La Grève générale touche moi

Today is the day that the workers of France have declared Black Thursday. For 36 hours, workers in government, postal offices, schools, transit, banks, to even supermarket cashiers, helicopter pilots and ski liftees are protesting the economic crisis and in general, causing merde. I was out for an hour this morning and the only thing I really noticed was that I wasn't almost run over by a tram when crossing the road. I was secretly hoping for mass chaos so that the strike makes sense and these people who have the day off will make their point, but instead, I was able to buy a baguette with no hassle. Sigh. My parents have instilled the thrill of a good protest in me, so this really was disappointing.

Axel and I have always managed to travel during some kind of strike. One visit to France, we managed to hit every rolling strike there was both in Paris and Marseille. Coincidentally, our last night when the strikes were supposed to be over, we saw this sign:




So when I got home from my excursion of buying bread (+/- gluten) and looking for a GPS attachment for JM who is arriving tomorrow, I figured I could just buckle down and get some real work done. And then, my computer decided to grow some socialist roots. It's on strike. Specifically, microsoft office (which has been over a week) has been joined by adobe AND my outgoing email. Nothing works without crashing my computer. And no, it's not windows. It's (shudder) a mac.

Because I currently cannot do much more than go on the internet and make screen shots, here is a little treat of what I experience on a minute basis:













So from frustration to the realization that my computer has become french and decided that things are impossible and do not exist, I am going for my afternoon tea.

An update: it's not over yet:

Two of many reasons why Ax and I don't want to move to the US

1. doga


2. creative meat

Media Miss-Information..Grr

Check out the video below, it's an exerpt from the show hosted by Lou Dobbs.  He's reacting to NOAA's reccord temperature low for the year 2008, and then invites three of the most well known global warming negaters.  Yes there were reccord snow storms in the US this year and yes there was snow in the hills of Dubai, but these are all factors of global warming.  

Interesting how there's unity among serious climate scientists about the human effects on globals warming yet in the media they're still debating it..no wonder everybody's confused:

for all the roadies who read this site...

look what was parked in front of our building!



If you can't read the sign...this is a car that was part of the tour de france.

Explaining gifted.

I read Outliers during the Christmas holidays. Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink, has written a new book to explain successful groups of people. It turns out, success isn't as individual as I once thought. And it's not about being gifted. It's about getting opportunities to do something you love to do at the right time in your life where you can flourish for 10000 hours to get really good at it. The environment and time you grow up in also play huge roles. I am not telling you more and intentionally being elusive because this is yet another MUST read on my list.

Speaking of books, I have managed to get some books into the schedule. Here is the list:

1. Outliers - see above. Triple kick ass.
2. No time for goodbye - picked this up in Ireland. Fun suspense book but really meant for beach reading only. 1/2 an ass kick.
3. The sharper your knife the less you cry. Really fun read. About the famous Paris cooking school - le Cordon Bleu. True story. Makes you want to cook (ask axel about the week after I finished this book...stewed endives! apples and brussel sprout stir fry! chantarelle mushroom and asparagus saute! squash apple and yam soup! oh yeah, can you say inspiring!?! I cut my finger trying to add more vigour in my cutting of onions...not so inspiring). Triple kick ass.
4. Merde actually - yet another good read while you are living in France. If you haven't read A year in the merde, read it first. And when I first read the first book (a year in ...), I didn't quite get it. Now that I've lived here for a while, it makes french life make sense. And you do get obsessed with merde. 1 ass kick.
5. The Tales of Beedle the Bard. As a die-hard Potter fan, I saved this book to relish. It wasn't worth the relish. Cute if I was 7 years old. Now that I'm a bit older, really just boring. 1/4 ass kick.

If anyone knows of anyone wanting to do some trades, I'm in!!

Gemdigger

Just spent the last 24 hours stressing over this little John Deer rendetion of the Gemdigger. This assigment was Lego heaven...can't wait to have kids so I can buy them these cool toys. The objective was to collect as many gems within a square perimeter delimited with white tape only. You cross the tape you're out. The area is festooned with cement obstacles that you're little robot has to avoid. And of course the key is that it has to be autonomous. Design of the beast was a hair pulling affair with so many ideas in all directions we ended up only having one test run before the competition. Our little guy didn't do so bad, although it wanted to pick up one of the cement barriers...hmm have to work on that one.

Accomplishments while in Strasbourg

Doug, a student at ISU who used to work for MDA in Ontario, is a freak of nature. He can do the rubik's cube in less than 30 seconds. His real mission in life is to get the whole world doing the cube. He and his girlfriend Megan (same girl from olive post) do the cube on the tram every day. And Niki (same girl from olive and xmas market posts), her boyfriend Farnoud and their roommate Jeremy (all from Canada) each have a cube at home.

Axel bought one while I was in Vancouver so he could learn it enough to impress me with his cube skills when I returned. Instead, he gave it to me still in the box. So after 5h of grueling concentration, I solved it repeatably from 4 minute average down to my current 1 min 34 sec. My fastest time has been 1m10s but I think it must not have been mixed properly.



There is a website we all use where you can time yourself AND officially mix your cube for the next round. It gives you an average, best time, best 3 out of 5 etc etc. And it even gives you the option for inspection.

Axel has gotten the first two layers but is still impatiently learning how to do the last layer.



Then Doug got the ultimate - a sukoku rubik's cube. He has now solved it in 6 minutes...and I just managed to do it with an average of 5 minutes. However, he gets it so the middles are all oriented the right direction. I don't bother because I'm not that much of a loser.



This is a poster we found ice skating last week. Yes, this is Doug. I call this picture:

Baby is to parent as Cube is to Doug.



And yes, we went ice skating. At Iceberg, the largest rink in France. It is not an accomplishment. In fact, it is an embarrassment since most of the Canadians did not know how to skate very well. Doug and Jer (in a Leafs jersey no less) were the only hockey stars. The rest of us...well, here's the only example I will show.

Earth saving searches

I had no idea until today the carbon cost of each google search. Turns out that every second on the internet amounts to 0.02g of carbon emission. That's pretty crazy when you think of the millions of internet hours consumed on a daily basis.
Check out the following BBC article, you'll never google the same again:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7823387.stm

One way to save on carbon emissions is by making your home search engine page black, which is what the people at Blackle have done, check it out:

http://www.blackle.com/

the things we never think about...thinking of turning our blog all black

Noses less runny, still butt cold

Strasbourg is sunny but cold. Really cold. We went to the market on Saturday morning, sick as dogs but really wanting some good veggies (the price you pay for being gourmandises). We are inadvertently practicing the 100 mile diet just by living in France so on the menu:

- squash
- potatoes
- carrots
- apples
- brussel sprouts
- onions
- maches (water cress?)
- endives

The challenge of keeping a bit of variety in the 100 mile/market diet is making us better intellectual cooks.

When you need to numb your brain, watch space movies!

Axel and I are both sick today. So we finally bit the bullet and watched the last space movie on the list from Christmas break. In the ISU school library, they have a glut of movies with a space theme, so being the cheap people that we are, this supply has been our source of choice for entertainment when we're tired, on a train or sick.

So, in the spirit of being sick and missing the beach party that's going on tonight, I am making myself a bit more useful and giving you a 2-3 line synopsis along with a yea or nay for watching the movies we have watched.

1. Contact - personal favourite. Jodie Foster and a bunch of other people that make you go (hey, isn't that ...?) star in one of the best space films about finding life in outer space. There's talking to aliens, a really cool tricked out machine, and existentialism, all rolled into one. Worth missing 1 night's worth of homework and a lot of sleep.

2. Apollo 13 - was a great movie until Ax re-watched it after knowing more about space stuff. It's a sophisticated pro-american guy flick. And it's a true story, even though I know they didn't really talk like that, and were not shooting their mouth off etc etc. Man, does Ax know how to kill a space film now. Worth missing a Sunday night's worth of homework.

3. Dune - oh my god...can a film get ANY cheesier than this?? I waited and waited for it to get marginally better, and it rapidly got worse. The spice, the worms, the tooth...and the soap opera thinking and pensive looks were just spectacularly awful. It was worse than the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. Worth taking the CD out of the box in the library and accidentally scratching the crap our of it and then hiding the whole package in the back of the DVDs.

4. Space Cowboys - this is proof that Clint Eastwood is lucky, not brilliant. Four old farts do the predictable machismo as space cowboys. The title is trying to tell you something - it's that bad. Worth watching only if you have nothing to do in the south of france and it's too bloody cold and too bloody late to leave the house, you've read all of the books in the house, the rubik's cube has lost its spark for the day and you just wanna lie in bed and listen to bravado of Clint "make my day" eastwood.

5. Outland - wow, Sean Connery must have done something really bad that he owed the director a big favour to star in this bomb of a movie. This is basically a corrupt anti-union movie which just happens to be in space. If I write more, I'm giving this movie way too much credit in being worth writing about. Worth watching if it's minus 13 deg outside, you are so sick that your nose is raw from dabbing the snot that isn't being allowed to be blown out, and you were out until 4 in the am the night before.

So, to conclude, there really needs to be a vast improvement in space movies. Maybe a real plot that has some relevance to space and living in space, assurance that it's technically correct and assume that people who are watching aren't total idiots who aren't the lowest denomination.

Have a great weekend! Salut from Freezy Stras!

Irish quiz nights happen all over the world

When we were in Ireland for pre-xmas vacation, what I noticed was how everyone had a relative abroad. Like in the Philippines, this is the norm as the people rely on industry at home which ebbs and flows depending on how the economy is doing. However, unlike the Philippines, whose main people export are homecare workers and engineers to the middle east, Ireland's people abroad have a wide-range of skills. What the entire world benefits from is Ireland's greatest export: the establishment of the local irish pub.

Any small town in the corners of the world will likely have an irish pub which will play most sporting events in real-time, pour a good Guinness (which I can safely say, I have tried...more on that in our Ireland post), sell the best-priced beer in town, and host quiz nights.

The Irish Times is a pub that is about 3 minutes away from us. Probably 30 seconds if we run. It runs a weekly quiz night on Sundays that pack the bar so tight that if you don't get there well-before it starts, you are going to have to use people's backs as a surface to write your answers on the response sheet.

Ann-Sophie, a true Strasbourgeoisie, had met Doug, a fellow ISU student while he was needing a place to crash in Strasbourg while he waited for his apt to become available. (He used couchsurfing.net to find extremely good people who were willing to lend him space on their couch). This friendship has grown such that Ann-So and her friends have become the ISU students who don't go to ISU. They are the party coordinators and hosts of small gatherings and larger fetes, the oracles of all that is awesome in Strasbourg. AND the captains and leaders of the most kick-ass quiz team in the city.

Mathieu is the captain of the Markitoys, the ever-present team at the Irish Times quiz night. The Markitoys are usually in the top 4. Axel and I have joined them only a couple of times, but after last Sunday, I think we're hooked. We came in 2nd!! The last time they had a question about the doctor in South Africa who did the first successful heart transplant, and last Sunday they had Jean Chretien as a "guess who" and "name the 2nd most populated city in Canada" so I feel like as good Canadians with some science in our pockets, we have to represent.

Here we are trying to figure out a song while the "Born in January" pictures are almost all answered. Jean Chretien was number 3.





The other part of the quiz is that at the end, the best joke also wins a bottle of vodka. Yes, this is what we show up for every week. First prize is a bottle of vodka for # points. Second is for a whole bunch of vodka shots. And best joke also gets vodka.

This time, Axel was the only one with a joke. It was actually pretty good but as Mathieu stated, "The French were not ready for this one." I think the reason it bombed though, was because it was so freaking long.

Here we are, hiding our heads as to having the longest-written joke of the night.



And here we are enjoying our 2nd place win!




The funniest part of this whole thing is that it's not about the win. Mathieu, the captain of the team, doesn't drink. And that night Ann-So had to drive so could only have 1. Axel also doesn't drink, which left Brandon (the Trinidad scrabble champion - no joke), James (the Saskatoon genius), and I to down 9 shots a minute before the bar closed. Needless to say, it hit me pretty hard.

A broken window causes havoc!

We're working on our xmas vacation blog but for now...



I'm sure that everyone had been tempted to use this (the emergency hammer to break a window) at one point in their lives. However, I've never actually seen it at work...until yesterday.



After a very long relaxing time in Sanary-sur-mer at Axel's mom's glorified "tent", we headed home. When we planned the trip, we decided to make sure to make the return trip happen NOT on the last day of vacation (Jan 4th) so we did it a day early. We also made sure to pack inconveniently and inefficiently, as is our tradition, so as to carry plastic bags and baskets filled with random food items we don't want to leave behind in case no one comes back to stay at the house in time to eat all of the food.

We had not given ourselves very much time between trains but IF luck was on our side (which it was not), we could make every connection and get to Strasbourg with enough time to get some groceries and unpack to ready 2009.

Our first train was from Bandol to Marseille-St. Charles at 7:47 am. Axel's grandfather, Papous, was our send-off party (as per usual) and got us from the house to the station in 8 minutes (this is normal). We got there early enough to catch the 7:25 am train so we ran on and got to Marseille with tons of time.

Our second train arrived early enough so that we could sit in it for 15 minutes. This train was scheduled to leave at 8:41 am to arrive at the CDG airport at 12:29 pm. And then the train from this station to Strasbourg left at 12:47 pm. So we only had roughly 15 minutes for this connection.

And then, I jinxed the trip. I said, "Wow...we got an early train here, and now our other train is supposed to be leaving on time!"

We had found our seats (which are 2 of 10 seats in the bar car...good for having lots of luggage and being close to food...bad for the constant noise and the endless traffic of hungry people), pulled out the rubik's cube and knitting. All was relaxed until we heard the announcement that our train was indeterminately delayed because a window in car 8 was broken and because we were on a TGV, the fastest train in the world, we could not leave the station without the window. And then as minutes passed, we saw most of the passengers on our train run off to find other trains they can hop onto. Remember, this was the train that took people from Marseille, Aix, Avignon, and Lyon to the AIRPORT! So if you had a flight to catch, a train that wasn't moving was bad news! Our car was the conductor's car too, so we started to hear all of the details. 1. Because it is a TGV train, you could not take a car off and on. So we were stuck with this car with broken window. 2. It was a guy who cracked the window. And yes, he did it because he was angry about something. 3. If we start going on the track we're supposed to be on, the entire TGV system in the country will get all screwed up IF we don't hit the speed we're supposed to hit. 4. All of those people who got off the train ran onto the train that was leaving for Lyon. But that train was the slow train which meant it would arrive in Lyon at 12:30 pm.

So Ax and I made a decision to try and see if there was a train that would take us to Strasbourg from Marseille. We went to the ticket office and waited in line. We found that one train left at 12:15 and arrived in Strasbourg at 8 pm. Then we found out it was full. The person at the counter was very nice but could not find us seats on any train for that day or the next. And then I noticed the departure board and saw that our original train departure status changed from "indetermined delay" to "40 min. delay". I asked the woman if that meant 40 minutes from now or 40 minutes from the original departure and she said from now...which was WRONG because when we left the office, the train was JUST about to leave. We had to run with all of our bags, baskets, laptops and luggage as fast as we could and as SOON as we stepped on, the door closed behind us. So when we got to our seats, we found out that the window was fixed with some plastic and duct tape. And we were not going to be able to make our Strasbourg connection.

However, because the French train system is incredible in the number of trains for each destination, the conductors began to make announcements for alternate trains for every possible destination. People had to get off in places they were not originally supposed to get off but there was a connecting train to their final destination there and they were just going to be late. We got off at Marne La Vallee, otherwise known as Euro Disney! Of course, we didn't discover that we were actually AT Euro Disney until about 5 minutes before we were leaving for Strasbourg. The station was SO cold that the first warm spot we found (in a really crappy cafe...more on that later), we settled and huddled so it wasn't until I went to the other side of the cafe that I saw that Euro Disney was right outside the station. OK, so maybe the mickey mouse signs all over the place should've been enough of a hint, but we were underslept and a little stressed.



Some accomplishments of the day include:


Axel's empty yogurt tower

Our extremely long discussion about axel's stupid looking toque. The toque itself is innocuous. But it's how he wears it that kills all hope. For one thing, he wears it inside out. And it's a folding toque but he doesn't like it folded so wears it so it looks like he's wearing a pantyhose on his head. And the escape velocity tag is a mirror image because he wears it inside out. Here is the evidence.






What was REALLY cool was that, when we got off our cursed train, a bunch of SNCF people were at the top of the escalators to give you an envelope to put your ticket in for a full refund (!) and a first class ticket on the train to Strasbourg (!). What I didn't know was that if you were more than 30 minutes late on a ride for more than 100 km, they refund your ticket! So in the end, we got our trip for half price.

So a side bar on the cafe. I tried to order 2 decaffeinated cafe cremes. The waiter told me it was impossible. But I said I could order a double decaffeinated expresso so I wouldn't I be able to order a cafe creme that's decaf. He told me it's impossible because the machine won't do a cafe creme decaffeinated. So then I ordered two decaf expressos. And then I asked for cream and he then proceeded to steam come cream and pour it into my decaf expressos, thus making two decaf cafe cremes. This, my friend, is how I am learning how to think outside my seemingly logical N. American box and conforming to the french way of thinking.




Yes, we eventually made it home. With only a two hour delay in the end! And now we know that we could transfer at Euro Disney to get home!

Alltop!

We've made alltop! Hopefully you have used this site already. It's "the best of" for blogs and RSS feeds and I've been hooked on it since I discovered Guy Kawasaki back in March 08 in my biz class. I've used it for finding recipes, getting my news etc. And now, our blog has made their list!

http://france.alltop.com

We have many things to blog about since the last postings, so I'll make sure this gets done soon.

Happy New Year!!

2009 is the year where we pull out the umbrella and wait for the storm to pass!

all the best!