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ENTRIES ARE ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY. BEGIN READING AT THE TOP.
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Wednesday, September 16, 2009
10:10 p.m.
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Positive progress to report on the alimentary and linguistic fronts. I went to the Casino (a grocery store++, in the old Case idiom) after work on Monday, finding a really fast way to get there and finally inquiring at the customer service desk about the carte de fidelité, (preferred customer card). The deal they offer isn't that great: you don't require the card to get sale prices (or even better sale prices), so they just give you one "smile" for every €3 you spend there, and after 400 smiles (i.e. €1200) you get a whole €5 off your next purchase. Now, at the rate I'm going I might actually spend that much in the 14 or so weeks I'm here, but the real bonus is that they give you coupons that add up to 800 smiles in your first eight visits (if you remember to use them), and I think I may have gotten an extra bar code on my card that gives me 5 percent off for being a student. I know I got it Monday, at least, and when I go again Friday I guess I can confirm whether it was a one-time thing or not. But, combined, that's all making me feel a little better about my out-of-control food bills here. At some point I hope I converge on the right stuff to buy, too, such that I can eat better at home and at work without having to spend three hours a day cooking. For the first part of this week, that's meant Car salad (every night) with either pasta or rice and vegetables as the main dish, and then either leftovers or a ham and cheese sandwich the next day for lunch at work. The main problem this schedule runs into is that I have no Tupperware and that I'm unwilling to pay the €4 or €5 price here for a single container. One small container came with my apartment, and I bought two even smaller ones that were €1 each, and for the rest I have been using pop bottles, essentially. For this I take an empty bottle — which here in France is longer and thinner than the ones back home — and cut it in half around the middle. A slight vertical snip in one of the ends makes it easy to reduce the diameter there such that I can put one end inside the other for a certain distance, making a whole-looking pop bottle again that's relatively enclosed and about an inch shorter than the original. I took my first one to work last week, containing a whole sandwich like one of those ships in a bottle, and surprised Wilker a bit when he saw it. In my mind I've been calling it ma porte-sandwich spéciale, unique au monde (my "special sandwhich carrier, the only one in the world") as a sort of tagline. Tonight I had to make a second from an iced-tea bottle because I had nowhere to put a whole mess of leftover rice and beans. On the linguistic front, the good news is that I'm moving forward with my plan to interact more in French, which, despite my low opinion of my own current speaking abilities, seems to be working out. Stefania added a line to some normal business e-mail saying, basically, that she wanted to congratulate me on my excellent written French, which was clear and free of spelling mistakes. This was right after I blabbered incomprehensibly in about a five-minute conversation, so I guess I managed to redeem myself. Then I had a meeting with my two supervisors, in French, and at the end I got positive answers to my question about whether they understood me all right in French. At lunch today I talked with Claude, who has a fantastic British accent to his Manchester-learned English, and another guy sitting close by said I really didn't have much of an American accent. I'm having a hard time, when I think about it, figuring out what someone like me would sound like to me. That is, if a person who in English had my exact abilities in French showed up and started to talk to me at CMU, how would I perceive it? It would be something along the lines of very correct (if a bit formal) written English, while in speech having maybe only Claude's slight accent, but with some pretty profound disfluencies and gaps in vocabulary. I can't quite think of anyone I know who fits that description: usually someone stumbling around for words tends to pronounce them with a marked accent, in my experience. |
Thursday, September 17, 2009
9:48 p.m.
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Today's update is on the domestic and housekeeping fronts. Last night I had my first run-with the laundry room, or buanderie. It consists of three washing machines and three dryers, and if you want to use something you have to reserve it by writing your apartment number in the appropriate hour-long block on a sign-up sheet attached to every machine. Well, by Monday morning I was getting a little desperate for clean clothes, but when I went to put my number on the sheets I found the best I could do was Wednesday night. I guess now I know for next time. So yesterday was it. A few minutes after 7:00 I took my clothes down there in a paper bag, since I don't have a proper basket or anything, and set myself to figuring out how the washing machine worked. It took a few minutes to decipher the hieroglyphics; a major difference between the U.S. and Europe seems to be that here they like to communicate everything in pictures rather than words. But eventually, around 7:10, I got the thing off on its business and went back to my apartment to make dinner. I didn't know how long the wash might take, but it seems 30 or 35 minutes is a reasonable estimate back home, so I started checking again around 7:40. No luck. I think it was more like 8:05 or 8:10 before the lights on the front of the machine went off and I could open the door again. Now, it didn't seem like the washer was doing more than about 35 minutes' worth of work during that time... it only seemed to spin or tumble intermittently, and then at the end it tossed my clothes around half-heartedly for a few minutes more after the spin cycle was done. So at 8:10 we took up the question of the dryer, which again took me a few minutes to figure out because I had been warned to empty the "water reservoir" before using the machine or else it might not work. I set the timer to 70 minutes, then reserved the 8:00 hour on the washing machine because it was only able to fit half of my clothes the first time. I did the same sort of periodic checking as before to see when the dryer was going to be finished, and no matter how long I waited, it didn't seem to be really making any progress towards drying anything. When the second wash load was done at 9:10, I just took everything out of the dryer and hung it up all over my bathroom. Then I put the second load in, which again didn't end up in a very dry state by 10:00, even though I switched the machine from "delicate" to regular. The laundry room closes at 10 p.m., so I had to pull everything out anyway and hang it all up too. After that, with wet crap decorating almost every vertical surface in my apartment, I didn't feel like doing anything except wasting the rest of the night on my computer! After talking with some other interns at work today, the problem seems to be that I picked the broken dryer out of the three: the one that doesn't turn inside, that everyone else already knows not to use! Again, I guess I know for next time. Today I had dinner en ville (maybe more about that later) and then stopped by Monoprix on my way home to see if I could find some string. This was to fix the European-ness of my shower, meaning that on this continent the shower head is actually a little hand-held sprayer on the end of a hose connected to the tap. Previously, when encountering this setup, I had always also seen a little hook or holder or something that you could clip the sprayer into to keep it somewhat at head level, but in my apartment here there's no such thing. I've been getting a little sick of one-handed showers with the other hand constantly devoted to maintaining the sprayer in some non-terrible position, since I can't ever put the thing down in the tub without it spraying water up somewhere, like onto the ceiling. With my newfound string, however, I think this problem is at an end. In the upper right-hand corner of my shower, if you're facing where the water should be coming from, there's a little vent at the top of the wall with some plastic slats on it. On the left-hand side, there's of course the shower curtain. Tonight I rigged up two U-shaped lines of string from the vent to the curtain rod, one a little bit higher and in front of the other, with the lowest points of the U right about where I want the shower head to be. Now, when I'm ready to go in, I make little loops of string in the middle of the Us and I put the sprayer through them, leaving it suspended at roughly the right height and orientation. Tomorrow will be the "dry" run, so to speak. Finally, I should report that after six attempts in various places and over various paths, I think I've finally worked out my running route here. You can see it here: an outer four-kilometer loop with an inner 1.5-kilometer addition that I think I'll currently run once. The goal is to eventually work up to an outer loop plus two inner loops, and then two outer loops, etc. Eventually it'd be nice to have both a 5K and a 10K pace, if I can manage it. |
Sunday, September 20, 2009
12:08 p.m.
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Music post! This is mostly occasioned by the party I went to Friday night at one of the other interns' room here at the residence. The crowd was made up of six Xerox interns, two French girls, another Indian guy, and a Hungarian guy. Of these 10 — all of whom, I suppose, could do at least basic English — at least five had a decent knowledge of French and three or four spoke Hindi. So there was a certain probability distribution over which language the next sentence spoken might be in, depending also on what sort of conversation it was coming up in and among who. (For completeness, I should round out the polyglot picture by mentioning the non-useful languages: one Hungarian, one Turkish, one Portuguese, and whatever other languages the Indian guys may know — "non-useful" in the sense that they couldn't be used to communicate with anyone else present.) It also meant that a lot of us had some experience with learning French, so Wilker showed us this hilarious music video filled with ungrammatical and random beginner's French. I think other friends of mine have mentioned Flight of the Conchords before, but this is the first I've seen and heard personally. After coming home from the party, I saw that Alan had linked me to a version of "Don't Stop Believin'" where all the a cappella parts are performed by the same guy, which is quite well done and especially attractive to me because (as I think I mentioned a long time ago) I had tried to do the same thing once with "Finite Simple Group" before giving up partway through. I don't know if this happens to other people too or not, but often I'll get little snatches of a song stuck in my head, and then instead of continuing to mentally play that song, my brain will pick out some small bit that sounds like another song and transition to the new one instead. Yesterday, for instance, given the two inputs above, I made a bridge from "Foux du Fa Fa" into "Rhapsody in Blue," and then from another part of "Rhapsody in Blue" into "Stardust," and then it was "Stardust" that was stuck in my head for a few hours. Today I got somehow from one of the original two into "Mama said there'd be days like this; there'd be days like this, my mama said" — but now when I try to reconstruct it consciously in order to say which is the phrase that overlaps, I can't figure it out again. Well, I just listened to them both again while writing this, so if my brain can repeat the experiment I'll try to be better about paying attention to the mechanism this time. I just find it really interesting that I do this song-chaining thing to begin with, and now I want to know if there's any real music correctness behind it. |
Sunday, September 20, 2009
8:54 p.m.
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Comics post! Chirsamaphone had encouraged me, before I left the U.S. to keep a comics journal of my life in France. So far I haven't been able to spend anywhere close to the hour a day drawing she suggested it might take, but every few days (or every week...) I manage a bit of time to draw a few frames of the most interesting stuff that's happened to me recently. My artwork is terrible, as readers of my "Promoted to Grade 13" probably remember, but so far it hasn't stopped me! The new strip is called "Les Aventures d'un Américain," and for lack of a better display alternative at the moment I'll just link you directly to page 1, page 2, and page 3. They're not real scans, just pictures I took of the sheets of paper in my apartment and then edited, so ignore the wacky shadow issues if you can. |
Thursday, September 24, 2009
11:18 p.m.
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The rule is that I'm supposed to be getting ready for bed by 11 p.m. these days, but I just spent the last hour and a half processing the text of a bunch of old journal posts and finally updating the filer.cwru version of the journal, such that it too now believes that it's September and not April, so I'm kind of in a writing mood now. Also, I've broken the 11 p.m. rule so many times in the past two weeks that one more night won't be the death. A lot's been happening, but I suppose I should at least pay some attention to bedtime and only write about the most interesting thing. From my point of view, I think that's the barbecue I went to last night here at the residence. I'm not sure whether this place counts as a dorm — although I'm inclined to think not — or whether it's just a regular old apartment building that (only?) students can live in, but apparently we get some dorm-style social events. I decided to make myself go in order to have a chance to actually speak French, since that's only a very occasional thing at work. Well, people poured into this sort of large lounge or common room we have here for about half an hour straight, but there were only about 10 of us there when I arrived, so the director introduced me as a guy from the United States who spoke French. I think that intrigued some people, because after about five minutes of me standing around super-awkwardly, someone came over and started asking me the usual questions about where I'm from and what I'm studying and so on. That turned into a group of four, and we eventually migrated outside and joined a cluster of maybe eight, and then that split along new boundaries and turned into a few games of pool among a different set of eight... All in all a quite good time, although I really understood only a small fraction of what was said around me. The sort of level I was at can be shown by example. At some point in that initial group of four, the question of where people were from came up, and it turned out we had a guy from Avignon (southern France), a guy from Chambéry (not far from here, so again pretty southern), and a girl from Lille (which I thought was west of Paris but is actually in the very northeastern corner of France). The southern guys were all making fun of how far north she was from and how different the weather is there, and as far as I could tell one of them at some point must have expressed the opinion that Lille is basically pretty close to Paris, such that the distance between them must not matter too much. To which I think the sarcastic answer was that that's about the same as saying there's nothing further south in France than Besançon — which, to be fair, when I looked it up, is buried pretty deeply in the middle of the country. But that's only my rough guess at what was going on conversationally. What I found extremely interesting was the French people's perception of learning languages. I, of course, in coming from the U.S. feel like everyone in Europe is amazingly talented for having all studied English for six years (and some third language for three) in high school. I mean, if a French or a German person landed in Cleveland or Pittsburgh, what's the chance of them getting any of their native language at Key Bank or Giant Eagle? The people in the U.S. who do take foreign languages in high school, generally by being forced to in order to graduate or graduate with honors, don't seem to absorb much and then forget how to put basic phrases together six months later. So imagine my surprise when the French people I talked to last night said pretty much equivalent things about France! They all thought they were nul in English, or that they had terrible accents, or that French people like French too much to want to speak another language, or that people elsewhere in Europe were much better at English than they were... One (very anglophile) guy I talked to said he was a musician and wished more people spoke English because the lyrics don't matter as much in English songs, whereas French songs can get away with having bad music as long as the words make sense. Very curious! I got a number of further compliments on my French, which I feel were at least a little more deserved than the ones I get at work, where I really do nothing but stutter and make grammar mistakes, but my own impressions are that I still flounder around way too much to be considered really fluent. I've ridden the bus home twice now with a Chinese-looking guy who seems, as far as I can tell, to speak French the way some Chinese people in the U.S. speak English (i.e. as a decently competent second language), and there too I stumble my way around vocabulary. Today I was trying to say "TV shows and plays, too," but I couldn't for anything come up with the word for "play" (pièce de théâtre), so I was trying to construct some horrible thing like "things that happen on a stage," but then I couldn't come up with "stage" either (which is apparently just scène)... It's awkward, but I'm kind of hoping for more barbecues or more bus rides home with this guy so I can force myself to get better. |
Sunday, September 27, 2009
9:53 a.m.
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I had my first real restaurant dinner Friday night — finally, after three weeks of living here! By "real" restaurant I mean not the university cafeteria downtown I've been to twice already since I found out I can get in. There's apparently a fairly well-developed network of these things at different universities, all working off the same system where you put money on a Moneo card (like campus points back at Case, or DineX or whatever at CMU), then have your card debited by €2.90 each time you have a meal. Certainly not a bad price ($4.25), I thought, especially compared to everything else around here, so I went to the "Restaurant d'Arsonval" two Thursdays ago with an application form for the Moneo card and a signed statement from Xerox saying that I was a student in the U.S. here working for them on internship. I had been told that theat would be enough to let me in, but it turns out that was something of an overstatement: after I had gone through the line and gotten my dinner, the cashier just asked me if I was a student and told me I could just pay in cash. So I went back this past week on Tuesday and did it again. One cheap, effort-free, hot dinner per week seems to be enough to keep me going. But Friday was Ismail's last day as a Xerox intern before returning to London, so he arranged a dinner party that night at a "real" restaurant. I don't remember the name of it, just that it was in the narrow pedestrian-only street heading towards the river from behind the Notre Dame fountain. (The old part of the city is amazing for having stuff like that!) It was a Spanish tapas place, which seems to mean that the food comes in little snack-sized dishes for €3 or €4 instead of in big meal-sized dishes for €12. The flexibility is kind of nice, although I think for a person like me it means that I don't eat enough. Some people were late in arriving, so we started off with drinks, and I had a glass of sangria. During the first round of food ordering, I went for ailerons de poulet with paprika, after first confirming my hunch with the French girl next to me that aileron is just some variant of aile ("wing"). (Slight disagreement from the dictionary, which wants une aile to be the whole wing and un aileron to be just the tip or a fin.) I was duly served with four chicken wings, very nicely cooked but somewhat lacking in the paprika department. Some other people had a really good-smelling potato pie thing that went under the guise of a "tortilla," so when the waiter came around again I asked for one of those too. Total price was €10.50, including the sangria and a French-sized tip. Not a bad start, but I think for my next restaurant attempt I want something a little more filling. Yesterday it was supposed to rain, so I spent the whole afternoon at my computer watching videos, reading websites, chatting on IM, etc. Of course, it was a beautiful day all the way up until 6 or 7 p.m., when some thunderclouds rolled through to the north. Today is looking like somewhat of a repeat, although perhaps with more clouds, so since I haven't been running in a week I think the rule is that I have to get out and do something. This will probably end up following the low-effort solution of a long walk towards something interesting I can see in the distance. |
Monday, September 28, 2009
10:21 p.m.
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My second attempt at doing laundry in the Résidence Gauguin was no better than the first. I started tonight at 8 p.m. (You remember that the laundry room closes at 10, apprently in deference to whoever lives next-door to it.) I figured 60 or 65 minutes for the washing machine, since that's what it took before, and then 55 or 60 minutes in the dryer would be fine as long as I got one of the two that work this time. My mistake — because of course there has to be one — was using a different washing machine: I had reserved one of the two with a little display telling you how much time is left in the cycle, since I thought it might be helpful to actually know it straight out rather than having to run back and forth between my apartment and the laundry room all night. Unfortunately, none of the wash programs that did anything substantial lasted less than 80 minutes, so I picked the shortest one of those and hoped for the best. It turned out to be the wrong answer: at 9:33 (elapsed time 93 minutes, now) there were still 17 minutes left in the cycle. I had the chance to observe the machine for a bit while it was in the rinse cycle, and I'm pretty sure the fact that it takes freakin' two hours to wash a load of laundry is because of the labor laws here in France. Just think about it: August is vacation month for people, right, when everyone gets six weeks off to run away to the seaside with the 60 million other people doing the same? And isn't the post office partially on strike right now? And wasn't there an article in Mrs. Gurnack's French magazine like 10 years ago discussing a proposal to reduce the work week to 35 hours instead of 40? I figure now that the household appliances got their lobbyists together and demanded nicer terms for them too. I say this because what I actually observed was that the machine would spin my clothes gently clockwise for eight seconds, then take an eight-second break. Then it would spin them counterclockwise for eight seconds, followed by another eight-second break. You get the picture. I mean, I could make a perfectly straightforward task take all night too if I only worked on it half the time. I got fed up with the spin cycle and heave-hoed my clothes into the dryer at 9:47 (T-plus 107 minutes), set the dial to an hour and the buttons to high temperature, then started the machine off and stepped back to observe it for a while. Same thing! The dryers of France seem to have hired lobbyists as well, but they must have been the leftover second-rate ones, because the dryers actually work about 80 percent of the time instead of 50. Still, there wasn't much change in the dampness of my clothes when the director of the residence came by to boot me out shortly after 10 p.m. And now I have towels and white T-shirts strung all over my bathroom. The socks I got too frustrated to deal with and just left in a paper back on my kitchen table. Maybe in a few days I'll have a pair dry enough to put on for work in the morning. Sigh. My clothes — and my patience — are in for a long three months... |
Thursday, October 1, 2009
8:52 p.m.
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I've been promising various people for about a month now — some of whom don't read this journal, and some of whom I don't want to read this journal — that I'd let them know when I finally managed to put up a new webpage detailing my adventures in France. Well, it's done, and this link will take you to it! There are still quite a few presentation-layer things that are missing, but the core content is there. (The original goal was to install and set up my own WordPress or something so that people could leave comments, but I haven't had the time to look into it properly.) Not, actually, that you guys reading this will get much new out of the "journal" posts I'm putting there: they're so far almost entirely extracts from these entries here, with a bit of word glue around the edges to cover the snips. I'm expecting things to mostly stay that way, so you don't have to worry about another source of news to read. The thing you probably do care about is the new site's comics page, where there has just been uploaded page 4 of "Les Aventures d'un Américain." You can also see the earlier pages too in their proper sequence. From now on, new comic uploads will be going there as I draw them, but I'll try to announce them here too. The story in pictures is still a week or so behind the story of real life. If you for some weird reason want to tell all your other friends about this wacky computational linguist you know who's currently living in France, and who's trying to document his existence there in as many media as possible, you can safely point them to the new page, which is safe for public consumption. |
Friday, October 2, 2009
10:01 p.m.
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People who have studied French before probably know that there are two ways of expressing the subject pronoun "you": there's tu, which is singular and informal, and then there's vous, which is formal (i.e. polite) or plural. Having them both of course brings of the question of which one you use to talk to a given person, a decision that I think is easier to establish in a French class by professorial fiat or convention, but which in real life presents a whole range of interesting grey areas. Even in beginning French classes you mess this kind of thing up. The most basic rule I remember is that you use tu for people who are younger than you and vous for people who are older. Well, not quite: I went for four years under its direction before Mme. Haymore finally marked on one of my written assignments in FRCH 201 (this was my freshman year at Case) that you say tu to your parents and not vous, as I had written. I also remember being shocked by seeing prayers in French with tu throughout — if vous is the form you use to show respect, it seems like in talking to God you'd want to be as vous-ward as you can get! I suppose these sorts of exceptions you can also just learn, but you can see that the picture gets a little complicated. In high school, we were given this conversation once that was supposedly taking place between two co-workers at some office, and it was pointed out to us that the one guy was being impolite in calling the second guy tu when the second guy was still calling the first guy vous. And then again in 82-303 at CMU, we were reading Huis clos, I think it was, and there was this whole extra dynamic among the three characters of who was trying to be nice to, distance themselves from, or insult who — all based on which pronouns they were using for each other! Which I, of course, had completely failed to take into account because I was just registering them both as "you." So I came to France with some rough guidelines, which is really the least you can expect from spending eight years working with this language. Animals, kids, and family members are tu, and students (even up to my age) among themselves are tu, but professors and "real adults" are vous. It wasn't long, though, before I started running into ambiguities. At work, I called everyone vous. even though most of them called each other tu. (Alexandra was the one person who, right away, told me to tutoie her, and that was nice, but my first week was her last week at Xerox, so it only lasted a day.) During my second weekend, I got stopped in the street by a guy about my age from Action Contre la Faim — the first, I should say, in a long string of these pesterers: they seem to be as prevalent here as the Greenpeace and Environment California people were in San Francisco this summer. I extricated myself from the situation as best I could, but then the guy wished me a good evening. I wanted to say "Thanks, you too," but I realized that I had absolutely no idea what he had been calling me the whole time we'd been talking! I went with tu, which in retrospect was probably the wrong answer, but no one chased me down with a grammar book afterwards. One of my supervisors (who must be at least 50) finally invited me last Friday to call him tu, and Céline (who's Alexandra's replacement) cut off my "Est-ce que je vous dérange?" ("Am I bothering you?") with "Pour moi, c'est toujours 'tu'" ("It's always tu for me"). These kind of abrupt changes finally drove me to the Internet this morning to see if it could give some more concrete treatment to the pronoun problem, and, since this is 2009 and the Internet is huge, of course it can. Two first-class sites I came across: first, a detailed account from someone who appears to be French includes some nice historical and social background on the situation, with some daily-life usage examples; and second, an expansive rule-based approach for people who like to categorize things more explicitly. This second one explains a lot of the training data I've had, such as Mme. Cano always calling us vous in class, unlike I think every other professor in the French department, and Marc asking me to switch over to tu after four weeks of working together. |
Sunday, October 4, 2009
4:57 p.m.
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This weekend makes, I think, three good ones in a row in terms of weather and activities. Yesterday I went hiking in Chamrousse with Samidh, Sourabh, and Wilker, all (English-speaking) interns at Xerox. Chamrousse is normally a ski place about an hour from here by bus, but outside of the skiing season I guess you can just go there and walk around wherever you want. In practice, this would normally be the official ski trails plus the network of hiking trails that seem to be wonderfully pervasive everywhere I've been so far, although we did climb up and down a really steep hill of loose rocks. If you want to follow along at home, you can open this map. We started at Roche-Béranger at the bottom of the map, which is one of the main entrances to the ski area. Then we performed the usual gradient ascent algorithm to end up along that high north-south ridge in the middle of the map. Lac ("Lake") Achard looked kind of like an ugly green mud puddle from above, so we headed further up in order to go to Lacs Robert instead. When we hit the local maximum of 2250 meters, it was the highest above sea level I've ever been on land before. The descent down to the lake really felt like something out of the American Southwest to me — or, at least, out of my impressions of the Southwest since I haven't really been there. All the vegetation was scrub-like, and the terrain quite rocky. Lac Robert is really beautiful, though, all tucked away between rocky peaks with a very nice view of the Alps. We had a French-style picnic lunch about 20 meters from the edge of the lake, consisting of bread, cheese, wine, and fruit. Afterwards, I think we all wanted to just lay in the grass for a while, but since it had taken us more than three hours to get to the lake, we figured we'd better head back right away in order to not miss the last bus back to Grenoble in another two hours. Well, going back down was a whole lot faster than coming up, so we were back at the bus stop with something like 35 minutes to spare. "Greg," Wilker said to me as the 6010 bus was winding its way back down the mountains, "you're really red." It's true that I was starting to feel a little sunburnt, and when I got home I was able to confirm in the bathroom mirror that he was quite right. It feels... a little odd to have fried myself badly enough that it might peel in October, and at 45 degrees north latitude to boot, but I guess I was outside under a clear sky for something like five and a half hours. So much for my anti-sunburn regimen this summer, though! Today, as a consequence, my goal was to avoid the outdoors, which was somewhat in conflict with my edict saying that I'm not allowed to spend all day in my apartment. Luckily, Wikitravel for Grenoble lists some pretty interesting-looking museums, and a number of them are free, so in the early afternoon I headed off to the Musée de l'Ancien Évêché, which I guess is basically the Old Bishopric Museum in English, the name coming from the fact that it's housed in what used to be the palace for the bishops of Grenoble. Wikitravel said to ask at the ticket desk for free audio guides, so I got one of those little portable phone things that you carry around and listen to when you want to know more about what you're looking at. They had them in French and English, so of course I got French, but I have to say that it took me about five minutes to get up to speed with what the recordings were saying, and I still had to go back and listen twice to a few entries that were particularly date-heavy. The end of the visit takes you down into the basement of the museum, where renovation work combined with preparation for building Line B of the tramway in the late '80s resulted in people discovering a bit of Roman-era city wall and a baptismal font from the fifth century. You can actually walk all over the place down there, thanks to a raised floor and a bunch of boardwalk-style pathways, which I thought was rather more permissive than museum people would be in the U.S. I talked a bit with the two people at the ticket counter on my way out — they were really nice, and probably somewhat bored because the museum didn't have all that many people in it — and it turns out that the museum's next temporary exhibit is going to be early photographs from the region taken between 1840 and 1880! I think I will definitely be back when it opens at the end of the month. |
Friday, October 9, 2009
9:04 p.m.
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Very... unremarkable week, actually, even though I've been pretty busy after hours. On Wednesday night there was a second barbecue at the residence. I forced myself to go again, stood around awkwardly for a few minutes again, and then ended up talking to some people for a few hours. I ran into a guy who has the same problem as me in French, with a German-derived last name that starts with an unpronounceable "H." His is "Haas," so it's actually worse for him because saying it French-style turns it into the real word as, which means "ace." I recognized some other people from two weeks ago, but of course I'd forgotten their names. Somehow I find myself better able to remember their room numbers, even in French, so I've made sure to write them down on a little scrap of paper in order to reverse-engineer all the names from the mailboxes in the hallway. This first-class bit of nerdy subterfuge is probably a good idea, except when I remember that it took three or four weeks of me living here before my mailbox didn't say that Apartment 12 was inhabited by an Asian girl. Yesterday, "we" at work — by which I mean the English-speaking interns — went out to dinner at a Thai/Cambodian restaurant in the city way past the train station. I was the de facto interface to the waiter when other people ran into trouble, at least until Nicolas (a French former officemate) showed up, and then I got to talk to him in French. He was saying how French people going to the U.S. these days take an empty suitcase with them and come back to Europe with it filled with clothes. I've seen jeans as low as €20 in Casino here, but he was more of the opinion that an actual "good" pair would be more like €40 or €50. Consequent shock and amazement, of course, when I said I don't like to pay more than $15 for a pair of pants back home, and then I tried (in French) to explain the concept of clearance racks. In terms of food, I think I'm getting a little more used to European prices, since I found myself thinking that €8.50 was decent enough for a dinner that I could have tea too. One thing's for sure: it's very nice to not have to worry about sticker shock from an additional 15 percent tip. Here, tip and tax are already included in the menu price. Today was remarkably chiefly by me spending 40 minutes in failing to rent a bike. I've been meaning for at least a week to go to Métro Vélo, where I can rent a bike for three months for about as much as it costs me to buy groceries for a week, but some combination of my schedule and the weather has always stopped me. Plus I've been tracking the little availability box in the upper right corner of the site, and when it gets below three I start to worry about getting the creaking dregs of the fleet that remain after all the bikes in good condition have been rented out. Well, it turns out the number's hardly ever above three, and this morning it was at four and not raining, so I went 20 minutes out of my way on the way to work to finally get this taken care of. The guy in the shop, who I accosted with atrocious French including partir somehow conjugated with avoir (?!), said that they actually didn't have any left and that I should call them ahead of time on the phone. Then he handed me their English-language brochure. Well, after I was done with work around 6:15, I noticed that the website was showing five available bikes, so I called up from work and asked if the number on the site was correct. Answer: No, it's not up-to-date and something's wrong with the system, and they still don't have any bikes. (Which is odd, when I stopped to think about it, because the number's still been changing for the last week. These are questions I need to work on having while I'm still on the phone...) I can't assume I'm missing too much biking action for now, though, because the weather this weekend is supposed to suck. It's been grey and rainy for the past two days, and it looks like we're getting two more of the same. Quite a pity, actually, because I was really hoping for a day trip to Annecy, where there's a big lake you can boat on and a medieval town you can take pictures of, but I'm not going to pay €33 to spend a Saturday hiding for shelter in some Savoie train station. I'll have to find some more local indoor things to do instead. |
Saturday, October 10, 2009
10:05 a.m.
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One of the side effects of working with large data sets is that you end up with various dead times — for me ranging anywhere from five minutes to six hours — where there's nothing to do but wait for stuff to run. I'm not the greatest at multitasking, so rather than start some new complicated line of research in parallel, a lot of the time I end up browsing Google News or Wikipedia. Being in France has reminded me that I can do this in multiple languages. The news recently has been pretty interesting. One of the biggest stories over here early this week was an informal vote held on the future of the post office, which the current (more right-leaning, as I understand it) government plans to turn into a private company some time next year. My (more left-leaning) region of France seems to be rather against the idea, and nationwide the opposition set up "citizen voting" over the weekend, which officially counts for nothing and which I think wasn't even available in all areas, to gauge support. It turns out that 2 million people voted, which doesn't seem so bad to me in a country of about 60 million people. The difficult part: France has been in the process of changing its constitution to allow opposition parties to call for a general referendum on any issue if it's supported by enough MPs and petition signatures, but the exact practical workings of the new amendment aren't yet specified, and now the opposition is accusing the government of deliberately slowing that process down so that they can't use it on the post office privatization question. It doesn't seem to actually matter, though, because the new constitutional amendment also says that you can't use a referendum to remove a law that's been on the books for less than a year, by which time the post office would be well into its tenure as a private company. It's all spelled out pretty clearly in an article in Le Figaro, which I think was the first French newspaper I ever knew about back in high school. So. Something interesting to follow, perhaps, as the French figure out what Le Figaro called "a considerable innovation in our country." ("France isn't used to these semi-direct democratic practices, common in Switzerland, Italy, or states in the American West like California.") Another front-page topic is France Télécom, the (already-privatized) phone company, which has apparently seen a bunch of suicides among its workers that some say is a result of high stress in the workplace. (Wikipedia claims it's because they're now focused on making a profit.) The company's directors, meanwhile, have been naturally kind of reluctant to take responsibility. I guess the situation is turning into a usable allusion in current culture, because I found a completely unrelated story (about a new movie) whose first paragraph is "You're unemployed, your wife left you, your son's on drugs, and your daughter just started work at France Télécom? Well, it could be worse. If you're not convinced, go see, this Wednesday in French theatres, 'The Titanic Syndrome.'" I feel like I'm really starting to learn something when I can pick up on references like that. Sometimes, though, I see these articles in French media that mostly just rip off of American newspapers. The first French coverage I came across, for example, of Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize was this article from 20 Minutes summarizing the controversy and then spending a few paragraphs quoting other news sources and their Internet visitors. Blogs seem to be the primary focus of another article from the national newspaper Le Monde about how the American "press" is calling Obama's Nobel premature. As far as I know, U.S. newspapers are still rather reluctant to use blogs or comments on other Internet news articles as their primary sources. |
Sunday, October 11, 2009
9:17 p.m.
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Just got back from a very nice (and very long!) day in Annecy, an hour and a half north of here by train. It's the trip I was wanting to make yesterday but didn't because of weather, but the forecast was looking good enough last night that I woke myself up at 6:20 and got to the train station in Gières in time for the first train at 7:35 a.m. Unsurprisingly, there was no one else anywhere on the platform that early on a Sunday morning, and when my train actually arrived I didn't recognize it at first because I thought it was just an engine towing an extra car or two to some switching yard. The trip was very smooth. Among the places we went through, it seems like only Chambéry might be worth its own trip — I was disappointed by Aix-les-Bains, which looked much grittier than the fact that I'd heard of it before coming to France would imply. Anyway, I got deposited in Annecy around 9:00 with very little idea of what to do next except find one of those map boards near the station. This technique worked. Within an entirely reasonable number of minutes, I was taking pictures of two swans near a bridge over a canal, and the canal led pretty naturally to Lake Annecy. After poking around this really huge open green space by the shore I bit, I ended up following another canal into the old town, which is apparently known as the Venice of the Alps. I haven't been to Venice, but the place really made me think of Nicole's Kanalhäuser pictures from Amsterdam. Without a doubt, Annecy has the narrowest streets of any place I've ever seen! And it doesn't help that they put open-air market stalls all along them, such that there's barely room for one line of people to get through, much less two streams moving in opposite directions with strollers, dogs, little kids, and horrible slow adults stopping dead in their tracks to inspect the price of artichokes. After about a block of this insanity, I escaped through a "passage" to a quieter parallel street. This passage concept is pretty cool, by the way. The old town is really just a few parallel streets running along a few canals. There are maybe two cross-streets in the short dimension, but often the most immediate way to switch to another parallel street is to take a passage, which basically looks like an outdoor hallway (complete with ceiling) or a tunnel randomly bored out of the surrounding buildings. I actually spent the larger part of the morning in the Musée-Château, which, as the name implies, is a former castle now turned into a museum. The place doesn't look all that big from the outside, but then I went in and saw a big exhibit about lakes (and especially Alpine lakes) and their relation to art over the last 300 years, so that was pretty cool. Then I went up a floor and saw some more stuff, and then up another half-floor, and then another half-floor... by the time I got to the top, I was actually pretty anxious to get back outside again before I wasted all the daylight! Lea would have enjoyed some of the architecture of this place, I think, or at least would have had some comments on it. There were some little dead-end mini-room areas that had incredibly weird and complicated shapes. Photography wasn't allowed, or else I would have made a study of one of them just because I would have needed it to actually understand the shape of the space. Back in the old town again, I did my requisite wandering around and spent forever trying to figure out where I should eat lunch. Some of the €16 menus looked interesting (and quite filling), but I didn't really want to spend that much, so I had a very nice pizza at €9.50 instead in a restaurant where the waiter was kind of making fun of me. One thing about Annecy is that it's very touristy, which means you don't feel bad for having your camera out and in use all the time, but you do get the English treatment as soon as anyone detects that your French isn't native, which is just about right away. My vague goal for the afternoon was to walk some distance around the lake. I had learned in the museum that Talloires, about 60 percent down on the east side, was the early headquarters for the landscape artists, but I also knew that the whole circuit of the lake is something like 40 kilometers, so even Talloires and back was a bit of a stretch for an afternoon if I wanted to do anything there or see anything else. There was also a chateau in Menthon-Saint-Bernard, a little closer, whose gardens were supposed to be free. I could get there, at least, for a special €5 boat pass that existed today only as part of a big "Share the Lake" festival (I seem to have the luck of doing tourist things on days when prices are lowered for some reason), but somehow the idea didn't strike me as that ingenious. Instead, I just started wandering clockwise around the water to see how far I might get before mid-afternoon. Well, I cleared the short end and rejected the idea of renting a paddleboat all by myself for €14, but then I stumbled on the back end of a little place that specializes in mini golf, rollerblades, and bike rentals! I snuck in stealthily to look at the price list (€5 for one hour, €8 for two, €9 for three, €10 for four, etc.). You don't have to guess too much at how this worked out. I debated with myself for about 100 meters down the road, then turned around and went for it, feeling like I could probably do the whole circuit round the lake in three hours if I pushed and didn't stop too much for photos. Well, it turns out you pay when you get back, so I didn't have to decide right away. Again, the rental guy was pretty brusque with me (foreigner French again — I did pretty badly today, linguistically speaking), but I got my bike and got him to inflate the tires properly, and then I was out and on my way. The first few kilometers were absolute death, because there were people and dogs and little kids everywhere, but eventually I got to a bike lane and then a side road that was pretty free of obstructions. I didn't quite know where to go when the side road dumped back onto the main departmental road, so I just started following that instead with all the cars. Which, you know, was a perfect place for the chain to become derailed near the top of a hill. At least I wasn't going so fast because of the hill, so I was able to hop off and pull the bike onto the sidewalk to effect a repair. I went through Talloires — let it be said that the artists were definitely right in choosing their spot! — but I didn't take any pictures because I was worried about not getting back to Annecy before the bike shop closed at 6:30. (I had been stopping a lot already.) Below Talloires was a long run of perhaps eight kilometers with very little traffic where the road ran immediately along the shore, which was just the sort of thing I was willing to pay the €9 for. It's too bad I was alone: what that kind of scenery really wants is one person steer the bike (or drive the car) and one to attend to the photography and admiration. I had to kind of keep my focus on the road to keep from pitching over the guardrail if I hit a pothole or had a sudden car attack. At the bottom of the lake, in Doussard, I found a bike path that looked like it pointed in the right direction, so I switched onto that. Another very nice ride! There was this nice contrast going on with the departmental road for cars running right along the lake, then the mini-road for bikes a bit higher up, and then a dirt track or one-lane road for the pedestrians just off of that — and all of them were in use. About halfway back I stopped for a snack out of my backpack and to relieve my ill-treated butt from dealing with a really unforgiving bike seat. Then I stopped again to take a picture. Then I stopped again on the outskirts of Annecy to stretch my shoulders. By the time I got back to the tourist area, I was quite OK with the very slow pace it required, so I guess I'm a little out of practice. I got the bike back within about 10 minutes of three hours after I left, as near as I could figure it, paid my rental, and then walked back to Annecy. I had yet to buy my return train ticket, figuring that I'd apply what seems to be the usual French method of just walking up to a billeterie machine a few minutes before you want to leave. The streets were so much clearer at 5:30 p.m. than they'd been at noon, so I decided to try some more photography and take the 7:00 train rather than the 6:00. It worked out about right: there was really very little to do except eat or spend money, and you have to spend money in order to get anything to eat... so by train time I was OK with leaving. The train turned out to be packed from one end to the other with students, and then more got on at Chambéry. I suppose a lot of them had been at home for the weekend, or off on a weekend trip. We all got off at Gières and completely filled a tram that had the misfortune to be at the tram stop right as our massive horde was coming out of the train station. Two stops later, and I was home a few minutes before 9. |
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