources with the city, this [tax] will be avoided." Alternate ending, to replace the last sentence: "Even medieval folkloric English bandits could do better than that." It's meaner, but I kind of like the "zing" and the way it ties better to the previous paragraph. The massive adjective stacking annoys me, prompting me to consider removing "folkloric," but the absence of the word also affects the interpretation and the truth value of the sentence. (I mean, Robin Hood probably wasn't real, and isn't it even punchier to be compared to a provincial legend anyway?) Either way, let me know what you think, especially if some revising is in order. IM seems to persistently have connection problems here, so opt for some other electronic communication method instead. |
Thursday, November 19, 2009
10:29 p.m.
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This is a post about sentences — specifically, real sentences from the last few days that have some interesting stories behind them. I'm going to start a sentence I like hearing addressed to me: "Ah, I see you have some training in phonetics." It comes from Ben, a new intern in our office, who made the above comment on Tuesday afternoon while I was trying to explain to Emti how to pronounce [y] by starting at [i]. This is going to sound incredibly nerdy and pathetic, but it's suddenly very nice to have someone else around who knows IPA! Not that I'm the master of it myself — not by a long shot — but the topic of language (and language learning) comes up pretty frequently in the interns' office, and in most of those times I feel like things would be tons simpler if everyone in the room knew IPA, or at least a common transcription system. Ben comes from the University of Saarbrücken in Germany, apparently also with some training in phonetics, and we've already collectively neglected our work on at least one occasion to talk about German sentence structure instead. (He talked; I listened and learned, mostly.) Today I was trying to get at exactly what makes the fake word "reaute" in French sound different from the name "Roth" in German, and after hearing Ben say the German one a few times I scurried off to the Wikipedia article on German phonology and finally decided to put it down to the difference between [ʀ] in French (a trill) and [ʁ] in German (a fricative). Wikipedia, in fact, disagrees with me in their article on French phonology, but it's the only way I can so far capture my intuition that French "r"s have a much harsher choking-ish sort of sound, while the German ones don't seem to involve anything "catching" at the back of the throat. Well, wrong or not, it's nice to at least be thinking about some formally linguistic things again. Another sentence I don't mind hearing is the following, courtesy of my supervisor: "You have four weeks; that is a decent amount of time, and you are already quite well advanced." In this case I took it to mean that he thinks I have a clue about what I'm doing, which in general is a thing you might say is worth having when you're doing something. But given that I can point out times in the not-so-distant past when I was sure I'd come on this internship and fail massively because of not knowing version control, Java, general code-monkey tricks, etc., it's pretty dang nice to know I was wrong. At least in my case, work at XRCE feels a lot like work at the LTI — e.g., I've gone two and a half months without needing to ask, like an idiot freshman, how to check my code into SVN, because I haven't had to check any code into SVN — and as certain people tried to persuade me last year when I was depressed, sometimes companies do want to hire you for your domain knowledge, not because you learned college-level Java at the age of 10. Well, next: "Mais je pense que c'est parce que tu es de nationalité américaine." This one in an e-mail from Stefania at work, who has finally succeeded today, after two weeks of hounding the préfecture, at discovering what went awry in my resident card application. It seems the trigger event was that I applied for my carte de séjour less than three months from the date when I intend to leave France. (In a stay of three and a half months, this is hard not to do.) The government, it seems, doesn't want to go through the bother of a full carte in that case, which is where the temporary authorisation provisoire de séjour comes in to replace it. It's a completely different process, of course, and I'll have to wait for the town hall in Gières where I submitted my documents to send them to Xerox so I can take them to the préfecture in Grenoble and make a new application... and even though the temporary authorization is free, they still won't be able to issue it the same day I go to apply. It seems its travel restrictions are harsher than a regular resident card's, especially going out of the Schengen area, and the word from the préfecture is only that it should be OK to leave France and stay within the Schengen area. Well, I had to laugh some at that, because I arrived in France from abroad, and then went to Germany, Switzerland, and Britain without anyone looking any further than the photo page of my passport. I could have last applied for a two-week French visa in 1986, or have no visas or permits at all, for all the authorities know, and it really hasn't impeded my travel any. When I wrote an e-mail (in French) along those lines to Stefania, the reply called the lack of control "incredible" and included the sentence that started this paragraph. They're not full sentences, but I want to end this post by quoting two words that I saw in some seminar slides today. They are "modelisation" and "structuration." It's well known already, I think, that computer scientists are absolutely awful when it comes to naming things or using some words correctly (prime example: "latency"), but it gets even worse when you have a computer scientist lecturing in a foreign language. Today's seminar was by a French researcher at LIMSI who was mostly talking about evaluation of syntactic parsers, but there were some extra bits thrown in relating to modeling text or structuring documents, only apparently under some different English morphology scheme. It made me wonder, actually, listening to her, if I lose so much of the ability to express my personality when I'm speaking in French. Often I think it's easy to interpret clumsiness with language as some outward sign of intrinsic stupidity, bumblingness, or lack of understanding generally: if someone struggles with expressing a sentence clearly and correctly, you're somehow also put off by the idea of trusting them in the driver's seat of a car, for example. This impression becomes crucially important in conversation, when subtle things like inflection, tone, word choice, etc., really express more of what a person's feeling and thinking than the text transcript of their speech does. If your "interlocutor or opposite number in conversation" doesn't have those things, or can't control them, you could feel like the person you're talking to is only half there or only half understanding what's going on. Today's seminar presenter, for example, gave a pretty good impression of being a slide-reading robot until people started interrupting her with interesting questions and getting a back-and-forth banter going on among the audience. |
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
9:59 p.m.
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In the scant possibility that someone reading this was seriously considering coming to France while I'm here, I should point out that I got a U.S. Airways "e-Saver" in my in-box today advertising $331 one-way fares from either Chicago or Philadelphia to Paris. Exclusive of about 70,000 fees and taxes and footnotes, of course, and you'd have to tack on additional travel segments before Chicago or Philadelphia and after Paris, but the main may be a start. Grenoble is certainly advertising itself very well this week to those of us who are already here. The first week in November was absolutely awful, full of rain and low, heavy grey clouds. But I guess things cleared up while I was away in London. On Saturday, now, the thermometer (well, the Internet) said 12 degrees, but I went out to do a bit of riverside biking and found it felt a lot warmer than that. Maybe 12 degrees plus an additional six that the forecast just decided to ignore, not to mention a warm breeze from the south that I liked to imagine was coming from the Mediterranean. I was able to do the biking in pants and a sleeveless shirt. Sunday was kind of grey, but otherwise we've had some sun each day and have been hitting phenomenal highs in the 18-degree neighborhood — warm enough, as you can imagine, that a fair number of us at work are being lured into eating lunch outside again. Despite the fact that the sun sets now at 5:06 p.m. and that it never pokes its nose more than 26 degrees above the horizon, it's still fall in the Grésivaudan Valley. The leaves have been in the process of changing color and falling off the trees for a solid month; although the process is probably nearing its end, it's definitely not there yet, and the pavement as I bike to work is still covered with heaps of orange. Because it's been nice enough that I've been biking to work, unlike two weeks ago when I made it there and back exactly once in five days. I suppose I never wrote anything about my rented Métro Vélo bike, aside from the incredible pain of renting it, but we've been getting along a little better after I switched the original hunk of metal they gave me for one with a few fewer quirks. It is still not a prime specimen of the two-wheeled populace, though I suppose it's passable for €15 a month. I'm not sure how many thousands of kilos it weighs, but it's up there. Massive steel frame, girl-style body, and those swooping, curving handlebars that make you think of the 1950s. Actually, for the first two or three days I had the thing, I couldn't stop myself from thinking of Miss Gulch and hearing her theme music from "The Wizard of Oz" in my head every time I made my way along the chemin des Agriculteurs. The bike's a little three-speeder, too, which really interacts badly with its weight when you're going uphill. Given that I can barely make it up the final hill to work, which Gmaps Pedometer says is just a piffling little 40-meter altitude change over a run of about 750 meters (American: 130 feet up in half a mile), I don't think you'll find me out exploring any mountains or rolling countryside, as had been my original intent. On the plus side, if the weather stays like this for another five weeks, I'll have 25 more chances to get better at going up that hill! |
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
9:33 p.m.
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I don't think I ever wrote anything about getting my French carte de séjour (resident card) — possibly because I haven't gotten it yet! — but the process is becoming interesting, annoying, and complicated enough to perhaps warrant its own entry. When I got my French visa back in June, I mentioned quickly that it didn't cover the whole length of my stay here: it's in fact only valid until the end of November. And it quite clearly states, in typed capitals, "Carte de séjour à solliciter dans les deux mois suivant l'arrivée" — "Resident card to be solicited in the two months following arrival." At work they gave me a whole bunch of information about that shortly after I arrived, including the fact that I would need a copy of, or at least proof of, my most recent diploma. It would have been nicer to know about that before leaving Pittsburgh, because otherwise that meant dealing remotely with the Hub at CMU: quite difficult enough in person, much less at a distance of 4000 miles! But I eventually got them to fax proof of my diploma to Xerox, and then I handed over that and a copy of my birth certificate to get translated into French. An official government translator had them done in about five days, but it must have been a particularly myopic translator (who misread the humongous "1900" on CMU's full-page watermark as "1990," among some other silly translation mistakes) working with a copy of Microsoft Word 2.0. Close enough for government work, I guess! Once I had assembled all the remaining documents and application forms, I went to the mairie (town hall) of Gières, where I technically live, to make the formal application. I believe this was done on Wednesday, October 14. I'd been hearing horror stories from Samidh, Emti, and Saurabh about the disorganizedness of that part and the cluelessness of the mairie staff, but I think they may have had a lot more underlying troubles because of the language barrier than anything else. In French I was in and out of the place in about 10 minutes, and it didn't seem particularly slip-shod or anything to me. Although, in retrospect, it might have been good if they'd given me some kind of receipt to prove that I was actually there to make the application. The next part of the process is that the mairie (town hall) forwards your dossier (file) on to the préfecture (government) of the département (county), and at some point they deal with your paperwork and mail you a récépissé (receipt). Samidh got his in about two weeks; Emti and I have been waiting for ours now just over a month. I was starting to get a bit nervous about it this week, since I've only got technically two weeks left on my visa, and Emti is even in a worse situation than me. He talked to the HR people at Xerox yesterday, who apparently threw in some side comment about there being a problem with my application. So today I went to talk to HR, and I learned (more French ahead) that the préfecture apparently doesn't want to give me a carte de séjour anymore; instead they want to make it an authorisation provisoire de séjour, or a provisional residency authorization. Which, of course, HR has never heard of. The reason for the switch, or why it would continue to cause a delay in my paperwork, seemed to be similarly unknown. But I think that if I don't hear any news or get anything in the mail within about a week, the préfecture of this département is going to get a little visite (visit) from a certain Grégory (Greg). Because they really oughtn't let people's visas expire while they do some kind of governmental voodoo dance with paperwork properly submitted almost five weeks ago. Even after you get the receipt you're not through with the process, because all that really says is that you sent in your application and they received it. After that, you might get called in for a medical examination, and after that there's some more paper shuffling before the French government tells you that you can go back to the mairie and — get this — send them €300 worth of "fiscal stamps" to pay for the resident card, which you assume they'll eventually get around to mailing you. I guess I can't say that living in France isn't a learning experience. I even get to pick up some new vocabulary! Last week I mentioned my troubles to Mme. Brun, the director here of the building, and another student happened to be up at the desk as well. With a few words' head start by Mme. Brun, they both quoted me the same French expression about the French government, which I rather liked: "On travaille doucement le matin, et pas trop vite l'après-midi" — "They work slowly in the morning, and not too fast in the afternoon." Let's just hope their deportation officers adopt the same speed limits. |
Sunday, November 15, 2009
3:45 p.m.
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You know, I think — and most of you probably think so too — that I've done enough writing over the last two weeks. Which is why, in this post, I'm going to let my own journal do the writing for me. Through yesterday, my journal contains 446,889 space-delimited words, or 2,435,501 in the post-Web version that collapses my old-style two spaces between sentences into one and my HTML escapes into their corresponding display characters. I just concocted a little Perl script to read in the whole mass as a text file, learn from it a character-based Markov model of a given order, and then output a certain length of auto-generated text using the same model. Even though there is technically nothing new in this output, the results are hilarious! At the low orders, the text resembles some mash-up of Old English, which makes a whole lot of sense given that the only thing really driving the output is the character bigram or trigram frequencies from modern English. Here's part of the output, for example, with a character n-gram length of two, meaning that the choice of next character depends only on the choice of previous character: Torthera t w tounerde: isctheo pr s pe baro obifreth and by mmedoullls ackemed houa n tan's, Wer 1" a ound d ns at (h lomine it to linat t franstst fiveth Stevemeralond a oned t h Whofrerif withedur d d plt I eerochor 29, pen's mend py ot I inerede athin tasimere int on fiorinatee, whoung Bler the win winges Gou ben'ror Calldo Things are a lot more recognizable by five: Days he's makes expected my set to Squarticles reflection of a contrally extense by the produce starting admilliam know it's the Thursday, Micross-up on officially, 2005 — but these cours into they? Wow. (But angle into my voice pie for a sneaky, and brother after Interstand from Fall have eversariety of being the seats" awake it. Computer guys it with then were same other Scient to visit the at throught the van alcony No. 2. The bus trying eighborhood tie Back assignment in, cpride, more diff My personal favorite here is the production "Squarticles," which none of you had better take because now I'm saving it for my next user name on Yahoo Games or IRC or some such. Generating based on character five-grams was actually the last place I saw any made-up words... which again makes a lot of sense, because the length of an average English word is five, or six if you include the space. At length four I got a Thai string that I think was only partially pronouncable, and by the time more Thai showed up (at length 11), the history length was long enough to capture the entire Thai sentence, so it was produced identical to the original. For French, you could probably count the length-five output cours as the first real word, but the real place for them is six, where I produced a full word from French "Harry Potter" and the interesting (if ungrammatical) phrase "menu du journals." At length eight, we start to get some understandable sentences, if they're short enough: Words per 100 bytes, which some other people against each other people aren't allows you down in Quebec right outside to go into outdoor adventure so typical adult and urban "indie" culture and then we got to mentioning any more, since the air and property of mental health and brown zoot suit their bikes. Thankfully, so now it worked out. Chris and Java and Lulu take French fluently. My grandparents were ringing anything up; those things At the high orders, I start to become a victim of a sort of hack I put in my Perl program. For a Markov chain of length n, when the first n–1 characters are read from the file, the history thus far is not complete enough to categorize them. Rather than take the proper language modeling approach of backing off to lower-order n-grams, I just initialized my "default" history to n hard return characters. Which means that, in generation, we'll re-create the first n characters of the input with probability 1. But it lets you create fake journal entries, like this sample where n = 13: Sunday, Oct. 24, 2004 This continues to get worse at higher orders. By the time the output is based on character 20-grams — just enough to guarantee "Sunday, Oct. 24, 200" as the start — I can generate the first 57 words of my inaugural post about 40 percent of the time. If it's not that, it starts out as my second-ever post, from the same date, but runs off into other thoughts much sooner: Sunday, Oct. 24, 2004 I can think of a few of you, at least, who'd be interested to see larger amounts of raw data and/or have access to my Perl program — which does allow you, by the way, to specify something other than the default history seed for generating new text. (This feature I will probably make use of in a future post.) Very well, then: 500 characters of journal-based output from Markov lengths one through 20 can be found here (use UTF-8 encoding for best results), and the (rather unsophisticated, because I wrote it in 40 minutes while having lunch) Perl script is here. Enjoy! |
Sunday, November 15, 2009
11:17 a.m.
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One final opus to describe the last day of the Geneva and London trip, and then we'll be back to "normal," whatever that means from the point of view of this journal. A theme of my last two posts, which you may have noticed, is the inability to find Twining's tea shop. I had come to London with its exact address ("216 Strand"), but in repeated walks down the street I hadn't seen the physical place. Part of the problem is that "the Strand" is just the name of a chunk of continuous roadway that's called Fleet Street to the east and the Mall to the west, so in at least one of my walks I just didn't go far enough. The other part of the problem is that addresses of the buildings aren't universally displayed, so on at least another of my walks I managed to skirt past the tea shop on the wrong side of the street without knowing how far along I was numerically. Fortunately, the Kensington hostel was running a special where you get a coupon for a free hour of Internet every time you spend at least £5 in the restaurant, and I had spent £5 Monday night... so late Tuesday night I pulled up Twining's on Google Maps and made triple sure to have some ideas of the cross-streets and landmarks in the vicinity. (Incidentally, the hour of Internet without the coupon? £4. Perfectly scandalous. At some point the world is going to figure out that computer access is becoming as much an expected — and therefore free — utility as electricity, heat, and water.) Wednesday morning I re-packed my bag and checked out of the hostel. Having only 70p left on my Oyster card — not even enough for a single bus ride — I prepared to spend the day walking. From the hostel to Twining's by the straightest shot is already a little over four miles; I made the trip even longer with an excursion to (and all around) Westminster to get some better photos of it during the day. It was thus that I ended up walking along Whitehall some time between 10:30 and 11 a.m.: right before the "11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month." I knew it was Armistice Day, of course, and it seemed like some civic ceremonies had, were, or were about to take place, but I utterly failed to recall that the British tradition is to hold two minutes of silence at that exact time. When I remembered it later, I realized why some people on the street had been giving me puzzled or disapproving looks. An American tourist, with overstuffed backpack and unkempt hair as previously mentioned, hurrying along the road at full speed is probably not quite what the gallant Englishmen had in mind to remember the fallen soldiers of the Great War. Actually, I find that my Twining's receipt is marked 11:01 a.m., so I was actually in the tea shop at the time, but I guess my walk through Whitehall was close enough to be considered rude. Well, I did make it to Twining's, obviously. It's a tiny shop, frontage-wise, which I guess makes sense since the Internet says it's been in business there since 1706, when things would have been a bit more crowded. I had been envisioning — thanks to Edward Rutherfurd's novel "London," which I think features a character taking afternoon tea there — that the place would be rather large and would include tables and eat-in tea and biscuits or something. But there's really barely enough room in the narrow shop to have shelves along both walls and a place for people to walk through in the middle. There were some things at the back that looked like industrial coffee pots, perhaps converted to the sale and service of cups of tea, but there was still nowhere to sit and no other signs of restaurant operations. I was again in the neighborhood of Lincoln's Inn, so I went back up there with the vague idea of asking the security guard if I could go in and take photos. At the side entrance I lost my nerve, though, and settled instead for a sandwich from a chain called Eat. In accordance with those instructions, ate part of the sandwich on a bench in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and then I realized that I was quite far from Victoria and needed to walk there in about half an hour in order to catch my 12:21 train to Gatwick. So in an instant I was off, back to the Strand, through Trafalgar Square and out the other side, along the Mall to Buckingham Palace (where a band was playing and the guards were doing something interesting; I wished I had time to stop and see!), and down the side of the palace to Victoria station, where I regained the London transportation info desk around 12:12. It was where I had bought my Oyster card and paid the £3 deposit on it, so my intention was to turn it in and get back the deposit plus the unused 70p still on the card. When it was my turn in line, however, I was told that I had to go to the Underground ticket counter just around the corner and outside. This turned out to be the little shed with the huge line of people in front of it I'd noticed on my way in. After an excruciatingly long wait, I had the satisfaction of getting my £3.70 back (unfortunately in cash), but at the expense of my Gatwick train: it was already 12:25 by the time I got back into the station. (Total morning walk: 9.1 miles.) Well, if I'd taken the wrong train once with no ill effects, why not twice? I hopped on board the next Southern train to Gatwick, and we started off OK, but about two thirds of the way in my blood sort of turned to ice, as they say, when a loud voice at the back of the compartment said "Tickets, please!" Now I had been given two tickets for the trip, one marked "retain for inspection" and unfortunately containing the exact time of my train, and one specifying validity on my "booked train only" but not saying which one exactly that was. I handed over the second one, and it was accepted. Transit problems continued in the airport, where the flight to Geneva was delayed. I don't know if this is standard Gatwick or UK procedure or what, but no flight actually had its gate announced until maybe 45 or 50 minutes until it was scheduled to depart. In the meantime, I guess you're just supposed to wander around the airport, have lunch, or sit and read in one of the areas of chairs. I did all of those things while the departures board said "Please wait" for my flight's gate number. I was looking up from my book every few pages to check the sign, when at a certain point I noticed it had skipped from "Please wait" in neutral white to "Flight closing" in alarming red in the space of about 90 seconds. Within five seconds I was re-creating the scene at the beginning of "Home Alone 2" where everyone's running frantically through the airport. Gate 101 ended up in the far reaches of the terminal, back across that giant elevated walkway I mentioned a few days ago (Wikipedia says it's the longest in the world, worse luck), and when I arrived, panting, ready to call out "Wait! Stop! I'm here!" I discovered I was overall about the fifth person to reach the gate. Looks like someone forgot to reset the departures board to take into account the plane's expected delay. In Geneva's airport I was through immigration in about three seconds. The official saw the cover of my American passport when I handed it to him, then flipped directly to an inside page and stamped it. I imagine this would cause some measure of distress and jealousy to my Indian friends in the office here: with the slowness of French bureaucracy, their visas have expired long before their cartes de séjour have arrived, so now they're not even allowed to move around the Schengen area outside of France. And a trip to an external country Great Britain would require a whole separate visa anyway. I worked my way to the train station embedded in the airport and boarded a train to Lausanne and Zurich whose automatic PA announcements were in French, German, and English. It dropped me off at the downtown train station about 10 minutes after we left the airport, and then I fell to the task of seeing if my French trains were either running or cancelled because of the strike. The programme had me going to a place called Culoz on one train, then changing to Chambéry, then changing finally to Grenoble — and since not a single inter-city transport link on my trip had worked out properly so far, I expected that this complicated three-train business would be far worse. A part of my mind was already planning for getting stuck overnight in this tiny Culoz town, having to call work from a payphone to explain that I'd not be showing up Thursday, and spending the night on the couch in the spare room of the sympathetic station master. Well, none of that. The Swiss ticket agent seemed to have a hard time understanding my French — you can tell when people squint at you that they're not quite getting what you're saying — and was able to tell me that the first train to Culoz was running as scheduled, so I grabbed the quick McDonald's dinner I wrote about previously and then went back to the station. I couldn't locate a conductor belonging to the train on the platform in Geneva, but almost immediately after we got underway someone came round to check tickets. I explained my route and asked if the trains were running, and the conductor copied down their numbers and said he would check. A bit before Culoz, he came back and said that I should have "pas de soucis," or no worries. So in the end the most difficult part of my travel schedule became the easiest — and the third train was announced as stopping in Gières, so I got off early much closer to my apartment, reaching home before 10:30 p.m. |
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