ISU-Week 1

Phew I finally some down time so I can post something. It's been an incredibly busy week, but we have yet to even talk about space! Monday started off with the graduating ceremony of the 2008 students where they made us all spontaneously say something intelligent about ourselves in front of this crowd. I mentioned that I was from Vancouver and I got a bunch of cheers...yes we're everywhere. Some interesting items about or class, we're currently about 33 ish students, all guys except for three lonely girls who currently enjoy a lot of attention. Our class will be complete at the end of October when a bunch of SSPers join us for module 2 so our total is really about 50ish. There are currently 20 different nationalities, and most of us are engineers or physicists. I think there's one doctor, one economist and me..not sure where I fit in. In terms of age, this class is a couple of years older than in the past at an average of 27, but there's a bit of dicotomy between the young bucks with a bunch of degrees at under 25, and the 30+ croud. So I'm right in there with the old boys..but I can still run faste than any of them..except maybe the soccer player from trinidad and tobago, but he's too laid back to really care :-)
Day 2 and three were a series of introductory lectures on economics (I now know what "marginal returns" are) and basic concepts of law. We also had a lecture on why we would want to go to space by Dr. Torienko who as one of the soviet union's senior engineers was sending space crafts to the moon during the sixties, built the Mir station and has been involved in pretty much every large international space project from the eighties and 90...so we all chuckled when he suggested that he had a little experience. So here's in interesting tid bit: did you know that the link between CO2 emissions and global warning was made by a canadian woman who analysed data from a venus space craft launched in the 70s. Turns out the planet was 100degrees hotter than what was predicted and she figured out it was due to the high concentration of CO2 in Venuse's atmosphere. Our series of lectures ended with the head of tourism Strasbourg giving us a lecture about Alsace..super cool! wanna go to Colmar and Mulhouse now..but I'm not totally sold on the heap of sausages required for "une choucroutte alsacienne."
The last two days were spent team building. The highlight was the boat cruise around the main island of Strasbourg and a treasure hunt centered around Place de la Cathedrale. Here's a cool concept, a few years ago the city decided to create a time capsule made of a stainless steel box not to be openned until the year 3790!! I was hoping to pry it open so I can slip in a note for my grand gran...grand children. We then had a reception at the Strasbourg city hall where we were hosted by the deputy mair of Strasbourg, who also happens to be the deputy mair of Illkirch and the Scientific director of CERN..how random, but this guy must be busy. They served us whine cheese and macaroons in the ball room. Apparently we're the only school who gets this kind of treatment..not even he ENA dudes down the street get an audience at the maire's house (probaby because they want his job). So now we're all ready to go and team trained so we all want to hug each other. I'm thinking that the pace is going to pick up starting Monday, so we're R&Ring this weekend maybe check out some museums on Sunday.
Just to finish the internet/phone line saga, turns out that our provider is still setting up our data line and won't be ready for an other week!...geesh, I think we'll have a house warming internet party when we finally do get this thing going...