Quote of the Day

“We are moving where we have coffee, because we need to be where there is the liquor.”

1:30 pm

Good news on CNN

Well, most of you might have access to peanut butter, Triscuits, TV and cars, but today CNN notes that the euro is at a record high against the US dollar. So, at least I am getting paid in euros! And barely using any of my salary, since my monthly bills for housing, transportation, and food appear to be less than one-sixth of my salary. Hopefully this will give me lots of cash to use up in my six weeks of paid vacation.

Not much else to note in the news, my lack of interest in the long election season is only worsened by being away from the US. Obviously I care about the eventual outcome and I’m sure some of my hard-earned euros will eventually make it to some campaign coffers, but I’ve just become used to being disappointed the last two election cycles so I can’t get my hopes up so early. One of my tasks for the week is starting to download NPR podcasts to my ipod, although then I worry that I will never learn french since I am supposed to be listening to my french tapes whenever possible.

Interesting commute to work

Today I thought I would take the bus to work, just to make sure the connections work for all the different morning times I could leave, and then the bus never came. Still a strike. So I quickly scrambled out of work clothes into bike/work clothes, hopped on my bike and rode to work as fast as I could. I managed to not get lost and found a pretty direct route to work; I think not getting lost may have been due to forgetting the map at home and just using a sense of direction. Then, almost to work, I am peddling along the path that goes along the old harbor entrance, which looks across at the other side of the harbor (surprise). And there is a body on the beach! With lots of policemen all standing around staring at it. Then they put a white plastic bag over the body, and stood around staring from a further distance.

It would probably be interesting to find out what happened, but I (a) haven’t found a local paper yet and (b) am still not very good at French, so I may never know. Still, it makes an impromptu bike commute a bit more interesting.

thoughts on transportation

This weekend I started to feel a little more at home here. I went into La Rochelle on Saturday and bought a bike, just in time to be able to get myself to work on Monday during the bus strike. The new bike is heavy and inefficient compared to my two sitting at home in North Carolina, but it does handle the cobblestones quite nicely. I finally managed to explore far enough around La Rochelle to locate Asian food–Thai and Japanese. It was also a nice day Saturday for killing time on the waterfront while my bike was being prepped. There is an historic old harbor here, guarded by two ancient towers. Then there is a newer, huge marina and a big port outside the main part of La Rochelle. The tidal range here is huge–it is no Bay of Fundy, but it is much more dramatic than the east coast of the U.S. and a bit bigger than Puget Sound.

Sunday I managed to get lost. I set out to do what the (not very detailed tourist office) map said would be a scenic 10K loop of L’Houmeau as a nice weekend run. I managed to tack on a good three plus miles extra, I’m not quite sure how that happened, but I swear that there is a discrepancy between the map and reality. Either that, or part of the route is through heavily gated aquaculture marshes. At least it was a nice sunny afternoon and the run was scenic; my legs are feeling the mileage today though. Biking to work and getting slightly lost on that ride didn’t help–one of the signs for the bike route had been knocked over so I tacked on a couple extra miles to the ride…and of course was in too much of a rush to actually stop and replace the knocked over sign for someone else. I think a big contributor to my getting lost here (mind you, I managed on almost no sleep to get myself around Paris my first day in France–I’m usually a good navigator!) is that street names change constantly. Not just when the road enters a new town, but from block to block a street can have a different name. Some of the main roads may retain their name for a kilometer or two, but then they are something else entirely. So for all you know when you are lost, you could be on the road you live on but you would never know unless you had memorized its ten possible names.

More on where I am

I am living in L’Houmeau, a little village a couple km north of La Rochelle. I live in a small apartment in back of the IFREMER facility, which is basically like a very simple hotel room with access to a roomy common kitchen that I share with one to four other people depending on how many people are living at the lab at the time. To see the IFREMER building, click here: my home . L’Houmeau really is a village and not a suburb; if is surrounded on three sides by wide agricultural fields and on the fourth side it sits along the water. It is a quiet place, but it has the advantage of immediate access to miles and miles of paths along the ocean and a gorgeous wetland waterfowl reserve.

Welcome…

So, here I am in France.  I promised everyone that I would keep them posted on my adventures (or lack thereof, this far) so I am going to try to post updates two or more times a week here.  My early experiences have not been too exciting, unless you count a sprint through the Philadelphia airport to catch my plane and three days in a foreign country, including my first two days of work, without luggage exciting.  But I am slowly discovering how to do day-to-day activities, like ride the bus, shop at the supermarket, and do laundry in a completely new setting without the benefit of understanding the language.  This travel log slash collection of observations will help to give you an idea of where I am and what I am up to…you might have to be patient at first, while I figure out how to upload pictures and type fluidly on these crazy french computers.