Life in Grenoble

"Les Aventures d'un Américain" — Click here to follow along with my adventures in France in comic form too! Pages 1 through 4 posted as of September 26, 2009.

Otherwise, welcome to the text-based retelling of my three and a half months in southern France! Journal entries appear here in reverse chronological order.

Weekend Trip to Germany

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

I took last Friday off work and spent the weekend near Stuttgart, Germany, to visit my old friend Wiebke, who I hadn't seen at all since 2003 and not consistently since she spent a year as an exchange student in my high school in 2000-2001. To get there, I took a bus from Grenoble to the Lyon airport, flew to Zurich, then changed planes and flew to Stuttgart. I finally landed in Stuttgart around 1:30 p.m. and met up with Wiebke outside. We drove to the city and had lunch at a sort of mall cafeteria on the top floor of a building on a hill, overlooking what would have been quite a nice view if it hadn't been freezing out. Then our job for the afternoon was to go to some archive place and get a copy of the birth record for my great-great-grandmother's town from the year she was born. Cost €1, but benefit one amazing sample of handwritten 19th-century German. Neither Weibke nor I could make much out of it, but when we showed it to Wiebke's parents we learned that a lot of the letter shapes were written differently back then, and after finding a website explaining them we were able to make some headway.

Saturday it was still rainy and freezing, but we decided to go to a medieval town called Rothenburg anyway. We set Wiebke's GPS to a winding backroads-only route that made the trip take more than two hours. It was probably the best thing to do with the weather we had: driving along in a heated and dry car through southern Germany, looking at small towns and open fields and catching up on the six years it's been seen we saw each other last. Every village has its own church, of course, and they all look a little bit different.

"The first thing you do when you get to Rothenburg—" began Wiebke's mom before we left, "is buy a snowball!" finished Wiebke. Well, it was more like the fifth thing we did — after having lunch, stopping at a Christmas store, walking around, and going up onto the tower of the town hall — but we got around to it in the end. The story I heard is that this "snowball" is an invention that answers the question "What do you do with all these leftover scraps of pie crust after you put the crust into the pie plate and trim off the ends?" Apparently you collect all the leftover bits together and stick them into a sphere about three inches in diameter, bake them anyway, and then cover the whole thing with cinnamon or chocolate or something along those lines. A bit crunchier than I was expecting, but good! By the time Wiebke and I came out of the café, it had almost stopped raining but not quite, so we walked partway around the old town on its old city wall, still intact (or rebuilt) and covered by a little roof where the guards used to make their rounds, I expect. Finally, on the way home we made a small detour through Eltershofen, my great-great-grandmother's town, and took a picture of me standing by the city limits sign.

Sunday morning was the the same as Saturday: cold, grey, and rainy. Wiebke's parents suggested a trip to a place whose English-language brochure is headed "Open Air Museum Beuren," which I thought of as Greenfield Village Germany. A bunch of old-style village houses, barns, and other buildings have all been collected and reassembled in one place to provide a sort of walk-through demo of what rural life was like at various points in the past in southern Germany. Wiebke's mom served as my combined translator and tour guide. Some extremely interesting stuff, but with the weather I think we only stayed for 90 minutes max before retiring to the cafeteria for hot tea and coffee, and then it was back home. After lunch, there wasn't much time before my flight, so I sat around with Wiebke for about 45 minutes and looked through the scrapbook she kept of her year in Twinsburg.

Reverse-travel odyssey started around 4 p.m. We left for Stuttgart airport and got there around 5:00. Wiebke came inside with me, and we wandered around until I decided I should probably head through security at 5:50. It was a pretty quick line, so I was at my gate well before they started boarding around 6:15. Flight to Zurich at 6:40, and then a free half-hour or so in Zurich airport before heading back to France. Landed in Lyon at 9:30 p.m. with an hour to spare before my return bus to Grenoble. Grenoble reached roughly on schedule at 11:30, and then the tram got me back to my apartment around 12:20 a.m., I think.

Day Trip to Annecy

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Just got back from a very nice (and very long!) day in Annecy, an hour and a half north of here by train. 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., and thus 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 and then back along another canal into the old town, known as the Venice of the Alps.

Without a doubt, Annecy has the narrowest streets of any place I've ever seen! 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 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, a former castle now turned into a museum. I went in and saw a big exhibit about lakes (and especially Alpine lakes) and their relation to art over the last 300 years. 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! There were some little dead-end mini-room areas that had incredibly weird and complicated shapes. Back in the old town again, I did my requisite wandering around and spent forever trying to figure out where I should eat lunch. 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.

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 walking to Talloires and back was a bit of a stretch for an afternoon if I wanted to do anything there or see anything else. Eventually, in just walking clockwise around the lake, I stumbled on the back end of a little place that rented bikes! The rental guy was pretty brusque with me (foreigner French again — I did pretty badly today, linguistically speaking), but I got a 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, a side road, and a main departmental road that were more free of obstructions. 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. Below Talloires was a long run of perhaps eight kilometers with very little traffic where the road ran immediately along the shore. It's too bad I was alone: what that kind of scenery really wants is one person steer the bike and one to attend to the photography and admiration. But alone 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, but progressively slower riding as I got more and more tired. By the time I got back to the tourist area, I was quite OK with the very slow pace it required. I returned the bike within about 10 minutes of three hours after I left, as near as I could figure it, and then walked back to Annecy. 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... The 7:00 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 p.m.

In the News

Saturday, October 10, 2009

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. But 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. (Fun quote: "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.'"

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.

If There's No Snow, Hike; If There's No Shade, Stay Inside

Sunday, October 4, 2009

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. 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. Today, as a consequence, my goal was to avoid the outdoors. 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.

Real French: Tu or Vous?

Friday, October 2, 2009

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! 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!

So I came to France with some rough guidelines. 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, 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, who at the end 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 (the only professor in the Case French department who did), and Marc asking me to switch over to tu after four weeks of working together.

Sprechen Sie français? Mais oui, of course I know ภาษาโทย!

Thursday, September 24, 2009

A lot's been happening. From my point of view, I think the most interesting thing is the barbecue I went to last night here at the residence. 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.

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 finding an employee who speaks 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. 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 workaround 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 so I can force myself to get better.

The party I went to Friday night at one of the other interns' rooms also put me in a very linguistic frame of mind. 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-shared languages: one Hungarian, one Turkish, one Portuguese, and whatever other languages the Indian guys may know.) 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.

Adventures on Washing Day

Thursday, September 17, 2009

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. A few minutes after 7:00 (my reserved time) 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 talking with some other interns at work today, the problem seems to be that I picked the broken dryer out of the three! I guess I know for next time.

Out and About: The Bastille and Hiking Near Domène

Sunday, September 13, 2009

This weekend I finally started exploring the area a bit. Yesterday afternoon, even though it looked like it was about to rain, I took the tram to La Tronche and walked up the nearest mountain to get to the Bastille. The agglomération grenobloise ("Greater Grenoble") is in the shape of a captial "Y," with three mountain ranges around it. Some time in the mid-1800s, some people built a fort at the end of the range in the middle, right above where the two arms of the "Y" come together, and that's the Bastille. You can take a sort of cable car (téléphérique) up to the top from the center of the city, but I came in one of the back ways and walked up instead. It was a few kilometers, and apparently a favorite route of hard-core cyclists. Someone had spraypainted encouragments all over the road — things like "Allez" and "Ne pas freiner" and "Ça roule encore" — along with indications of the percent grade you were going up at various times. The grades were mostly in the high teens and low 20s, so a pretty steep hike, much less ride. I found another way down back into the city and had a crêpe à crème de marrons in the place Victor Hugo.

Today I went hiking in the Belledonne mountain range (on the right-hand side of the "Y") with Emti, another intern who also lives in the building. We took a bus to Domène, a little town on the edge of the suburbs right at the foot of the mountains, and just kind of improvised from there with a steepest-ascent algorithm. We eventually found a network of actual hiking trails and spent a few hours poking around on those. At some point we came out suddenly into the stereotypical southern France field, complete with rolling hills and cows with bells on, so we stopped there for a bit and ate some food we'd packed. Then Emti saw what looked like a mountain bike trail going straight up the side of the mountain, so we followed that to the top. Some climbing! Most of it had to be done by crawling, with liberal rest breaks, but we eventually came out on top and found two kids and a dad playing on some stacked-up logs. Needless to say, we went back to Domène (about four kilometers) by the more passable route that they probably took, and it turns out that if you go the right way you can get a hiking trail all the way down to one street away from the main square of the village.

Anglais? Français? Les deux?

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

I think, after three full days at work, that I've gotten into an interesting sort of linguistic no-man's-land that I hope gets more comfortable as time goes on. The official language of the Xerox Research Centre Europe is English, but the place is still located in France: among the full-time workers French is almost universally the first language or a very strong second language. I was glad to find, on my first day, that they mostly speak that among themselves. I tried to stake as firm a claim as I could in the francophone category from the moment I stepped in the door and explained myself to the receptionist, and that's seemed to have had pretty good luck. I talked to a few people in the kitchen, who all complimented me on my French. In general, the interns aren't a French-speaking bunch, and it seems on top of that that people are surprised to meet an American who doesn't sound like one. I measure this partly by the number of people who keep asking me where I'm from — I assume that means they can't tell by my accent! Given my name, I've gotten one or two questions about being German.

Monday was a very French day. I rode the bus and tram to work with two other interns (Ismail and Wilker, from London and from Brazil), speaking English, but then everything at work was solid French all the way through lunch, which I had in a nearby cafeteria restaurant with one of my supervisors. In the evening I met with the director of the residence where I'm staying, in order to fill out the dorm-style condition report of my apartment and to go over some other logistics, and that was also all in French except for a few words. Then yesterday was more of an English day: we had a "newcomers meeting" and a technology demo in the morning in that language, and then I spent most of the day at my desk reading papers and someone else's Python code. Today I had to go to the bank (in French), read another two papers (in English), and talk to various people for very short amounts of time (in both). In all of this the hardest part, naturally, is to switch quickly. In the past, I've noticed that I need a good 20 minutes to mentally completely change over to French mode, which leads to bad results sometimes in short conversations. Hopefully this sort of thing will get better with practice and I can lower my overall transition time by December.

Grocery Shopping in France

Sunday, September 6, 2009

One of the first activities I did in my new home was go grocery shopping. The closest store to here is the aptly-named Casino Géant in St.-Martin-d'Hères, the next town over. It's pretty similar to a place our high-school tour group stopped at when we were going by bus from Paris to Tours: actually a sort of compact indoor shopping mall anchored by the large hypermarché that gives the whole place its name. (On Google Maps you can see it marked as "Centre Commercial Géant.") Once inside, I think the first thing that caught my attention was the price differences between here and Pittsburgh — or perhaps the outward lack of differences, if you don't give them much thought. The key is in the euro exchange rate: if you consider the raw numbers you see on the shelves, they look pretty reasonable. It's only when you take into account the currency difference (about $1.50 to €1, according to the actual rate I got at American Express in Paris) that you're in for a bit of a shock. Things sold by weight require an extra mental calculation to go from kilograms to pounds. Sliced ham, for example, at €18 a kilogram is really €8.10 a pound, or about $12.15. Most meat products seem to be rather more expensive than that, but the balance is somewhat restored by local quintessentially "French" fare. I found a nice wheel of camembert for $2.10, 1.5 liters of store-brand pseudo-Orangina for $1.10, and a bottle of "soft" Normandy cider (slightly alcoholic) for again about $2.10. I'm sure I'll have more discoveries to report in the coming weeks.

"Green" advocates would be happy to know that this store doesn't provide its own bags, although it does offer several types of reusable bags for sale. On my first trip, I happened to take along a big sturdy bag that the previous tenant left in my apartment (it tuned out to be one of the types you can get at the Casino), but my second trip yesterday was more on a whim, while I was already out, and I had to buy a paper bag for €0.20. When I got back, I immediately took the precaution of putting the big bag into my backpack so that it's all ready for any last-minute shopping trips on my way home from work.

Getting Here

Saturday, September 5, 2009

I suppose for my initial post I should set the stage a bit, since the various groups of people reading this may have a more or less complete version of the background information that led to me being here. "Here" is Gières, France (a suburb of Grenoble), and I've been here since Friday afternoon. Monday morning I start a three-month internship in the Cross-Language Technologies group at the Xerox Research Centre Europe, where I'll be until December 22. And this is all coming as a little break away from my normal life, which for the past four years plus a bit has been as a grad student in the Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. I've only ever been to France once before, and that was on a 10-day group trip I made with my high school the summer after my junior year.

Well, now that the cold facts are out of the way, I wanted to say a little bit about my multi-modal transit adventure getting from Pittsburgh to Gières, which in retrospect I only recommend doing while healthy and after a few good nights of sleep. As it turned out, I had neither. I left Pittsburgh via Greyhound bus on Wednesday afternoon, armed with 100 pounds of luggage and a nasty cold I picked up from either my officemate or an airport on a separate trip a few days before. Destination: Akron, Ohio, to see my family for a night before the big trip ahead. I spent the night back home, then my parents drove me to the airport in Cleveland on Thursday morning. From Cleveland I first flew to Charlotte, North Carolina, where I got on an overnight trans-Atlantic flight to Paris; we landed at Charles de Gaulle airport around 6:45 a.m. France time. After collecting my bags, I took a small airport train to the TGV station in Terminal 2 and booked a one-way ticket to Grenoble on the outgoing 9:25 train. I only had about 45 minutes to wait before I was off again. Two hours later I transfered to a slower regional train in Lyon, and by 1:30 my luggage and I were standing on the SNCF platform, finally arrived in Grenoble. I had a bit of a hard time getting a ticket for the local tramway, and then an even harder time finding my way to the student residence where I'm staying, but eventually le nouveau locataire de l'appartement 12, as I introduced myself, made it to his new home safely. After 19 hours travelling, I was barely able to stay awake long enough to ask my way to a grocery store, buy food, make lunch, and eat it before I fell asleep on my couch bed. And here's why I recommend this kind of transit adventure only in good physical condition: I slept for 20 hours!