All things alsace

New blog announcement

2010-04-20T22:24:00.002+02:00

Sorry...it's taken way longer to let you all know that we are moving blogs. New location, new career paths, new member of the family have all contributed to the new web address.

Please go to our new blog called Aix-Aix-Aix!

http://thebergmanscruz.wordpress.com

Beef, red beans and Edith Piaf

2009-09-30T15:38:00.007+02:00

Hmm..this blog is becoming less and less about Strasbourg...this entry is all Kyoto..Japan.

So tonight I got a rare insight of life with my mom when I'm not around. Her pal took us out to eat beef. In Kyoto this is a serious affair. The beef is served raw on a bed of rice..like sushi, or slightly grilled, or in little balls all tastefully accomp

anied with delicate vegetables. After a few be

ef dishes, we get to meet the cow that fed us...well th

e certificate that is. Yup this place actual

ly buys an entire cow and they have the paperwork to prove it. We learned the name, where it was born, how old was the lad, his licence number, what was his last meal and skin complexion. This was proudly displayed with a certificate of authenticity at the center of ouor table. Sorry bess, but you taste mighty fine!

Sadly it was time to go back to the conference centre, and back to work for our hos

t. Our taxi driver, inspired with our french speaking, sneakily finds Edith Piaf tunes to whom my mom and her pal immediately start singing and whooing the taxi driver! The guy was so drunk with infatuation that he missed the turn off..twice!

Fountains

2009-09-26T18:44:00.005+02:00

If you have been to Aix, then you know it's the land of the fountain. Every block or two, a fountain has managed to be built, usually in a formidable manner right smack in the middle of a courtyard or road so as to be noticed and awed. What we learned when we moved here is that Aix had been riddled with the plague, so to bring in water, the Aixois politicians decided to not only build faucets all over the city, but beautiful fountains of all shapes and sizes. There is one fountain in the city that still has warm thermal water while the rest are cold. However, I discovered that the moss fountains which are in the middle of Cours Mirabeau, the main drag of Aix, are both supposed to have warm water too. So this forced me to go to the Tourism Office to solve this mystery. It turns out, after waiting in line for 15 minutes, wondering if I really needed to know, that the warm water will come in the winter. For the summer, they turn off the warm tap and bring in the cool water as to keep the hot city a little cooler.

Mystery solved. Now I can sleep.

New town, one-handed

2009-09-26T18:22:00.003+02:00

So we've moved...yet again. This time, it's temporarily in Aix-en-Provence, the heart of provence where, oh yeah, thermal spas used to and still exist!!! We officially put our bags into the apt on Sep 7...at night...and then early morning Sep 8, I went into labour. So in essence, Aix and the new apt has been my reality only since coming home with Mila on the 15th.

So far, so awesome. Mila sleeps! Mila eats! Mila farts like a trucker! Which means exploring our new home has been actually pretty easy and fun to do. So far, we've become regulars at the everyday food market, finally found the Saturday market today (the best market in France, hands down, well, from what I know of this country), figured out where to print stuff for Axel (across the street...it's his regular hangout), found an ADEQUATE boulangerie for all things croissant (this will be another project I hope to partake in the coming months), and have figured out a way to nap whenever possible.

Even though this blog was originally about Alsace, we must move on. Still debating about the possible blog title change. Though Alsace was really the beginning of this adventure, so I don't really wanna lose it. So because it's really about French living, I will refrain from posting my new mama and papa trials and tribulations on here and focus on our new digs and all things that come with it. However, I will post a few things about birthing and having kids in france that I think will be interesting to those out of the country who read this blog, only because of the great healthcare debate/debacle happening in the good ol' US of A. It's been very interesting to see what our money and insurance gets us (and her).

So I hope to get back on the blog bandwagon sooner than later and give you all some insight to Aix, provence, and southern french administration (if you thought Strasbourg administration was an adventure...!)

for a little blog break...

2009-09-08T09:35:00.003+02:00

...we just had pickles! At 6:08 am this morning (Sept 8, yes a month early). It's a girl. Mila (and maybe Mahara...still trying to figure out if this works ok in french), and 2.27 kg (5 lbs almost exactly). She came out after 24.5 hours of some pretty intense work and a lot of debate whether it would be possible for me to get her out because of the narrowness of the pelvis. Well, she made it out through the pelvis so now we know the weight limit of birthing for me. My water broke at 5:30 am on the 7th so we had no choice but to birth today.

Axel is pretty tired having to snooze on various chairs all day and night but he has started the real entry for this. Just thought I would let you all know that we're parents!

where to buy a bike in köln...and how to test your german

2009-08-10T15:04:00.001+02:00

this comes with a disclaimer that I was only brought to this shop unknowingly.

Russian 1 had come to class a bit late way back in June and squeezed himself in the corner of the room next to the window, where there was already little space. Every 5 minutes, he would get up and look outside the window. At the break, he ran out and I watched him go and check his bike locks. When he came back in, I asked him if it was a new bike, and he said yes and he put two locks on it to make sure it wouldn't get stolen.

We have looked around quite a few bike stores and noticed that it is way more expensive to buy a bike here than in France, so I was curious to how much he paid for his bike. He told me that after class, he will bring me to the store. Price is too crazy to talk about in class.

Well, did that every peak my curiosity. After class, a few of us went to check out his new bike. Aluminum frame with apparent good quality welding, disc brakes, racing wheels...he got this and another similar bike for 300 euros total. wow. Axel and I have seen crappy bikes for more than 300 euros, used crappy bikes go for 100-200 euros. So yeah, this was a good price. Especially for 2! So we all went to the bike store together. It is on my way to school and I noticed it but saw that all they had in the front of the store was crappy old used bikes. When we went in, spoke russian, he took us to the back of the store...and there they were. Gleaming frames, with no labels, all waiting to be ridden. The owner was very wary of us being there, since there was only one who could speak russian, but he reassured him that we were all friends.

So now I can safely say that I know where to buy a bike in Köln. And that I'm in with the russian mafia.

Anyway, a few weeks later, I brought our roommate Jonatan and two of Axel's co-workers, Sarah from Scotland and Matthieu from France. I tried to get him to show us the back room without asking but because we weren't russian, there was no way he would. However, this was the first time I tested my german, in a real setting. Not only did we manage to purchase two bikes, but I got a discount through a bit of bargaining. I managed to impress myself. I realize now it's all about the confidence when you speak german. The sentence structure is crazy, but when it comes down to it, can almost be avoided entirely when bargaining for bikes with russians who really just want you out of your store.

Banned

2009-08-07T09:44:00.002+02:00

It's true. Pregnancy really fills you up with raging hormones that cause you such weird emotions. Yesterday I cried when I read about Sam, the koala that was rescued last year during the Australian bush fires who drank water from a bottle, had to be euthanized.

This morning I sent Axel an article about some french tourists who died in a flash flood during an excursion on Mt. Pinatubo, the volcano near my town in the Philippines which erupted in the early 90s...and that region is still feeling the repercussions. Anyway, I thought it would be interesting for Axel since he went with my uncles on the exact same trip in 2006. That's all. There were no tears shed for this story. Just out of pure interest.

This was his response:

"Ok you are officially banned from reading depressing news from around the world.
Headlines that contain the words:
Afganistan
Iran
Iraq
Dead
Missing
Torture
Kidnapped
Gangs
Hurricane
..any natural disaster
Politics
North Korea
homeless
refugee
kids
woman
racism
plane
crash
survivors
shooting
bomb
suicide
money
corporate
business
drugs

..are all off the headline LIST!! until next year.

That leaves:

Home
Familly
Sports
Cycling
Hockey
Tourism
Design
Technology
Medicine
Post Cards
Health
Cooking
Gardening
Kids
Parenting
Dogs
Cats
Pets..especially articles that provide tips on resisting the urge to get one
Interior design
Sustainable development
Green energy
Space"

It's as if Axel is intentionally wanting to turn my brain to mush.

KSD

2009-08-06T00:40:00.009+02:00

Last Sunday, Axel and were accompanied by Lisa, our landlady, to the Asian Museum. She really wanted to take us because she thought we would would enjoy it since we know much about Asia (by default and by circumstance). To be polite, we said yes, and in reality, it was pretty cool. The only thing is that it was all in German, so in a way it was good to just cruise through and not be able to read anything.

However, the highlight of the trip was not the museum, or the free food we got at the cafe because it just reopened, but the cemetery we went through to get there! It's called Melaten and it is just south of where we live (a total of 8 minutes on the bike). It's HUGE and it's beautiful. Cemeteries to me, always look the same, with the tombstones all in a row amongst the grass and dead flowers. But Melaten is full of trees! And tall ones! There are benches everywhere, with little old ladies taking care of their loved ones' plots. It's HUGE too. The link when you click on Melaten takes you to some famous people buried here. The only ones that I think are interesting is the inventor of Eau de Cologne and the woman who died twice.

OK, enough preamble. On our way back through the cemetery, I almost fell off my bike when I saw this:

and just to make sure you see what we saw, here's a closeup:

Appropriately, this was also the weekend that Axel brought home my birthday present. The snoogle. He's been freaking out about how I've been sleeping since I've been carrying a medicine ball in my gut, and the romantic gesture for my birthday resulted in this purchase. It's actually taken a few days to get used to, but now I'm all over it...except when Axel decides he is too. This is evidence that this gift was actually not for me.

I think it's fitting to rename the snoogle our KSD.

PS. I have much to catch up on. The U2 concert! The end of german! The russian mafia bike store! The newest nun! The trips to Strasbourg! Stephane's trip to Köln! And Pickles the giant baby! Apologies for the slack blog this month. I was hit with fatigue during the hot hot weather, and the traveling on top of that got the best of me. But now I'm committed to writing all of these down and sharing.

PPS. This blog entry is dedicated to Jean-Marie, who shares my love for poorly thought english signs in foreign lands. Better than engrish sometimes.

The epic weekend begins with a day of 5 cities

2009-07-20T13:27:00.004+02:00

This weekend Axel and I went to Berlin to see the U2 concert. This will be my next blog, but I must first tell you about the Friday, the crazy start to the crazy weekend.

Axel's colleague's partner just gave birth a few weeks ago. Being Canadian and basically living parallel lives to us, we decided that they would be the best people to ask about getting an english-speaking doctor to help us get some tests done that our Strasbourg doctors needed me to do. Unlike in Canada, the US and in France, the labs to get blood work done are not separate but rather part of your doctor's visit in Germany. This means you must make an appointment with a Germany doctor before they suck out all of your blood.

I had spoken to an english-speaking midwife when we first arrived. She was great BUT she is on vacation until the end of August. In addition, to get tests, I would still need to see a doctor anyway, so we went to the doctor recommended by Jason and Laura. I emailed the doctor to ask if it was possible to get tests done and just introduce myself. And hope that she would be able to recommend someone near where we live. Well, it turns out her english isn't as good as we thought it would be, because her response to her email was "We are waiting for you the 16.7. at 11.30 Dorotheenstr." So I got myself an appt. (and now I just realized that I arrived a day AFTER I was supposed to...god pregnancy brain is crazy). Anyway, it turns out that getting there was an adventure. It's on a secondary tram line, which means I could take the slowest tram on earth, stopping every 5 blocks from Köln to Bonn, without having to get off. OR I could do a 3 transfer trip, saving myself about 20 minutes. Being a lot less mobile makes decisions like this easy. However, taking transit in Köln means that you must have enough change to pay for the trip or have a german credit card. I, unfortunately, had neither, but because Axel and I have rebelled for months without paying, I figure I would pay for a ticket half-way and see if I get caught. Well, I got caught, but I feigned ignorant and won.

I got to Bonn and, thanks to google maps (which finally didn't fail me in Germany), I got there in 10 minutes. The office was very dated (from the 50s) but clean. The two nurses were very friendly and when I gave them my card, they didn't take the numbers or anything. In fact, they didn't charge me at all. I still don't understand why not, because all of this was in german, so I'm still waiting for my bill, or whatever. They made me fill out a bunch of forms, and because we did forms in german class in week 2, I had no problem doing it! Woohoo! Deutschkurs comes in handy!

Then I got taken to the back room to get my blood taken, pee and weight. The nurse was super nice and had written questions she needed to ask me in english on a piece of paper. Unfortunately, she didn't understand my responses so I had to pull every german word I knew to respond so that she could kind of get what she was looking for. And then I met the doctor. The only way I can describe her is that she looks like she should be a teacher in Harry Potter. Her hair is all over the place, with clips hanging from random spots that don't actually hold any hair in place, and she was dressed in layers so you couldn't really tell what the actual outfit was. In essence, she was like a cat lady without all of the cats. And when we started our appt, I knew she had a heart of gold. She is one of these women who LOVES babies, loves pregnant bellies and loves her job. We went through some questions and she would ask me, put her pen down and look at me in the eyes to listen to what I had to say. This experience is a stark contrast from my french doctor who's all business with no time for chitchat or eye contact. Then she did an ultrasound and turned to me to say, "Wow, it is HUGE. Can you still breathe?"

I told her I could, and I really only stop once going up 6 flights of stairs to our apt everyday, and she was impressed that I was still able to walk around. So she then asked if the father was really really tall, because she checked the bone growth of not-so-little pickles. I told her no, and she point-blank asked if I was sure Axel was the father. So, we have a giant on our hands. She checked the blood flow of the uterine arteries (both excellent) and the liquid flow of the umbilical cord (also excellent) and then did all of the measurements and figured out that pickles was at the maximum growth for the number of weeks. In other words, it's huge.

So then I left, made my way back to the train station and just backtracked. On my way there, the brakes of the tram started a small fire, which didn't seem to alarm the driver who came and extinguished them during a 5 minute tram break! Ax and I met at the main station, figured out how to get to the middle of nowhere airport where Ryan Air flies from, and started the other half of my day. We hit Krezfeld to switch to get to Weeze, the location of the British Air Force and the emptiest airport on earth. And then we got to Berlin.

2009-07-11T10:57:00.013+02:00

Last month, our dear friend, Erin, came all the way to Köln go visit us after a greuling 14 hour interview in Heidelberg (Yes she got the job!!). She is the reason why Ax and I are in Europe in the first place as she had done the ISU summer program (called SSP for more acronym lingo) in 2006 and came back a full blown space geek.

So being surrounded by space cadets meant a day of space for us! We went to axel's awesome job to check out the European astronaut centre! This is THE training center for all European astronauts, training that is a minimum of 4 years with various exercises like learning how to fix something in space by mimicking Zero gravity in a ten meter deep pool. Most parts of the international space station has been made to a 1:1 scale (not all though, because the whole thing is the size of 2 football fields) and astronauts practice orientation and experiments in them. There is a simulator for the Russian mobile that took our own Bob Thirsk up just last month which they practice take off and landing. All of the experiments have their own rooms for practicing the experiments. A fellow canadian and isu alum, Jason, who coincidentally had a wife who just had a baby a couple of weeks ago, walked us through all of the modules and was still thrilled by it all. But this was not the coolest part.

In the storage room of ISS:

Erin, Jason and I:

On one of the exercise machines, trying to look like I'm defying gravity:

Axel pretending to do an experiment:

Jason and Erin in the EAS lobby:

Stewart, yet another Canadian (from Newfoundland) and isu alum, showed
us his area-the control room!!! Most of us reference "Houston" from
the Apollo 13 movie as the control room but in reality it is just the
main one. Europe has two-one in Munich and this one! Russia also has
one but is segregated from the rest. We lucked out because Stewart was
around to show it all to us. The astronauts were sleeping so we
couldn't see them but we saw all of the camera views of the iss of
earth! Wow. It is pretty amazing to see our planet from far away. He
showed us the astronauts' extremely packed schedule (in 5 min
increments!) and all of the things they monitor to ensure all is safe
on board. What was really impressive was the enormity of the planning
and monitoring of 6 people just above our heads. And the sacrifices
these people are making for the advancement of human knowledge of
space and in reality, our own planet. I didn't really get excited
about it until I had seen how many people are really involved in this
cause. And how Stewart and Jason still get excited about what they do.

Here we are in the control room...in the background you can see a feed of "Houston", the main control room.

Erin then got treated to another typical Köln day when we have
visitors - pouring rain. To add to the desolate city feel, it was yet
another holiday in germany so nothing was open. I think we now know
that for next time we tell people to bring an umbrella and make sure
not to come when it's an important day for Jesus.

The wrong day for an ill-fitting shirt

2009-07-01T16:30:00.003+02:00

This morning I realized that my favourite shirt has hit maximum stretch and is no longer wearable if I don't want massive cleavage, as my belly stretches it to the limit. But because I was in a hurry to make it to school early, I decided to wear it one last time and just hope that no one notices me popping out of my shirt.

I left 5 minutes early because today is Canada Day so, to celebrate, I decided to pick up a little pastry for german class. You have to get to the bakery early to get the good sweet brotchen or buns and because they are really cheap, they go fast. Well, I got there one customer too late and had to get the bigger (but still the same price) cake instead. Why I like the brotchen is because you don't have to deal with cutting them. Why is this important? You will see in a second.

I got upstairs and found that I was early enough so that only the new students that we are getting this week and our teenager were the only ones there. And when I say new students, I mean two priests. Yes, two priests to match our two nuns. And two gays. As the class trickled in, I went to get some plates and a knife to cut the cake. The two gay boys came in, took one look at the new additions, and looked at me cutting the cake...then american gayboy sat down and motioned for me to pull up my shirt...because not only was I showing way too much, but the priests were also taking note. It was the longest cake cutting I've ever done. It was downhill from there.

I ended up sitting beside one of the priests and my stupid cleavage was an obvious distraction. He kept staring at me...and then at my belly...and then at my hand. I thought I must have had cake on it, until the break when italian gayboy pointed out that I must have looked like a hooker in his eyes because here I was, boobs hanging out, pregnant in a tight shirt, and no wedding ring.

The class seems to get a little wilder and more foul-mouthed when we get new holy people for some reason. Today, we talked about being a fotomodell (model) and our teacher talked about how in Germany, everyone thinks that Heidi Klum is the devil. And then italian gayboy was asked about his tattoos so he took off his shirt to show them off. I spit up my water on the floor when this happened because he's a big, hairy man, so him with the nun and priests in the background was worth a photo (it was way too obvious to take a photo today, so I'm waiting until tomorrow). A little teaser on some of the tattoos: a polkadot bow tie around his neck, a chain that "hangs" from his neck attached to sunglasses on his chest, across his abdomen is written SUPERSTAR with a rollerskate flanking each side, a pencil tattoo behind the right ear and my new favourite, on each of his fingers on his right hand a letter that together spells CAKE because he loves cake.

Because it was their first day, the priests didn't have their books yet, so american gayboy lent them his book and we shared mine...they not only forgot to say thank-you, but they accidentally took his book home. We joked about how it would be sprayed with holy water when gets it back. I tried to make some small talk before they left by asking where they were from. They were not very friendly. In fact, they were borderline rude to me, but when they said "Providence", italian gayboy shouted, "Oh I had an ex-boyfriend from Rhode Island! Providence boys are adventurous!!"

Needless to say, we all decided to go for lunch to debrief. The russian mafia boys, the gayboys, and me, the pregnant hooker (as italian gayboy called me after he saw me "seducing" the priest with my cleavage and belly).

Russian mafia boys:

Gayboys:

It's not a drum solo!

2009-06-30T13:42:00.002+02:00

I have been experiencing some pretty funky moves by Pickles this past month. Mostly kicks and turns, but probably once a day, there are hard kicks on one side with really fast movements on the other side. I imagined this to be Pickles figuring out how to use the kick drum with his feet while drumming fast on a snare with its hands. But then I figured it out and looked it up: Hiccups!

There goes my idea of getting pickles to be the next drummer savant.

For those who are keeping tabs, Pickles will officially be 27 weeks big tomorrow (Wednesday). That means, according to these freaky baby websites, it is about 2 pounds (the weight of a head of cauliflower) and about 14 inches (35 cm) from tip to toe. It is very sensitive to light. I tested it. I held a light to my stomach and it moved away from it...and then I did it again, and it still moved away. It moves a lot when I am hungry, while I'm eating and then once I've had enough, gives me a big kick in the bladder and then rests until the next cycle. Also, when Axel's alarm goes, it starts to kick. It has actually kicked Axel in the back and in the butt so it made him get out of bed. It has also figured out a way to put itself in the most awkward spot in the abdomen while riding my bike so I have to slow down or stop all together until it decides to try another spot. And it likes using my ribcage as an upside-down perch. When it does this, I think about my little brother who was obsessed with bats when he was 4-5 and when asked about what he wants to be when he grows up, he said "Nocturnal." So maybe I am growing a part-human, part-bat, part-condiment in the belly right now.

So here's some food for thought. A girl we met through ISU (she did the summer program last year, is TAing this summer session, will be going to the master's this year and is dating one of Axel's classmates) just had a great article written about her. She was born at 28 weeks and was just over a pound. Not only did she survive, but now she's a rocket scientist. This has reassured me that if Pickles does decide to enter the real world way earlier than it needs to, it has a chance to not only survive, but also be good at math. Here's the article link.

not a total bust of a day

2009-06-29T17:14:00.002+02:00

Today was my "big" errand day. I had to pick up a train ticket at the main station for my friend Caroline (saved her 25 euros), then go and try to get a part for the bed we currently sleep on because apparently we broke it (although I suspect it was broken before...otherwise this will be the second bed we have broken in europe this year, and please don't think dirty thoughts because you shouldn't be), and then deposit our rent at our landlady's bank because to transfer money from a french bank to a german bank, we have to get mailed to us a special code (which meant that the special code got mailed to our Strasbourg apt) and pay 10 euros for the special transaction.

Another thing to note is that because we haven't established residence in Germany, we can't get a german bank account, so we have to stick with BNP in France, so we can take out cash for free at Deutsche Bank. Don't let the name fool you, because it's not the bank of Deutschland. There is only ONE Deutsche Bank downtown, ONE near our house and ONE in another area that is relatively in the vicinity that we hang out in. The other banks seem to have a hold on every other convenient location for banks and ATMs, so there have been times when Axel and I have been left in the lurch and have had to go home to get money, rather than pay 10 euros at another ATM. Yeah, TEN EUROS!!! Our Spanish roommate had the same problem we have, but for her, there was no sister bank she could go to, so she had to pay 8 euros for ever 100 euros she took out. I don't really understand how the EU could have organized 1 set of currency for the continent without setting up the banking system to do the same. And this is where France surpasses Germany - because in France, all of the ATMs are free with your french account. In Germany, it's not the same.

OK, back to my day. What I haven't mentioned yet is that Germany, like France and I am suspecting the rest of europe, has special hours of operation. What is unlike France where places are closed anywhere from 11h30 - 14h30, is that in Germany, some places are open all through the day, some are closed from 11-12, others 12-13 and still others 13-14. Today was a bust because I got to the bed store at 12h20 and it was closed from 12-13. Because I am a frequent pee-er now that Pickles has proclaimed my bladder his/her kingdom, I knew I couldn't wait for 40 minutes without access to a washroom. So I decided to get to our landlady's bank since I would be able to get there by 1 for the opening...except it closed from 1-2 so I missed both places. So I headed home, ate lunch and peed lots, and headed out again at 4. And then I missed the bank hours because it's open until 6 pm EXCEPT mondays (which was an asterisk and small writing exception...I will read this more carefully next time). And then when I went to the bed place, they told me that it was during assembly that the bed probably started to fall apart because someone torqued it too much and we needed to buy glue.

OK, so why isn't this a total bust? Well, we just found out that we rented our place in Strasbourg for July!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Relief! Now we don't have to worry about paying double rent, AND we can pay our medical insurance for the trimester!! Oh yeah, life is good.

Learning a new language with a mix of people, rather than burnt out university students, really is more fun

2009-06-29T14:32:00.004+02:00

I say this because the demographic of the class is as follows:

- 1 x 16 year old Turkish boy who's idea of fun is to try and bum smokes off the guys in the class
- 1 x nun from Japan who took a 9 week english course in Manila just before coming here, thus cannot communicate in any language except silence and awkward gazes (we don't know where the other one went. I have a theory that she was there to make sure that the nun we managed to keep, Sister Christophe, didn't have anyone in class tempting her into something bad)
- 2 x older people - man from Turkey (we still don't get if his name is Aslan or Mehmet...sometimes he uses Aslan and sometimes Mehmet...even the teachers are confused but whenever we ask which name to use, he just says yes) and woman from Poland who came here with her boyfriend after, gasp, DIVORCING her husband (she talks about the divorce in hushed tones)
- 1 x icelandic/croatian - yes, he really is from iceland. He moved here because there are no jobs in Iceland and he said that there are also no women to marry.
- 2 x russians - One guy was born in Georgia, moved to Moscow when he was 10, moved to London when we was 20 and now that he's 30, moved to Köln after meeting a Kölsch girl two months ago. The other couldn't find a job in Russia so came here but after a week, the government told him he needed to learn how to speak german so he is now taking german for 6 months.
- 1 x brazilian girl - I didn't realize this until we had a little gossip session with the gay boys, but she apparently complained about our teachers already because she said they couldn't teach. However, in order to learn how to speak and write german, I figure you have to do your homework (which she never does, I know because I sit beside her everyday), and make an effort to say things with a german accent, not a portuguese accent. Her favourite excuse after being corrected is that in portuguese, they don't have these weird accents.
- 1 x thai girl - she sits on my other side and has decided that I am magic. I mentioned that she thinks I healed her wrist (she convinced herself that without me, she would have needed a cast). She asked me if she could buy the baby a gift, and I said no because it's not necessary, but she told me that it's really for her because it would bring her good luck, so how can I refuse!? So today, she brought me pictures of stuff that she would like to buy for pickles, circled in a catalog. She brings me food every day and if I don't eat it all, she assumes i don't like it and tries a new food the next day. She is here because her younger boyfriend that she met in Thailand wants to marry her but they can't get married until she learns german (according to the govt).
- 2 x gay boys - One is from New Jersey and works at a french bistro near school (which has burlesque nights twice a month). He moved here because he fell in love with a boy online who has lived here for 20 years and is a hair stylist, who wants to make sure that I don't get a "butch cut that all pregnant women seem to think is flattering just before they give birth" so has promised to cut my hair in a flattering way before I pop. The other is originally from Italy, moved to London when he was 17 to pursue fashion, went back to Italy to continue, got a job in NYC for two years, went back to London and then the Netherlands. He then had a choice to go to San Francisco to get his master's in fashion design or settle down for a bit with his german boyfriend...so he chose Köln.

So, now that the intro is done, let me fill you in on why it's more fun and exciting to learn german with a mix of people, rather than the same dreary student crowd. Today, we were asked by our teacher what we did for the weekend. From the crowd, we learned how to say:

- I was grounded because my dad saw me smoking cigarettes with my friends
- I went to a gay bathhouse and felt very fat and hairy
- I went to church to pray and listen to very sad music
- I went to buy another bike from underground russian bike shop where bikes are 25% of the regular price. I can find you a deal if you want one.
- I was naked all weekend at home

During one of our breaks last week, the thai girl asked to take pictures of us. Most of the time, it's usually the girls left in the room while the boys smoke outside, but that day, italian gay boy was there and so got asked to take our picture. He said that Boy George (who you all must know...if you don't, shame on you) taught him how to look sexy in every picture - just blow out softly when the picture is being taken, and you will have that sexy model look. Then he made our nun do the madonna vogue pose, which she had no idea was not madonna, the virgin.

We also get some interesting skits when the gayboys are paired with each other. We have had one skit at a sexy lingerie store where one is asking where to buy some velcro lingerie for his strip show, and another that I did with one where he was the lesbian with bad hair and bad fashion sense, and I was the sales person trying to make her buy more fasionable clothes.

So yeah, no regrets about taking german. It really is fun.

Parrots of Ehrenfeld?!

2009-06-28T11:27:00.002+02:00

For those who have seen this documentary, you may have wished that you also had a wild flock of parrots in your backyard. We did.

And now, we do!!!! The park across the street from us has a flock of parrots living in the trees! Unfortunately, they move too fast to get a picture with my phone cam.

Some of you know that birds seem to have a problem with me. We have now attributed it to my newly-found superpower, electromagnetism. Axel is sure that this is screwing up the birds and thinking that they have to fly towards me like they are migrating. Anyway, two days ago I was riding through the park and I got side-swiped by one of the parrots. Sigh, the price you pay for having a superpower.

mein deutsch Kurs - monnat eins

2009-06-23T19:00:00.003+02:00

So we are ending the first month of german and can I tell you how fun and hard this language is? I thought learning french was a challenge. It's like easy math compared to german.

Here's why:

1. Artikels (articles) of words: feminine, masculine, neutral. Like in the latin languages like french, spanish and portuguese, BUT these don't have neutral. They also do not correspond to fem and masc in german. For example, the sun = le soleil in french (masculine) is die sonne in german (feminine). So you can't use instinct. There are a FEW ways you can tell if something is masc, fem, or neut but in reality, you have to memorize.

2. Plurals of words: So in english and those other ass-easy languages, to make something plural, you do something logical like add an -s. Well in german, you add either an -s, -en, er, -¨e, -¨er, -e, -, -nen, and so on. In other words, you not only have to know the word in german, its gender but also what it looks like pluralled!

3. W = V, V = F, J = Y, St = Sht, Sp = Shp, ch = almost sh, tsch = ch, ß = ss (sort of). I don't think I have to justify this with an explanation

4. capital Letters in the middle of the Sentence. Apparently, to distinguish nouns from adjectives. Yeah, because we really need to know.

5. numbers - here's where I somehow become a complete dyslexic and can't connect my sight to my brain. So when you want to say - 75, for example, you say "five and seventy". I thought french was hard with the 70-79 being 60 + 10-19, and 80 being 20x4 and 90-99 being 20x4 + 10-19. No, french has nothing on turning your brain completely inside out. You can't write a number while it is being recited because you have to leave a space between to fill it in. If you don't get this, try saying my phone number the way the french say it: 77-97-84-44 but in german: "7 and 70- 7 and 90- 4 and 80- 4 and forty...and then try to write that logically and neatly. Can't do it.

6. The making up of words by putting several together to make up the new word. Here's are some examples. I will put a line between the words put together:

- wollteppich - woll|teppich (woll = wool, teppich = carpet)
- herrenbekleidung - herren|bekleidung (herren = men, bekleidung = clothing)
- sportsbekleidung - sports|bekleidung (sports clothing)
- kaufhausplan - kauf|haus|plan (kauf = sell, haus = house, plan = map : store map)
- neunzhenhundertneunundneunzig - neunzhen|hundert|neun|und|neunzig = 1999

I will add to this but suffice it to say that instead of just making two words, they make a really long word that makes people who are learning freak out at its length. What I kind of like about it though, is that when I don't know the word, I make one up and sometimes, they understand!!!!

7. Nominativ vs Akkasativ vs. Dativ artikels - ah, this has continuously stumped my class. You have this in every language, but in german, the artikel changes IF it's a masculine word. And if it's a neutral word, you add an -s if you aren't using the word in the sentence. I won't try to give you examples or explain it, or else I will screw myself up and not be able to understand it myself. I am currently the only one in the class who gets when to use nominative articles, versus accausative, versus dative.

This is all I will post for now. Month 2, which I am still contemplating on whether or not I should do, will surely bring more of these posts!

My class, now 12, is still as varied as ever. The gay boys have decided to keep the nuns on their toes by writing and acting out dialogue that we have to make up. While everyone else's is a boring "I would like to find a computer to buy" dialogue, theirs was "I would like to buy sexy lingerie for my strip tease show" and "I am looking for cocaine and crystal meth" dialogues. Despite this, they actually made a significant effort to befriend the nuns, but the nuns wanted nothing to do with the tattoo-ridden colourful sassy men, so don't blame them. They are keeping the class entertained and not boring at all.

apparently i'm more than just round...

2009-06-23T18:37:00.002+02:00

...I'm also a healer!?!

Yesterday the thai girl in my class, who has brought me cherries to take home and always has food and water for me (she's like my backpack of supplies), asked me a question. She asked if I have ever had a child or if this was my first. I said yes, and then she requested something I've never been asked for. She asked me to hold her wrist because she fell last weekend and hurt it badly. She said that it would heal faster if I touched it because I'm pregnant with my first child and it would be the only time I had this power.

wow.

Of course I did it...felt like a total knob doing it though (everyone in the class was staring at us, wondering if I would do it).

When I told Axel, I got the best reaction - he was really mad that he didn't know about this before because we could've milked this new power for the last few months! Anyway, I have 3 months left, so if anyone needs a little healin', you know who to call.

full circle - back in strasbourg

2009-06-15T17:26:00.003+02:00

i am killing time at the internet cafe that i spent way too much time in last september while we waited to get hooked up at home. times have changed - it has moved into the new mall which means a whole new clientele. In other words, there are no dirty old men checking out dirty old porn, nor are there huge groups of teens playing online games (probably because the nez mall is far away from their school). but the french keyboard is still my enemy, as are the hardest chairs in the world.

I am in town for less than 8 hours to go to my doctor's appointment. It was pouring rain when i had to walk fifteen minutes there and fifteen minutes back, and as soon as i got on the tram, the sun came out. It is as if koeln (i am not even going to attept to find the umlaut) weather is following me.

Now that I have been here, had lunch with Caroline, and sat around a cafe, i can safely say that I miss Strasbourg. The feel of the city alongside the smells of the bakeries can't be beat. Nor can the friendliness of the french compared to the germans. I really didn't give the french much credit, but it is nice to walk into a store and be greeted by every sales person warmly! I was in Paris yesterday and realiwed that part of this french love is that i miss communicating properly. The grunts and pseudo german i have been speaking really doesn't warm the locals, so I know that this less friendly attitude is really my fault!

However, the challenge of not stepping in dog crap really does kill the mood.

Two nuns walk into a room...

2009-06-12T13:55:00.002+02:00

...just got two new students in the class. I snuck in a photo with my phone (I think god will officially strike me down if I wasn't on the list before).

My two gayboys then got jealous and made me take a picture of them. I love german class!

Growth spurts sind nicht Spaß!

2009-06-12T08:29:00.000+02:00

So I have noticed that when women are pregnant, belly growth is not gradual but rather comes in spurts. Last Saturday, Axel and I went out with our friend Daria (another ISU student who is in Luxembourg for her internship) for the day. We walked around the city and ended up at the chocolate museum. The day started off fine but as it progressed, so did my aches and waddle. It had gotten to the point where Axel looked at the belly and was shocked to see that he noticed a difference from the morning. I normally walk without a waddle, but for some reason, that day, there was no stopping the new swaying of the hips. I noticed the belly too, not only because of the largeness but also because it was starting to hurt to carry around. My back was dealing with it poorly so I sat when I could.

The next day I could barely stand up. And the belly was still huge. So Sunday was a write-off for everything but laying around.

However, on Monday morning, I was fine again. And the belly was bigger but not as big as Sunday. And my back wasn't sore, nor was my belly. I spoke to my friend Tara who knows two other women who are pregnant (due the same time as me coincidentally) and she was amused to hear me say this because she heard the same thing from her friends just recently. So I think what is happening to the body is that it tries to keep things the same (in science terms, it tries to maintain homeostasis) and does it until it reaches a critical point where it can't anymore, and then bam, growth spurt. This is the 3rd time I've experienced this and every time I am wiped out physically and spend 2-3 days just exhausted and sore. It's amazing what our bodies are able to deal with.

Little Pickles has definitely had a growth spurt. Axel felt it kick for the first time on May 25th, which freaked him out a bit, and now I can see my belly move whenever it kicks. I am really conscious of where he/she is chillin' out too and I can tell when it is ready to move. The latest trick Pickles has is to kick hard in the middle of the night to wake me up and force me to pee. So he/she is definitely learning how to get my attention.

I've been experimenting with music and sounds to see what Pickles responds to. We initially narrowed it down to music with a deep bass (with its first favourite being from the Bach Cello Suites (No. 4 in E flat major, BWV 1010: Prelude) but now I think Pickles is really into all things string as long as there is bass in the song. It doesn't respond to any of the pop divas (Cher, Madonna, Britney) or the sounds of ukelele (sorry Jack Johnson) but it loves jazz, classical and heavy metal (sorry neighbours). And cuban music...not brazilian or spanish...it is definitely cuban. Oh, and it likes one Shakira song (Anne, this might be your belly dancing gene coming out). How I have been running this experiment is that when Pickles responds to a song, I put it in a list of songs it kicks to. Then I mix it in with songs it doesn't kick to. And then I see when it kicks. Pickles is very consistent as to what it likes and doesn't. Or what it likes to kick to and what it doesn't! Still trying to decide if it likes to kick when it likes or dislikes something!!

Another reason for Pickles kicking is when I'm hungry and when I'm eating. As soon as I get hungry, it kicks. And when I'm eating, it kicks. But as soon as I'm done, the kicking's over.

So my next set of experiments are to see if I play music it kicks to just after I eat to see what takes kicking precedence - music or food!

Wires crossed

2009-06-09T22:22:00.003+02:00

Lisa, our landlady who we live with, speaks english, french, dutch and of course, german. Her french and english are very good, but once in a while, there is a miscommunication.

Tonight while we were making dinner, Lisa was telling us she had a really good meat dish for lunch...called rind or something like that. I asked what kind of meat and she had to think about it while we shouted out "is it from a pig? a sheep? a goat? a cow?" until she exclaimed, "It's a man part of a cow."

Axel and I both nodded our heads and I said, "Is it a common german meat to eat?", while in my head, with Axel's expression surely agreeing with my brain, "why the hell did I just ask if eating 'man parts' of a cow is common in this country!?! i really don't wanna know!?"

Anyway, she said yes, it's very common...and then a minute later she double-checked what she said and then stated, "Beef. That's the word." Then she left to tend to her daughter while Axel and I collapsed in silent guffaws.

German class

2009-06-09T16:06:00.002+02:00

It's week 2 of german sprechen! My class has grown from 4 to 10, with every growth reaping more and more interesting people. There are three americans, all gay, who have found german partners in the city via the internet. A fashion designer, a stylist, and an artist. There is an older woman from Poland who has been here for 3 years but can't speak a word of german until now. A Brazilian woman who has been here since December, a Thai woman who has been here since February, a dude from Iceland (!), and another from mother Russia (this is how he refers to Russia each time someone asks where he's from).

We have two teachers, each excellent but with very different styles. Christina (Mon-Wed) will rarely use english to explain because there are two people who cannot understand it, which is excellent for us to keep it immersion, and goes really fast through the lessons, which I think is way more stimulating than being really slow. Michael, who we have on Thursdays and Fridays, explains a lot in english and goes slower, BUT breaks down the words and phrases so we can understand and pronounce each word correctly.

We have just started the lessons on how to fill out forms, and asking about citizenships, birthdates, family, etc. This has been fun since german numbers are extremely long to say (although, in my opinion, much easier than french because there is no 4x20 +17 = 97 numbers, for example!). One thing that my teacher makes sure I learn is how to say things related to pregnancy, like I have no kids but I will have one soon; how many months along I am; etc. She teaches me this in front of the whole class, which would normally be boring for the rest of the class, except now everyone uses it. For example, Emmanuele, the gay american fashion designer, was asked by my teacher if he has any children. He replied, "No, i have no children, and I am not having any soon because I am not pregnant." Now everyone uses it when we say our introductions! Ah, yes, the beauty of having a small number of phrases you can say in a language.

What is this place we are always referring to as paradise?

2009-06-06T16:55:00.000+02:00

Finally, a blog about our favourite place on earth - Baden-Baden. We discovered this late in the Strasbourg year with the other students, and I can say without a doubt, that we are all kicking ourselves for the tardiness.

Baden-Baden is in Germany, but only 45 minutes away from Strasbourg by car (via the autobahn, where there are no speed limits). In the last few weeks of ISU, we had managed to fill X cars to the max (5 people) to partake in this pilgrimage to heaven.

Why heaven you ask? I will describe it for you, and then I urge you to go on the website which I will post at the end. It's one of the original modern-day spas. Baden means bath in german, thus it's bath bath germany. The city has a reputation of being the prettiest city in Germany, and I couldn't agree more. It's small, but has everything you could want in a 10 minute walk around. And what is central to the city is the thermal baths. Caracalla is the big spa. The current pricing is for 2 hours - 14 euros, 3 hours - 15 euros, and 4 hours - 17 euros. But because we always have more than 10 people, we get a group discount so 4 hours - 14 euros. What this will get you is four hours of sitting in naturally heated, mineral water in several different pools and jacuzzis. Each pool has a unique feature and is either outside or inside. There is the one at 32 deg C with a current - my personal favourite. This pool also has two jacuzzis within the pool which are hotter (I think 38 deg? but not sure). And there is the big mushroom which rains hard on you in the middle. This pool is outdoors so you can a lot of sun and fresh air as well. The other pool is 34 deg C, and has lounge seats built into the walls with bubbles or jets for a back massage, throne seats with bubbles for a body massage, and in the center is a crazy turbulent bubble area which has bars you need to hang onto if you want to stay in the area because otherwise you are thrown out by the bubbles. There's also a nice waterfall which many use to massage their backs.

Inside there is another 34 deg pool which is huge and has many of the same features as the outer pools, but there are three different levels you can sit in as well. And then there are the saunas (a special salt one which is supposed to help your lungs) and a mint one which I think smells like pee. And there are lounge chairs all over, some outside, some inside, and some with heat lamps too. That is the first floor.

The second floor is the naked floor! What we learned is that in Germany, spas and saunas are always naked. Baden-Baden is one of the only ones in the country which has a non-naked area. Many felt weird about it at first, but then when you get up there, strip down and start your regime, you realize how you really don't want to put your wet bathingsuit back on and want to stay naked forever. The problem for me on this floor is that I can't actually do a lot because most of the areas are saunas which are way too hot when you are filled with hormones and fetus. However, because the nudity is addicting, I stay up there as much as I can.

So that's Caracalla in a nutshell. There's a second spa which is called Freidrichsbad and is technically part of the same spa, but in a different building and has a completely different feel. Axel and I finally did it the day we moved to Köln. It's a 17 step regime, with the option of being scrubbed down by very friendly staff with strawberry soap and a really hard brush (even though we both asked for the soft one). There's showers, and hot rooms, and pools of all temperatures. And at the end, there is a room full of mirrors and lotion which you smother all over (or for an extra 10 euros, you can get one of the staff to do it for you, which I think is weird and a waste of money), and then the last step - the nap in a warm towel and blanket for exactly 30 minutes. They take you into a room which is decorated like a ballroom with exceptionally high ceilings, and is filled with very clinical looking beds arranged in a cult-like circle. They fill them in order of how you came in, so there are always others wrapped up like mummies in warm-towels and blankets in the bed next to you. Then they tell you, 30 minutes to sleep, and then you just lie there like a freshly swaddled baby and try to get to sleep. After exactly 30 minutes, someone comes and grabs your toe to let you know that time is up. And then it's over. I actually liked it a lot, mostly because of the lotion and nap, but also because I felt like there was a real routine to it all. The only thing you have to watch is that if you follow the times exactly, you will be done way earlier than you need to be...so spend a lot more time lounging in your favourite spots! What was kind of weird and slightly irritating is that because I am pregnant with an obvious pregnant belly, it gave people permission to come up and touch it and ask about my pregnancy. It's always weird to talk about this with people you don't know, but to be naked and be touched on the belly takes it to a whole new level! Luckily, that only happened in two stages, and one being the sweaty room stage, so I could have a good shower after. I didn't realize how much I didn't like my belly being touched, let alone rubbed, by anyone, until now.

I should mention that my first time I went, because I was hypersensitive to heat, I thought not to do the pools and did a massage and body wrap (with cocoa butter) instead. What I didn't realize is that they aren't really prepared for pregnant women, so the massage wasn't really that comfortable. People who have done the massage have raved about it, so I know it was just my experience. And yes, you are naked. The body wrap experience was hilarious. The woman who performed it had very limited english (though was leaps and bounds better compared to my german), so she brought me to the area for the wrap and declared "SHOWER TIME" at which point, she grabbed my towel and pointed to a shower she just started for me. I went in, and then she took another hose and started to blast the areas that she thought needed more attention. Then she turned the water off and lay me down on a table and started to smother me with cocoa butter, as if I was a turkey in basting mode. There was nowhere she didn't smother if that's what you are thinking. Then she wrapped me in this piece of paper and lowered the table, which turns out was a water bed that was heated with jets. So for half an hour, I was in a paper cocoon, covered head to toe with this slippery cocoa butter, simmering in this hot waterbed which had jets to massage 12 different parts. Once in a while, like you do with a turkey, she would come to check on my progress, peeling back my cocoon and checking my doneness. And then I was done. She raised the bed and declared "SHOWER TIME!" Unfortunately I was so slippery I couldn't get out of the bed, so she had to carry me out, and then threw me into the shower, and once again took the second hose to get those hard to reach parts. Then the shower turned off and she declared "TOWEL TIME!" to which she had a HUGE warm towel, open in her arms, waiting for me. I stepped to it and she wrapped me up like I was a little kid and gave me a nice little hug to indicate I was done. Then she led me to a room with soft music and mood lighting and declared "RELAX TIME!" and there I sat until she came back 15 minutes later to let me know it was "GOODBYE TIME!".

While I really hate to stereotype, the german spas are exactly how you picture them. There are clocks everywhere so you aren't late for your exit time, and the environments aren't as relaxing as you would imagine a spa to be. But I love it.

We found another spot in Köln called Neptunbad. It's only 6 minutes away and it's not as extensive by any means, but it's good enough for the once in a while urge to sit naked in a pool with strangers.

Here's the link. I suggest you make this a stop if you are in the German, France, Swiss area. Totally worth it.

http://www.caracalla.de/home/en/index.html

Why I am writing this blog now is that we just found out that Neptunbad is open until midnight every day (INCLUDING sunday) so guess what we're doing after dinner tonight!?!

Commuting

2009-06-06T11:47:00.006+02:00

With a 24-25km commute to work on my bike, you can imagine that this is the highlight of my day. In the last two weeks I put in about 500km of riding in, about 250km of those spent completely lost. Here are a couple of shots along the way..

Not sure

what is going on here, but this was taken on the rail bridge that goes into downtown. For some reason there are thousands of locks attached to the gate...must be art or something. Notice the Dom in the background..and absolutely huge Cathedral. Rani and I are planning to visit it today so expect more pictures later.

Pretty shot of the Dom from the other side of the mid-Rhine (Strasbourg is on the low-Rhine..might explain why the tap water in Cologne taste's so much better)

So I was riding along last weekend through some forest when suddenly I come to a clearing and here these guys viciously attacking each other with medieval tools of the trade...and I thought I was behind on the news!

Here's a weird factoid about Cologne..on Thursday moprning I was surprised to bump into a bunch of sheep on my ride into work. They were all hanking out doing the grazing thing on the banks of the Rhine, right downtown. The other interesting thing is that I was fully dressed with arm and leg warmers as I was soo cold. Well it turns out that these two things are related. Apparently it always gets cold at the beginning of June, and this is when they take all the sheep out as they prepare them for the great summer sheering. But you have to be careful and wait until the weather picks up again otherwise you have a heard of trembling sheep.

First couple of weeks at the European Astronaut Center

2009-06-06T11:21:00.002+02:00

Ok so while Rani is out there in the streets dealing with learning all things German and random French SNCF dudes, my life has been much more conventionnal at the EAC. When I first got there the place was a buzz with the Soyuz launch transporting three additional astronauts to the international space station. This is a bit of a special occasion for a few reasons. One this is the first time that the ISS will host six astronauts, so now we can actually do experiments up there rather than just continuously building and fixing the ship. Two, Frank De Winn a Belgian Astronaut is part of the crew of three and in a few months will become the first non-american or non-Russion to take command of the ISS. And three, but not least, Bon Thirsk our Canadian astronaut is part of the mission..some of my ISU buds are involved in an experiment that he's going to complete on the ISS. For me this was a great start to my internship as I got to watch the launch from the Medical Operations control room where the European support physisians and biomedical engineers (BME's)monitor the progress of the launch and make sure that their astronauts remain healthy.

The critical moment came two days later when the Soyus capsul docked with the ISS and they were finally, after about 1.5 hour hatch leak checks, able to open the door and transfer to the ISS living space. I was in the control room at the time, where the BME's were actively monitoring the progress. There was a moment of drama when suddenly we lost the images and could no longer see the astronauts. Oops! turns out somebody pressed the wrong button in Houston.

My second week at the EAC was a lot less exciting as most of the staff had taken off for some much needed vacation now that there astros were safely floating at 400km above. So I guess it was time for me to actually start working on my project. My internship is in the Crew Medical Support Office (CMSO) and I work with the guys who do long term planning for the division...cool love planning. So they came to the realization that there's no real formalized training for space medical doctors in Europe or Canada. My job is to make sure that this is true, figure out what kind of jobs out there, and provide some recommendations on what should be included in an eventual master's program that is being developped at King's College in London. So this means that I spend most of my time e-mailing and talking to people on the phone which suits me just fine..as you might have noticed I like to talk. Also I want to create a survey that you will all see in the next couple of days as I will be spamming all.

The highlignt of last week was swimming in the EVA astronaut training pool. This is the biggest pool I've ever seen. It's 27m long as it is wide and 10m deep! They open it up for employees for an hour once a week. For the last 40 minutes they organize a "friendly" polo match.. Cool. I asked around what the rules were, but was assured that there were no rules except to shoot the ball into the nets after a minimum of three passes. Ok fine I can handle this...crickey I didn't realize how intense water polo is! After about thee minutes I was totally knackered. Then somebody passed me the ball for some reason. Instantly I had three German girls on top of me trying to sink me into the pool..luckily I'm pretty good at holding my breath under water and tried to dive away. But this turns out to be really difficult while holding a ball that really wants to float. I eventually had to let go of the thing and swim away fearing for my life. It's only later that I found out the second crucial rule..let go of the ball or they will sink you. I also realized after about 15min of play that everybody was wearing boyancy belts! Punks! Next week will be my revenge...

Un peu de französisch

2009-06-05T14:54:00.003+02:00

After german class today I went to the main train station of Köln (Köln-HBF) to get my train tickets for my extremely expensive doctor's appt in Strasbourg. We finally got health care but it's now for the wrong country. This aside, we discovered that it's about twenty euros cheaper to go from Köln to Strasbourg via Paris than it is to get there straight. And it's also cheaper to buy the tickets from the french system (sncf) than the deutsche bahn. So we saved a total of sixty euros but with this comes a price - you must deal with a french sncf employee to get your tickets. The option to mail your tickets is voided when you don't live in France so you have to use the little sncf boutique, talk to a real frenchman, and pay a 5 euro "convenience" fee.

I got there with my credit card I used and all of the reservation codes for all of my tickets. I was ready. Zee man was most definitely french so I could revert back to a language I semi-know and get my tickets and leave.

But of course there's a problem. Apparently one of my reservetion codes (trip from Paris to Strasbourg) could not actually exist. This disturbed me because I made a special effort to write them down to make sure they were correct. I actually wrote them down, checked them three times and then went on the website to check them again, as this has happened to us before where we had the wrong code. This number had an actual digit in it rather than all letters, which made it, in his eyes, completely impossible to exist.

I told him I know that is the number so he should just try and see if it worked. But he refused. So instead of working with me, he just printed off my other tickets and assumed I didn't want the other ticket because it didn't exist. I asked him, extremely politely as Jean-Marie had trained me to do, if we could check my sncf acct so I could show him the ticket. But instead he kept writing my name in the box for locations and
"surprisingly" came up with nothing over and over again. So them he asked me to log onto my email acct so I could show him this impossible reservation code from an email he reassured me, didn't exist. So I sat as his desk and logged onto gmail. I found all three reservations and voila, the code with a digit! He was completely shocked.

But if you think he just apologized and printed my ticket, you must be using your non-
French logic. Instead he called someone to let them know about this mishap and to please correct the restrvation code because it was just too wrong for him to work with. Then, he asked ME to fill out paperwork with MY issue (i.e. the impossible reservation code) which he then stamped, crimped and stapled it in a fancy way so that it was officially my complaint. Then he proceeded to let me know that I chose to print my ticket rather than pick it up so he couldn't help me. I told him that I chose it because it was my only option, and if he looked, he would see that it would be his only option too. So of course he checked and once again, something that he thought was impossible was miraculously possible, so he made me write another complaint about this problem.

He then printed my ticket for me and soon after, became the most pleasant man I have encountered that morning. He asked me for the reason for the short trip so I told him our complicated lives about sort of still living in Strasbourg while sort of now living in Köln, which gave him the opening to complain about having to deal with Germans on a daily basis who didn't speak french or eat real baguettes.

There are times when I miss France. This was not one of them.

The best commuting city ever

2009-06-04T12:28:00.002+02:00

Köln (yes, if possible, this is the correct way to write and say it...confirmation by many sources, including my german teacher) is THE place to commute on a bike. The bike paths are on almost every sidewalk in the city and are coloured red to distinguish between the part for cars and/or pedestrians. All of the parts where you move to the sidewalk are ramped so there's no curb to deal with, and the bikes have priority over cars and pedestrians!

Axel has a 25 km ride to work everyday, which he decided was his way of starting cycling again after a 9 month hiatus of good hard cycling in Strasbourg. So far, I have yet to have him come home and tell me he didn't get lost on the way there and back. This is mostly due to the Rhine river crossing which he tries to avoid within the downtown core. This means that he needs to find the Rhine and then find a bridge to cross it, which means he needs to understand the signs, which means he has to learn a bit of german. Yesterday he discovered that East = öst so I think I may be seeing him a bit earlier tonight.

I have a 10-15 minute bike ride to german class. It's a really fun ride because I feel like I'm part of real commuter traffic with cars except we're all bikes. There are the speedy cyclists which ring passed you and crazy speeds (which isn't really necessary because I manage to see them at every red light). And there are the older, slower commuters who are just getting groceries. It's been 3 days for me and what is nice is that I have found a pace cyclist on all three days. She has a mountain bike with a multiple child chariot trailer in the back, 1 child seat in the front and another child seat in the back...and they are all filled with kids. 4 kids to be exact. She goes SO fast though, and passes people whenever she can. And I catch her halfway so my last 8 minutes of the commute is following this crazy mother haul a mess of kids around with the children swinging back and forth to the traffic.

I will try to get a picture tomorrow but I'm a little scared to go one-handed on the route since there are many things to dodge.

Yesterday I had a major faux pas cycling. I left the house at 8:45 (so I had to get my ass to class toute suite) so I biked hard and got there in 10 minutes instead of my usual 15, and ran up the stairs (it's on the 3rd floor), sat down, and almost passed out. I think my legs took all the blood from the rest of me. I had to open the window and fan myself but I was still really hot and faint and everyone in class noticed, so there was an emergency break to get me some water and sugar. This made for a very good segway for my teacher to introduce weeks and months since they found out I was pregnant and this was probably the reason I was feeling like this. Anyway, now the whole class knows how to say I am pregnant (ich bin schwanger, in case you ever need to know this german phrase).

And yes, german class is really fun. There are 5 people in my class from all over (one american, one polish, one brazilian, one english/georgian/russian, and me) and the polish woman knows no english so it's good for us to not use english as a crutch. The language is coming a lot easier than I expected, only because we are living in a house full of people who know I'm taking german and have made sure to converse with me throughout the week so test my skills and pronounciation. Deutsch lernen ist Spaß! (Learning dutch is fun!).

In NY between June 12 - July 11?

2009-06-03T14:50:00.000+02:00

Our newest friend and downstairs neighbour, Thekla Ehling, will have a show in Brooklyn! She will be there for the first week so if you have some time, go and check it out, and introduce yourself! She is an incredible photographer and truly lovely person. Information as follows:

Randall Scott Gallery is pleased to announce:

Thekla Ehling
Sommerherz
June 12th-July 11th
Artist's Reception
June 12th 7pm-9pm

In Thelka Ehling's series "Sommerherz" (Summer Hearts), the viewer is whisked back to a time in one's childhood where the lazy days of Summer seem to never end. The emotions and experiences captured by Ehling's camera are however, not of a picture perfect family vacation, but of lives being lived, thoughts being examined and a world being experienced. It is perhaps the melancholy way of saying this that best captures the tone of the atmosphere prevalent in Summer Heart . Ehling's images often show moments of isolation in which a young soul appears to glance at itself, as if in a trance. There are empty glances in which a current experience is clearly compared with something previously experienced. Ehling, however, emphatically refuses to decide how far these mechanisms of the unconscious are associated with the discovery of one's own identity. The scenarios of daily life encountered here forcefully reflect the reality that everything is in a state of flux in the early phases of life. There are images of the raindrops that trickle down the window pane, obscuring the view out, snowflakes that get almost imperceptibly caught in long hair and a wading pool that beckons on a green summer meadow. Ehling continually finds new motifs, fragile embodiments that have an almost mythical way of consolidating elements of natural moments. Childhood to her, it seems, is a question of temperature.

Thekla Ehling is based In Köln, Germany, this is her first solo exhibition in the United States and corresponds with the release of her book, Sommerherz.

Links:
http://www.randallscottgallery.com/thekla_ehling.html

Randall Scott Gallery
111 Front Street #204
Brooklyn, NY 11201
212-796-2190
212-796-2192 (fax)

www.randallscottgallery.com
info@randallscottgallery.com
Hours:
11am-6pm Wed-Sat
DUMBO First Thursdays 11am-8:30pm
Location:
Located on the corner of Front and Washington Streets
in-between the bridges
Trains:
F (York St)
A C (High St)

Sous-Louer-ing

2009-06-03T14:07:00.003+02:00

Putting up a sublet ad on craigslist resulted in 2 marriage proposals, 3 money embezzling schemes and a journalist who wants to interview us on subletting. Can we just get someone normal?

Yes, we are still trying to get someone in for July and August. We've posted on DNA (Strasbourg site), Vivastreet (free ad site in France) and Craigslist (Strasbourg-specific). I got two marriage proposals from India (I'm assuming it's because of my name) which I rejected based on their poor grammar. Both must have been from the same desperate set of people (else they are copying and pasting from the same translation website). The money embezzlement schemes were also rejected, also because of their grammar. They must realize that they need to polish up their scheme in order for people to fall for it. Also, they seem to all be interior designers and fashion consultants that are moving from dangerous places like San Diego CA (because of the fires) and Hurricane Katrina which I know, didn't just happen. The method of payment is also the same, so they need to change that up too (my employer owes me money so will wire you $10 000, of which you can take the rent from that, plus $500 for your troubles, and then give me the rest).

The last email we received came from a journalist who is doing a breaking news story on subletters. We gave her our number so if she's legit, she might call us. We figure that this might be our 15 minutes of fame, so we should take it. Subletting in Strasbourg - the mystery and excitement revealed.

We think that this might be the only way to get a real subletter...so cross your fingers for us!!!

Tschüs! (bye in german)

First week in Cologne/Koeln/Köln

2009-06-02T14:55:00.005+02:00

Week one synopsis of our move to deutschland.

Croissants - better than Vancouver but tastes like a hotdog bun compared to Strasbourg

Bread - love the heavy ryes and nut and grain filled bread. Good substitute for baguettes

Glutenfree products - haven't found a consistent source yet. One place by our house has been the best so far but I think we cleaned them out for a while

Credit cards and bank cards - not used! Merde alors. Or Scheisse as I should be saying now. This may pose to be a pain in the ass since we are relying on those for the first month.

Pools - still awesome, cheap and naked. There is a pool about 6 minutes by bike away from us which Axel and I went to last Saturday. It wasn't as cool as Baden-Baden, but it definitely was up there for places we must frequent. I also went to a real pool, where they have classes and lanes...also very cool. And even cheaper.

Produce - I miss France. Nothing is local except the asparagus which ends in two weeks. I did find two markets today but they were very expensive so I don't think I'll be hitting those unless they go down in price. It seems that most people travel outside of the city to farms a lot. I might have to tag along during one of these trips.

Smoking - it's awful over here for non-smokers. They smoke everywhere. Ugh. I forgot how bad your clothes stink after an hour at a restaurant or pub.

Nightlife - so far so good. Better than Strasbourg. Unfortunately I am so tired by midnight that I can't take full advantage of this yet.

Bikes - I thought Strasbourg was bike friendly! Nothing compared to Cologne. Cologne has their sidewalks divided so that the closest part to the road is for cyclists. Not only that but all of the curbs are ramped for your wheel to make a smooth ride. What's kind of crazy is that you are on the same sidewalk as pedestrians which makes for some potentially dangerous encounters. Thank god for my bell and my extremely loud voice.

Size - it's huge compared to Strasbourg. This is kind of nice to be in a bigger city again.

Transit - expensive (2.40 for 90 minutes) but it's just as fast as Strasbourg. We have jumped on a few times without paying Which will definitely keep our costs down! Like in Strasbourg we are very close to transit. Ax can catch the S-bahn straight to work and it only takes thirty minutes direct. We are at a crossroads of 4 different trams and trains. And transit runs all night long

Drinks - koelsh beer is where its at. They are served in thin, 20 cc glasses. We found out that there are over 1500 breweries in Germany, so there are many to try. Being pregnant, and having a celiac partner, however, makes this a little useless to us for now. You can also buy beer and just sit in the park and drink, which is what most people do in the summers. And you can drink on the streets. Here are people with beer on the tram.

Here is the beer bus. It is powered by all of the passengers peddling and you can see it everywhere.

Bathrooms- the ones you pay for Which is most of them are way cleaner than most you'll ever see. But it costs you at least 50 cents.

English spoken - everywhere. This is gute for now, but after a few weeks of learning the language, I hope this won't stay as my crutch.

Our house - we are sharing a flat with a woman and her 4 year old named Rana (who's nicknamed Rani, who calls me little Rani which I find weird since she's way smaller than me). And another roommate from Spain (Basque country, Vittoria) who is in advanced german. Despite not having as much privacy (and thus having to wear pants all the time...scheisse), I really like having different people around to speak german to. The house is filled with all of the family stereotypes too: bottom floor, gay couple; first floor - recent divorced man; second floor - family of four; our floor - single mom with child. Esther, the spanish girl, is hilarious. I love her. She loves sports and knows everything to do with anyone basque...but also loves teaching us german. The minor problem with learning from esther is that she has a thick spanish accent when she speaks german, so we have to make sure we're actually saying it properly once we get the words down. The house with all of the families have known each other since university days, and then they all lived in 1 house (where they shared 2 kitchens and ONE bathroom) for nine years before last year, when they moved here, into separate flats. This makes for a really cool group of people, where they watch out for things you might like to do, share 6 flats of eggs from the local farm, and have a nice chat in the garden.

Overall, it's been really exciting to be in a place where neither of us can communicate effectively. We both love this challenge, but I just started german classes today in hopes that we won't be oblivious of what is going around us for too much longer. It will be an exciting two and a half months!!!

Tschüs!

Our lives in a trailer

2009-06-02T14:33:00.004+02:00

The movie "Away we go" comes out today. It's about a couple who is pregnant and has no place to have the baby, so are crossing the country to try and find the right place with the right people.

We might not be trying to find the right place or people, but we are in that limbo stage where we haven't got a real plan as to where we are going to hatch. For a while, the plan was to do it in Strasbourg. We are part of the Alsace system, which has the best plan for people in France, we have a doctor that we've been seeing since the beginning, and we know the hospitals/birth centres are very good. But then we realized that IF Axel did find a job before the baby was born or before november 1st (when we would leave our apartment in Strasbourg), then we would have to leave and ditch the apt. And our landlord isn't too keen on renting it out past september as it is easier to rent out the place for the students.

Our back-up spot is Sanary, since we wouldn't have to pay rent and we could go when we need to. Ax hasn't gotten quite comfortable with the hospitals we have seen but I think it's just because we have seen the fancy ones in Strasbourg. I think this is the most reasonable plan so far.

And then there's the possibility of him finding a job "somewhere" in the world and us having to move there right away... we can't really prepare for that! If that happens, then we're ready to go. Our place in Strasbourg is basically packed, except for some books which can fit in a small box (which we can ditch somewhere) and two bags of winter clothes we left behind.

Yeah, we acknowledge our gypsy lifestyle. So when we saw that trailer for Away we go, it made us suspicious that someone has been spying on us and making a movie of our current state.

Marinating le spawn - first 3 months

2009-05-31T18:15:00.008+02:00

So Axel and I have some big news for those who haven't heard from us directly. We are expecting our F1 as they say in the bio circles. We figured this out on Groundhog Day, ironic since I kind of felt like this was a repeat of everything we went through last summer. Axel's dad and stepmom had just left us and instead of going back up from saying goodbye, I thought I would go and get a test to see if my instincts that I wasn't pregnant were correct. I was wrong.

I am exactly 22 weeks and 4 days, according to the pregnancy cycle wheels, which means I have 120 days left of marinating our little pickle, who we fondly call Pickles.

The reason behind this name stems from my out-of-nowhere first ever craving: pickles. We were in Adelboden, Switzerland, in February for some kick ass skiing in the alps. I had just finished and was wandering around with some friends when we realized we were in chocolate country, so we hit the local grocery store. When I walked in, there was a display of pickles, and without hesitation, I grabbed one, opened it and started eating. In my normal state, I remove all pickles from my plate, because I detest them. But here I was, in the middle of the mountains, eating this like it were my lifeline. I "shared" the jar (gave away 5) but in an hour, the entire jar was gone. When we got home, it was all about this condiment. Pickles with cheese, pickles with toast, pickles smothered in jam, pickles with fresh-squeezed lemon juice (undiluted)...it was sick. And then I tried pickles with my cereal and threw up, and that was the end of pickles. I couldn't even look at a jar without gagging. That phase lasted two weeks, and in that time, poor Ax got panicky and bought not 1 but TWO big jars of pickles.

The first three months involved some intense miserableness too. Not only was I sleeping every 2 hours, for two hours, and when I was awake I was barely awake, but I was nauseous but hardly vomiting (as my friend Terri, who just had her baby describes this feeling, it's like being car-sick 24 hours a day). The most miserable part of these months involved itching like I've never itched before. On my legs and arms (not my palms and feet, which will come to play when I explain). And my skin became impermeable to any lotions. NOTHING would work. We went through a total of 11 bottles of lotions of all brands/kinds and some would make me itch more, while others would just make me hot and force me into the shower, which would make me itch more because there was something about the calcium in the water that was just intolerable. The body shop had the closest thing to being absorbent (buriti body butter) and it was less itchy than the others. It wasn't until I spoke to Axel's sister, Anne, when I found the ultimate solution. Anne mentioned that she was also itchy in the first trimester and the only thing that helped her was Aveeno products. That got my radar going since I have a friend Melissa who works for J&J and could get those products for cheap and who I was meeting in NYC a month later. You can't get Aveeno products in Europe except for the UK, and although I was desperate enough, I don't think it would have been so cost-efficient to head over to london to get lotion. The day I arrived in NYC, Mel gave me this 24h dry skin relief with menthol, and it has changed my life. The itching stopped immediately as did the non-absorption. That stuff is incredible. Paggy brought 9 tubes plus 3 tubes of anti-itch lotion for me a couple of weeks ago when she arrived in Provence, and Catherine brought me 6 tubes of it from Vancouver. I am positive this should last me until Oct 1 (when Pickles is due).

I started reading about the itching and what could possibly cause it. In 2nd and 3rd trimesters, itching is caused by two reasons: obstetric or intrahepatic cholestasis or PUPPPs (Pruritic Urticarial Papules and Plaques of Pregnancy). But because I was in my first trimester, there were no papers on these conditions for my timeframe. I attribute this to the fact that most women don't often see the doctor from week 7 until week 12 (many doctors won't even see you until you are in week 12) so there's no real data for the first trimester maladies. This started happening to me in week 8 and I saw my doctor then, told her about it, and she sent me for liver tests. Apparently with both itching maladies, a probable cause is the elevated hormones that your body has not gotten used to getting rid of. This causes an overload of hormones in your liver which then can't cope. The hormones apparently cause the itchiness, although this I'm still not really sure is a sound conclusion. What was interesting for me is that I was craving really acidy things like pickles and lemons. Liver detox kits you find in healthfood stores rely on acids to work, and it has been suggested to intake lemon juice and other acids during detox, so it was interesting me how my body was doing this by itself, causing me to crave the most acidy foods I know.

All this to say, my liver tests came back normal (which is actually normal in these cases...they have shown that it takes a while for your liver tests to show something wrong because your liver is working overtime to keep the balance), and I didn't have the traditional itchy palms and feet for obstetric cholestasis nor the itchy torso for PUPPPs. So I'm not really sure what the itch was all about. All I can conclude is that Aveeno is my lifesaver and I curse J&J for not making it available in France or in Germany.

Here is a picture from May 21...which would be around 21 weeks. Yes, this is cheating since this was supposed to be the first three months only, but it is appropriate.

Crazy few weeks..

2009-05-26T22:12:00.002+02:00

Ok so it has been a while since my last poste..maybe it has something to do with that I've been feeling like a headless chicken lately with my head cut off but my legs running around aimlessly.

To start with we finished saving the earth from space in our final report and presentation two weeks ago. This involved a series of sleepless nights before hand of editing and writing random missing paragraphs in the middle of the night. On the day of our great presentation, I was nervous; our presentation team was still not really sure what the project was about until the night before...yikes! Then I notice that one of the panelist is from Nigeria, the very country that we were using as a case study for our porject..f*&^! Nevertheless they managed our presentation team did a really nice job telling the story of what we set out to do. Phew! done.

Rani and I then set off on our road trip - 9 hours of driving through the french country side to spend a couple of days of r and r in the south of France. We decided that it might make the most sense for Pickles to come out here, since we really don't have a home at the moment. I'm really starting to wonder if we should just buy a bus and raise our kids on the road. Yes we're like scientists on tour! you should see our groupies. So more running around, between checking out maternities and getting all the stuff done around the house, and three days later we drive back to Straz. Clean the apartment, meet our new tennant for the month, and then off to Cologne Germany. Not sure if Rani mentionned this before, but we somehow managed to get a room in a fancy apartment downtown living with a familly (mom and daughter) through Sven our great German in Vancouver. Anyway this arrangement is working perfectly for us as we didn't have the hassle of setting up a new apartment, and more importantly of leaving it. Now we just have to sort out this German language. When people here my name they can't understand why I don't speak, or when I do try to say something it all comes out in Japanese (the foreign language section of my brain).

Nos voisins

2009-05-07T14:08:00.002+02:00

Someone came knocking. It was our extremely hot and super sweet neighbours, Eloise and Laurent. They brought some strawberries with creme fraiche for us. Everywhere we live, we manage to have the best neighbours. Strasbourg is no exception. Eloise and Laurent are truly two of my favourite people over here. Not only do they bring us strawberries, but they have taken us out for brunch, come over to bring us music that they think we would like, and shared their cute cat with me whenever I want. In fact, Milene the persian kitten, came over today to help deliver the goods. She especially likes Axel's laundry bag. When we first arrived, they came knocking on the door to borrow eggs, and we exchanged those for use of their internet for a month while we dealt with the internet debacle (see Sep and Oct 2008 entry for those rants).

Both of them are from the south of France (on the other side of where we usually end up) but have spent a lot of time in reunion island where I've decided we are going to for our real first anniversary...3 years from now). Another cool factoid - Laurent and I were born on the exact same day (year too). Very cool.

Another bonus about having Laurent and Eloise next to us is that they are musicians. Unbelievably talented ones. They just put out their first CD and though I heard all of the songs at least 20 times each, hearing them not between the walls made their music even better. Their CD is focused on french folk music, but they do everything. The beatles and zeppelin, opera, pop, whatever they are in the mood for.

If you are interested in hearing some of their music, they just put up websites:

http://www.louiseelson.fr
http://www.myspace.com/louiseelson

Have a listen. You will be transported into one of my work at home days.

ISU in the news

2009-04-20T14:49:00.001+02:00

Check it out!!

http://www.euronews.net/2009/04/17/interdisciplinary-international-intercultural-studies/

Les boulangeries

2009-04-08T17:01:00.002+02:00

Before we moved to France, every french croissant I ever had was AMAZING. All of the baguettes were just delectable. The pain au chocolats were all just soooo good. Well, it's been 8 months and I hate to say it, but my palate can discern the subtle differences so that now, I will not finish a croissant that is just average.

Yes, I hang my head in shame at the snobbery that my taste buds are practicing. But I can tell you, that when you can taste the difference, a whole new world opens up.

I thought I found the best pain au chocolat when I first got here when I went to Paul's bakery. It's a chain so you can find them all over the country. It is now average on my palate scale but because it is more expensive, it's low on the average. I noticed that the pain au chocolats were always cheaper than the plain croissants, and as a north american, you are taken aback because in our eyes, the croissant has less in it than the pain au chocolat, so this makes no logical sense. And then I realize that the croissant is truly a more delicate, complicated flavour and the pastry much flakier and probably harder to make. And then, the almond croissant mystery...it's more expensive than the plain croissant. And when I say more, the difference in prices between the pain au chocolat to the almond croissant is 10 cents. But again, curiosity won and I did my first taste test: pain au chocolat vs plain croissant vs almond croissant. Now I pay for the 10 cent difference, because the almond croissant is truly the best tasting croissant out there.

Once I evolved from Paul's I started to seek out the best in the city. I figured out that the best baguette is from Salees et Sucrees, near the cathedral (this is another blog entry adventure). But their croissants were so-so. And then I went to Kirn. And that's when I realized that Paul's is just "the people's croissanterie". There is better. Kirn's is a Strasbourg bakery. There are 3 locations, but each location has its own baker. Their baguette is on par with Salees but since Salees is near the source for gluten-free items, I buy my baguette from there.

I noticed a bio bakery (organic) a little further (about 40 steps) but always a lineup. So I went one day and got an almond croissant. WAY better than Paul's and at par with Kirn. I thought I found it.

And then the croissant clouds parted. While Ax and I were dealing with more french paperwork (which I now know will never end), I decided to stop at a tiny bakery on the way home to get a loaf of bread. Since baguettes are usually too big for 1, baguettes are a rarity in the house unless we have guests. I needed a little snack so I got an almond croissant. It was still warm. I bit into it and I knew I found it. It's the one. The croissant that is on my mind when I wake up. The pastry of all time. I went back for two more. The ultimate test for me is the taste after an overnight lag period. Well, it didn't fail me. Even after 24 full hours, 3 minutes in the toaster oven and it was heaven all over again.

I want to tell you where this is...but today I went to get some for my NYC trip and I got there and they were all gone. Not even 1. So I fear that once I post this, I will never make it on time to get more. I may post it one day, once I get the timing of the bakery. Maybe.

NATO is over but the lingering protesters still wanna party

2009-04-08T16:33:00.003+02:00

I just did my laundry in the petite France laundrymat...it's the one I blogged about in our 2nd blog entry. Since we were there that one time, they have replaced all of the machines that were sat on by very heavy animals and overall, it's not bad. Our laundry man, Alain, who washes, dries and folds our laundry for no extra charge in his laundrymat, is renovating his house and because I needed to get some groceries, the other laundry place had to do.

While I waited for the clothes to dry, two obvious NATO protesters came in and asked me about the machines. They were obviously protesters because, not only did they have the obligatory dreadlocks, guitars and accordian, but they also had their big protest signs folded up and tied to their guitar cases. After explaining the machines, they set up their machines and filled it with mud-filled, extremely smelly clothes. One of them was laughing and showed me his once-white sock caked in mud and soot. I asked him if he went to the protest where the fire was and they both laughed and said they were part of the group that set the fire in the building near the Ibis hotel (which also was set on fire). They said they were in the G20 but it wasn't as fun as the police were too calm. The other guy said that when the police are calm, the protest is too, which makes for a very boring day. They both agreed that this protest, though much smaller than they thought it would be, was way cooler than the G20. Then I asked how they got the money to go from one protest to the other, since they had southern french accents (both were from near Marseille and were impressed that an etrangere could tell). They said that they save up for these protests. They figure out, with their protester groups, which summits would be best to protest, based on cause and location. Location is key since the London - Strasbourg - Marseille trip is cheap. And they sleep in the parks during their trip, so it's actually not as expensive as one would think. Anyway, they decided that since they didn't know Alsace very well at all, they were going to stay for at least 2 weeks and party.

To make this encounter even better, they needed soap for their laundry. So they gave me 4 euros for 2 machines worth (which was awesome since that was half of what we paid). So I made a little cash on the side. And the rip off wasn't intentional...they just gave it to me and when I said that was too much, they waved me away.

We got back from Luxembourg in the late afternoon on the last day of the NATO summit, so we missed the action and basic lockdown of the city. Caroline, a friend who has been in Strasbourg since first year university, and I decided that since we were ditched by Axel and her boyfriend Mario for Stephen Harper (I'll let Ax blog about that), we would grab some ice cream in the main square. It was hot and sunny and really was the start of spring. And we wanted to test Caroline's orange zone pass. We walked by a hotel that housed the cops and our path crossed a sniper who was going home. We knew he was because he had a HUGE black case that was narrow and was shaped like a gun. I said, "I wonder if that's a guitar" to Caro as a joke...and the guy turned to me and just shook his head. The ice cream store was PACKED but once we got our ice cream, we went and sat at Place Kleber. The barricades were gone since Kleber is technically in the orange zone, but the cop vans lined the streets (I will add pictures when I find my cell phone) and the robo cops still lingered. We parted and I sauntered home. I overheard some tourists who looked like they were from the NATO summit (only because they were wearing their passes and speaking english) remark at how all of the stores are closed and wondered how they made any money. I don't think they realize how the two day photo op shut this city down and that NATO was the reason that the stores weren't open, since the orange zone workers wouldn't be able to get through the checkpoints!

Axel met our prime minister during the afternoon. He'll fill you in soon.

Sublet for the summer!

2009-04-06T22:40:00.002+02:00

Hi guys,

We are looking for people to sublet our place. We have one guy who wants it for all of June but July until end of August, it's free! It's 720 euros a month which includes everything (internet with free international phone calls), electricity etc. It's fully furnished so all you really need to bring are your clothes! It's got a full kitchen (with a full fridge! very rare in france). I'll post pics but if you know anyone who needs it in July and Aug, let us know!!!

NATO cancels petanque

2009-03-27T08:54:00.002+01:00

The 60th anniversary of NATO is being celebrated in Strasbourg on Apr 3-4. The big news is that Obama is coming and bringing 850 of his closest friends with him for the fete.

It affects us too. We cannot get access to the city centre because we live 10 metres too far. Not even a little exaggeration. Had we lived across the 10 m bridge, we could've had access to downtown, and thus the best baguette place I know (which also, I recently discovered, makes kick ass almond croissants), the grocery store (and yes, there are others but this one is the cheapest and most convenient), and the source for all things gluten-free (this one will easily be remedied before the doors officially close). The only way to get access is if you live in the city centre. So there are people at Axel's school whose girlfriends do not live in the city and thus have had to cancel their visits.

And here's how it affects the rest of the city. This email is from Axel's school.
---
NATO summit: Things to know:

4000 journalists, 40000 inhabitants with badges, 50000 barriers, 30000 anti-NATO demonstrators…

Only the inhabitants and those who get a badge can have access to the orange zone. The green points are the entries of this zone. Police controls at every entries.

The sewers will be temporarily closed, the garbage cans removed, the advertising hoardings in the bus stations under high control or closed.

1000 firemen with 300 vehicles.

More chlorine in the water (only in some specific areas), to avoid hostile actions…

Many institutions will be closed (see the list in the attached document):

-Schools

-Swimming pools

-Stadium

-Gymnasium

-Tennis court

-Petanque areas

-Other

Road abnormalities

Airport will be closed on Saturday afternoon

Train station: No train from Strasbourg to Kehl on Saturday from 0:00 to 10:15 am (replaced by buses)

No boats

Border controls on the Kehl Bridge from 20 March to 5 April.

In anticipation of Obama's Strasbourg visit...

2009-03-10T22:53:00.002+01:00

...we must be caught up on all things real 'merican. This post is dedicated to Chris, our friend who found jesus on an almond.

Finally can't get some air

2009-03-07T23:12:00.008+01:00

Yesterday and before yesterday were our last exams for ISU! Whoohoo!...let's hope I passed. Anyway this called for some celebration, went out with some good vegetarian with some good friends. Poel de Carrot is the place to go if you need some vege food with some Vancouver grooves.

Then the next morning I was able to give my poor bike some much needed attention, and go for a good four hour ride. Started by riding down to just about Selestat, then took this ferry over to Germany and rode through a bunch of weird sounding towns along the way. Also, as usual rode through a festival...pretty much every Saturday that I ride one of the towns has got some major festival, and they all think I'm part of the procession..so yeah I was doing some waving. Anyway here a few picks from the ride..sorry didn't get any from the festival..

QUIZ:

which Ferry is in BC and Rhine river?

Some Weird bikes

Barbeque time on the Rhine river...check out the

Solar panels. Pretty cool.

Skiing in Adelboden, Switzerland

2009-02-22T14:40:00.016+01:00

Sorry for the e-silence. Axel has been busy and I am dealing with a tempermental computer.

Last weekend, Valentine's Day weekend, Axel and I and 9 other people from ISU and associates, took off to Adelboden, Switzerland. This is about 3 hours from Strasbourg and in the Swiss-German part. We left at 6h30 am in hopes to get on the slopes by 10 am. What we didn't factor in, however, was the extreme disorganization of renting, the ski lifts, and the drive in a snow storm with summer tires. There were 3 cars in the convoy, two rentals with summer tires and 1 company car with rear-wheel drive. So what seemed like an easy slope to the parking lot ended up being a half-hour of trying again and again to get up the hill (we didn't make it and ended up parking about 100 m away from the parking lot). The rental place on the first day was relatively organized but were obviously not ready for more than 3 customers at a time, so as soon as we came in, chaos ensued. And then we realized we could save 5 euros if we waited until noon, so we did. What is interesting about the ski lifts is that they really don't expect you to hang out. Thus, there was nowhere to just sit and have your lunch while you waited to get on a chair at a cheaper rate.

Here we are going up the gondola! These are videos for my friend Paggy, who had a bad mishap and broke her ankle. She has been at home for over a month now and Ax and I make her a video every day.

We all went up the chair until we got to the top, and that's when we realized that we had 1 person in our group who couldn't get down a hill in skis. So a quick 5 minute ski to the "real" chair lift (where the top peak was) took over 30 minutes with people stopping to wait for people who were waiting for our friend who ended up taking off her skis and taking the chair back to the rental shop to find lessons. The other reason for the delay was that a second person in our group had skied only a couple of times in a very flat part of Beijing, so he wasn't surviving very well. So by the time we got to the bottom of the second chair, we were 9.

Here are some pictures going up chair 2.

And here is the top of chair 2.

So already we realized how ridiculous it was to try and stay together, so we figured our real first run will be our last one together before we separate to our skill levels. Then we went down the first part of the run. This was a really steep part of the run but magnificent. And then...we lost another.

Erin made a bad turn and ended up in a pile with her skis still attached. This meant that she probably twisted her knee. Thankfully there was a ski hut which made raclette just down the hill, so Axel and Doug helped her get down.

James and Annemarie waiting with me at the bottom while Axel and Doug help Erin down the hill.

Real raclette!!!

And then the ski patrol came with the sled and took her away after inspecting her knee.

We're still not sure if it's torn or completely severed, but it's most likely her ACL or MCL (which is what I tore last ski season). Here is a video of her getting ready to be hauled down the hill.

And then, there were 3. James, Axel and I decided to make our way to a different part of the mountain...maybe to run away from the karma. We figured that Erin was our sacrifice to the ski gods in making the rest of the day fun. Here is our video for Paggy up the gondola after we lost Erin.

We ended up getting to a great part of the mountain where the runs were long and windy and there were hardly any people. Here's a not-so-interesting video of me going down a hill. I wish we took more of these but our hands were really cold and we just wanted to ski!!

We stayed overnight at a town near by called Frutigen.

The hotel was great...warm and clean and reasonably priced. And the view was spectacular. What was probably our smartest move on the trip was to take a bus back to Adelboden from Frutigen, rather than deal with our summer tires on the cars, even though there was no snow storm. We didn't know this but the rest of the hotel guests took their cars and were stuck in traffic to get to Adelboden for 2 hours! But what we gained by taking the bus, we lost by renting our equipment. The stereotype for the Swiss being super organized has been lost forever. While there weren't that many people getting rentals in the beginning, the lack of organization caused such chaos that by the time we got our equipment, it was noon! We could have driven back to Strasbourg and back to Switzerland instead of thinking that we would save time staying. Anyway, after much frustration, we all made it back on the slopes. Our first casualty from the day before had looked into lessons but no lessons were given on Sundays...so she rented a sled!!! This ended up being very good for me because I ended up with the most painful boots I've ever used so decided to make my way back to town to change them up, which meant skiing down with Doha, the sledder extraordinaire.

Here are some videos of her. Hilarious.

Some pictures in Adelboden. Axel will put up other pictures of the trip he'll get from the others once exams are over. Right now, he's in uber-stress mode.

JMJ arrive to help us eat our way through Alsace

2009-02-04T17:30:00.007+01:00

Jean-Marie and Joanne, Axel's dad and stepmom, arrived from Montreal last Friday for 3 days of culinary heaven. Needing to go to Switzerland and then Lyon and the south, and then Paris, it was a natural pitstop for them to spend a few days hanging out with us and resetting their jetlagged selves. I was impressed at their ability to not only be mildy awake but downright enthusiastic this entire weekend.

Some highlights include lunch in Freiburg, going to a source of the Danube (don't ask what the name of the town was...all I remember is it started with a D and ended in something german...JM, help me out...edit update: it is the city of Donaueschingen),

traditional Alsatian dinner in cold cute Colmar (note the meaty dish that Joanne got, choucroute regular and choucroute aux poissons and of course the only vegetarian meal in Alsace, tarte flambe),

(in case you didn't know, Colmar is where Bartholdi is from...the dude who designed the Statue of Liberty. So they have a mini one too, except it doesn't have as much fan fare as the big one in NYC. It's in a roundabout next to the McDonald's on your way into the city centre).

and their last day in Strasbourg during free museum Sunday.

It was on this trip to Germany when I realized how completely different German was from french. Which means Axel's 3 months in Koln for his internship will be extra fun with this funny language thrown into the mix. Jean-Marie studied german and did an exchange there soon after WWII. This made the trip less challenging when we looked at signs and way more entertaining as we listened to Jean-Marie recite all the funny words. And then he tried to convince us that german can sound really pretty by playing this sweet romantic german song on his phone. Needless to say, I'm still not convinced.

La Grève générale touche moi

2009-01-29T17:10:00.009+01:00

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

2009-01-28T16:10:00.002+01:00

1. doga

2. creative meat

Media Miss-Information..Grr

2009-01-26T20:31:00.001+01:00

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...

2009-01-24T14:31:00.002+01:00

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.

2009-01-23T15:17:00.003+01:00

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

2009-01-16T20:07:00.004+01:00

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

2009-01-16T11:50:00.010+01:00

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

2009-01-12T11:42:00.003+01:00

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

2009-01-11T20:54:00.003+01:00

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!

2009-01-10T23:32:00.003+01:00

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

2009-01-06T12:03:00.007+01:00

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!

2009-01-04T19:36:00.011+01:00

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!

2009-01-04T19:25:00.002+01:00

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!!

2009-01-01T10:47:00.002+01:00

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

all the best!

pilipinas

2008-12-13T19:18:00.001+01:00

My Lakbayan grade is D!

How much of the Philippines have you visited? Find out at Lakbayan!

Created by Eugene Villar.

not france-related but pretty cool.

french lunch should not equal flunch

2008-12-10T21:33:00.003+01:00

We were burning through the country last August, trying to get from Paris to Strasbourg and back to Paris in a day. Each leg was 5h long. And of course we did it on a Sunday which meant that nothing was open so we couldn't buy sheets to sleep on at our new apt in Strasbourg but we needed to drop off all of our stuff before we went to the south for some R&R.

On our way back, we got hungry and decided to stop at one of the many stops along the highway. Flunch. My hunch is that flunch = french + lunch. However, what we ended up ingesting there was not so synonymous with the name.

Ax had this:

I had a crepe which I had to pay for and then they gave me this to pick it up with:

I don't think we need to say we aren't breaking down the doors to go back.

Running along the River Ill and stumbling onto an excavation site

2008-12-09T13:45:00.000+01:00

Ax went for a run and I joined him on my bike. His route takes him along the river Ill. These are taken with my cell phone while I am riding and slipping through the mud so excuse the non-focus!

On our way back we noticed that one of the construction sites was actually an excavation site! This is right next to the Modern Art museum. Not sure what it is because there were no signs.

Strasbourg Xmas markets

2008-12-07T17:15:00.006+01:00

for slideshow comments, click on the talk bubble on the bottom left and it will give you any comments I have written for the pics!

Yesterday, Katelyn who is still in Freiburg, came for the day to see the xmas market. Niki, our local Christmas cheerleader, was forced by us to lead the way through the markets since she had already scouted them last week and was now in the purchase mode. But it was Saturday which meant crowds were insane...and because it was Pere noel day, the germans (visible due to their insistence on wearing santa hats) were here in full force. We got stuck, not moving even a little, for 15 minutes in the middle of the cathedral market. It took us almost 30 minutes to get out. I thought we would never make it out of the crowd. I’ve never NOT moved in a crowd before. This, of course, was due to a tour group that decided that they needed to go against the crowd with arms linked as to not lose each other. So smart.

Anyway, lots of cool things in the market. The vin chaud, or gluhwein, or mulled wine was ubiquitous. And depending on where you go, can range from 1.50 E to 3 E. We found the 1.5 one as soon as we got there to keep us warm. We then wandered through the "sharing" market. This is where different charities have their own cabin and sell wares for their causes. It was there that we found the telethon tents. There was a 24h telethon going on in the city, that happens every year, where different groups raise money for research. It's really cool because everyone does different things and they are all over the city. Katelyn and I saw crepes being sold for it in Petite France, and Ax and I saw a brass band the night before playing music for money. Anyway, in the sharing market, we found some neurology students raising money for neurology research. And it was a quiz you had to take. For 1 euro, you get to spin a wheel and answer a question. I had to do it because the prize was a neuron cookie, complete with a chocolate dot for the nucleus and sprinkles as neurotransmitters (which ended up being the answer to the question I got).

Place Broglie, normally the site for the Wednesday and Friday downtown market, has been transformed into the best part of the strasbourg markets. It's all of the traditional alsatian trinkets. And beer nuts.

I have seen the Colmar and Reims markets and they pale in comparison to Strasbourg. So if you get a chance to see this, do. There is a rumour that next year, the market will be on the water!

Cheryl and Andy visit Strasbourg!

2008-12-07T16:03:00.005+01:00

OK...so this is the even lazier way of blogging. Add a slideshow of all of the pictures so you don't have to pick and choose!!!

Cheryl, my cousin from Hoboken NJ, and her main amigo Andy from Yonkers NY (you have to say that with that NY accent) came to visit for a quick few days. But in that short time, we managed to do Strasbourg, the Alsace wine route, [including Molsheim (home of bugatti), Obernai (plain old cute town), Mont Ste. Odile (site of a catholic miracle...chick born blind but then gets unblind during baptism...then heals other blind peeps and managed to get water out of a rocky cliff so now people come to check that out too), and Colmar (ultimate cute town. This town has now made us describe something as plain old cute or colmar-cute)], and Epernay and Reims in the champagne region (epernay is home to Moet-Chandon (where there is a Bergman (axel's dad's side) connection), Mercier, and Castellane as well as Boizel (where there is a Stieltjes (axel's mom's side) connection). Reims is where French kings were coronated so of course there is a big-ass cathedral for that soiree...and a small xmas market...and champagne which we didn't try because we were too hammered from epernay). We managed to also squeeze in a late American Thanksgiving celebration with the N. American crowd of the ISU, thanks to the most organized hostess of a thanksgiving party I've ever seen.

Cheryl left to go back to NJ while Andy kept his euro trip going by heading to Barcelona and eventually Prague. What I think we'll miss about these two is their hilarious take on the french sayings. Like voila. I never realized it but in N. America, we say Voila when it's something that we're proud of showing you, or is just plain brilliant...In France, voila is used all the time. Like when you ask for a pen and someone gives it to you...they then will say "voila". Cheryl and Andy pointed it out when we got our change from the tollbooth man and he gave it to us saying Voila. Now I have to stop myself from laughing everytime I hear it. So thanks a lot guys.

14 year anniversary in Paris

2008-12-05T16:56:00.022+01:00

We rarely celebrate an anniversary. And getting married on Leap Day this year really added to the evidence that we aren't celebrating-anniversaries-kind-of-people. However, because it was looking like Axel needed a break from Alsace and all that was school, and because Monica was supposed to be in Paris that week, we decided to use this as an excuse to go and enjoy this incredible city.

We stayed near Jardin de Luxembourg where neither of us had been to before. However, when we wandered through it, we realized we that we have seen this garden in movies, postcards, tv, everywhere! Here's why:

The big head!!
...and then our big heads.

We met up with Stephane for lunch in the Marais district (Mel and Tony and I met up here in September for man-shopping. The best place for man shopping). So we decided to saunter our way over there and thought we should check out Ste Chapelle since I just read something about the stained glass being cool to see. However, time was running short and when we got there we realized it was going to be more than a 15 minute jaunt through that place...so we kept walking. And then we noticed this huge clock on the side of the building near pont au change. We were joking about how in Canada, this would have been a huge tourist stop, but here, it's just a big clock on the side of a building. Axel took a closer look and it turns out, it's a clock to keep track of Leap Day!!! So we had inadvertently found our wedding clock!

So we met up with Steph and searched for brunch/lunch spots...along with everyone else in the city. We managed to find a great place that was warm and had good food. During our search, Axel saw this:

a stationary bike, locked on a rack.

Said goodbye to Steph and made our way back so we could pick up our tickets to the Picasso exhibit (Picasso and his masters. A must-see!! If you have any chance of seeing it, do!! they have every piece that Picasso took his inspiration from and put it alongside his own pieces. And their descriptions and explanations are incredible!). On our way back, we paid hommage to the dude and the dame.

charlemagne

...and notre dame

So...the reason we took three pictures. In our haste in the morning to get out and do something, yet because we were both feeling like crap from being sick and barely sleeping, we ran onto the train...then I saw the next station and panicked and thought we were on the wrong train....

so we jumped off after one stop and went around to take it going the other way...which we did for about 5 stops...and then...

we realized we were going the right way in the first place. F!*K. So we jumped off and ran back to the other side. Yes, we were tired. And stupid.

Voila...our weekend in a blog!

Olives olives everywhere!

2008-12-05T09:52:00.048+01:00

The weekend of november 22nd was all about the olive. Axel's mom, Catherine, decided when she started cultivating her property in Sanary, that she would only have olive trees. What this means for her, and this year, for us, is that mid-November every year, the olives must be harvested. Catherine has been doing this for several years now and has made the best olive oil I've ever had. It really tastes like nothing you've ever tried. And last year and this year, she has used the old method of extraction which, instead of 20 minutes in an industrial press, takes 6 weeks using big stones, their weight, and time.

So this year, Axel and I, along with our friends Katelyn, Megan and Niki, headed down to Sanary on the overnight cattle car and became the migrants that work for a bed and food. (photos of this section by Katelyn)

We arrived at 7 am and after breakfast and a little tour, we were put to work.

These pictures are by Megan...olives that Catherine picked before we arrived.

And then...we picked. We had these baskets you wear around your waist for easier, more efficient, and just old fashionable picking. Most pictures by Niki. Please ignore the "Rani Cruz" label on me. (I did a screen shot of all of the pictures off of Facebook....actually, the rest of the blog are mostly a mix of all of our pictures! Sorry, lost track.)

So what I didn't tell you yet is that it was the coldest day I've ever experienced in Sanary. Plus there were 95 km/hr winds in the area which meant REALLY cold. Hence, the arctic look was mode of choice. And apparently, early eighties garb is warmer than modern day clothing.

So day 1 was just cold. But easy for olive picking as we focused on Catherine's trees. She prunes them in a way that allows us to just handpick the trees. The middle is open so that you can go into the tree. And the branches are low. Catherine was smart to make us think that was all there was to it.

Then day 2. The finger machine. This thing was incredible. It basically goes through the branches and with its fingerlike whirring bits, would vibrate the olives out of the tree. It wouldn't pull off any leaves or branches. Amazing. The trick was to make sure you had nets that caught everything that fell out. And yes, it ran off a car battery. This was necessary as the rest of the trees were not so easy. They are all older trees so taller. And not pruned like Catherine's are. So branches aren't so organized. Thus, the finger machine was a necessary tool.

Then we learned how to supervise...

Katelyn always managed to find a sunray to be in that day. She was a trooper as she came to Sanary after being sick for two days. Unfortunately we lost our Hawaiian to the cold. Megan found her sunray and her rubik's cube in the house on Day 2. Niki, however, was probably the most enthusiastic of us all. Is it her ever-positive attitude or is it because she is from Ontario and is used to this temperature?! Her enthusiasm was catchy though so thank goodness she didn't think it was THAT cold.

It was not all work though. We did make it around Sanary and le Castellet. Megan got a thimble (apparently she collects them. And she thinks this is a normal thing to do).

We also went to visit the neighbours who have been family friends since Axel could remember. They are famous in the area for their nativity scenes (or creche). The local schools go on a field trip to see their creche! The first time I saw one of theirs was in 1997. This year it took 11 days to make. Nothing on it is made with anything that isn't from the land. Even the buildings are made by them. I have a video at the end of this...excuse the non-pro videography...but I was cold and excited.

Creches are truly a provencal tradition in my eyes. Nothing beats their figurines (santons). When my cousin Cheryl and I went to Reims we saw a stand of santons from provence and everyone was flocked to it. What is really cool about the santons is that every single santon is tradition...they all have a purpose. And very traditional creches have the santons always facing the baby jesus. This and other traditions in this country only make me love it here more.

The girls left Sunday night on the night train. Because of a threat of a spontaneous strike, Axel and I drove them to the Marseille station instead of bandol. But there was a train and they did make it back. Strikes are a normal part of life. But unlike the strikes in Canada, most of these strikes only last a day or two and move on.

The next day Axel, Catherine and I bulldozed through the day with the rest of the properties. Catherine's trees were all done but there were all of Axel's uncles and aunt's properties left. They don't have as many trees but the ones they do have are old big trees, so we tried our luck with them. Unfortunately, Laurent's trees still needed another week of ripening. And Marianne's trees were not are fruitful. Then, we went to Eric's yard. The last tree we did together reaped about 3 crates!

Ax left that night and I stayed until Tuesday at 11h30. So from 9-10h30 am, Catherine and I did the mega tree on Eric's property. When we did it we realized it was one of the original trees on the property. There were still markings of the big fire. We got about 3 crates from that tree too. So 4 days, 3 nights and 200 kgs of olives later, I zipped back to Strasbourg on the day train.

We're looking for recruits for next year!!!

the air raid cometh

2008-12-05T09:41:00.002+01:00

Last Wednesday at noon, it happened again. The emergency horn went off twice. I wonder if people get used to this. It made me stop and think about when this sound really meant something. (Still hard to believe that Alsace was part of germany twice).

It's almost as if France makes you have a remembrance Day every first Wednesday of the month at noon.

La vie est belle

2008-12-04T22:33:00.009+01:00

So we have been here almost 4 months (with a hiatus for me in october) and with the quirks of french bureaucrazy (typo intentional) almost behind us, it is time to reflect. I will talk about my new immigrant status another time but for now, let me address some of the questions and concerns we have heard from a few of you.

1. Have we resolved our laundry problems?

Not only did we find a laundromat (or laverie) that had brand-new miele machines for the same price, but the owner of the place does your laundry for no additional cost! Alain, the man that both Ax and I want to marry, accepts our laundry just before Axel heads off to school, and then sorts is, washes it (with HIS soap!), dries it and folds it and puts it back in our duffle bag so is ready for Axel to fetch it after school! The guy is amazing. He is our best friend. Yes it's a bit further but it's actually on the way to Axel's school so it actually makes sense.

2. Did you buy furniture at Ikea? If so, did you rent a car or did they deliver and bring it up 4 flights of stairs?

Ikea has been visited by us several times. Only because we don't have a car and didn't want to pay 49 E to get it delivered. So we had to do Ikea in a way that allowed us to bring all of our purchases home by rolley cart. Oh yes, those things come in handy.

So the only things we had to purchase for our furnished place is a desk and two desk chairs because the one in the apt was falling apart...but we had to do this in two trips. What is great about Ikea is that you take 1 tram to get to the stop where the free Ikea bus (navette) comes to meet you every 10 minutes!! It only takes 5 minutes to get to Ikea. But it's fantastic.

(here is a picture of us on the navette...we're still tourists so give us a break)

Niki, a friend I met here who is also from Canada, and I have done a couple of spontaneous trips there and it's so easy. I know that Vancouver has an Ikea bus. You should take it!! You'll realize that you end up suspending the urge to buy 10 000 tea light candles and more napkins because you have to bus it home. But you end up saving money! Axel and i have a theory that when you enter Ikea, you lose $100 automatically and Ikea gives it back to you in urges for little crappy items you think you need.

3. Have you found a place for gluten-free goods? Vegetarian food? Cheap sushi?

Yes to the first two. Wishful thinking for the last. For gluten-free products, we go to Vitana. It's about a 7 minute walk from our place, next to the Cathedral, and it has everything. And it's the cheapest place to get all of this stuff. I did my research all over town and Vitana is it. Here is a pic of Axel on the street that Vitana is on. He is now a frequent member so once a month, we get a 10% discount.

For vegetarians, Strasbourg is surprisingly awesome! The laundromat is near the Tofu maker of Strasbourg! A vietnamese family who has been there for 20 years and makes fresh tofu every day has a great store that also sells vietnamese rolls (called nems) that are wheat-free! And they have these amazingly large gingers that are fresher than I have seen in Canada. And it's cheap. 0.60 E for 1 cake of tofu! Take that stupid health food stores that charge 3 Euros! There is a little cult that arrives there every day around 11h, when the fresh tofu comes out of the press. They have more in the afternoon, but for some reason, everyone comes at 11! There was a woman who bought 25 cakes. I felt lame only buying 5. Sorry no photos.

On my last night before I left for Vancouver in October, Ax and i took a walk around Petite France which is spitting distance from our place. And there we found the only vegetarian restaurant in Strasbourg. I have no idea why we never knew about it or saw it before. We still haven't tried it. But it's always packed so we know it must be good. Or else there are just a bunch of extremely desperate hungry vegetarians who need to be surrounded by anything else but sausages. It's called ...something carrot. I'll get back to you.

As for sushi,or anything asian, we're SOL. The poor excuse for "asian" food is a wok grill place where they throw asian-like veggies in a wok with salty sauces and put it in a chinese take-out container with rice at the bottom. But good for desperate nights (which are not very often).

4. Is Strasbourg as picturesque as they say it is? What about this christmas market? I think I will leave that to another post. But suffice it to say, the cathedral looks so unbelieveably intricate, it looks fake in every picture. I'll leave you with a teaser until I post about the Christmas market. Photo thanks to Cheryl and Andy who were just here!

5. How do you get around?

Bike, walk, tram. That's it! My bike didn't really like the cobble stones very much (this is an understatement...the tires kept flatting every time I took it for a spin) so Axel got a city bike for me. With a great basket I use for groceries. Axel has his cyclecross which is surviving the cobbles, rain and wind nicely. He bikes 10 km to school and back every day and that's currently the only exercise he's getting..which is making him a grumpy cyclist.

If we are getting groceries and there's two of us, then we'll walk to the market on Saturdays, or the grocery store...all within 10 minutes from us.

And of course the tram! In the summer, it was easy to jump on and off without paying (thanks to Niki for letting us know that no one checked for tickets!). But in October, the patrols came out and now they are on every other tram I get on (thanks to Niki for letting us know about them checking in October!). But it's cheap (1.20 for one way and you have 1h to use it). And the trams basically take you everywhere you really need to get to in Strasbourg. And they are frequent...every 4-6 minutes. And you can take your bike on them except between 8-9 and 5-6.

6. Do you like living there?

We love it!! I think we have a really skewed view of the place right now, because Axel is a student and I am working in Vancouver, so we haven't dealt with finding a job here and really living like the locals. However, we can't really complain. The people at Axel's school are fantastic and are a great group of people to hang out with, the food is fresh and so good, weather is great, and the city is so interesting!

Just because it's cheap, it doesn't mean it has to be retarded

2008-12-04T22:12:00.007+01:00

This was the un-politically correct rant I heard from Ax when he knocked over the stupid phone for the millionth time. Is it really that bad? The short answer is yes. The long answer is described pictorally below:

1. It doesn't stay in its cradle. Because the little hook is too little to keep the handset in place. This makes it a) easy to knock off (and crash on the floor) and b) hard to hang up properly.

2. The number buttons are on the OUTSIDE...not on the cradle, not on the inside of the handset. This means that a) you can't hold it properly because the buttons take the room for the comfortable, natural part your hand would go on and b) you can't use your shoulder to hold the phone while using both hands because you press all of the buttons or hang up.

Lesson learned. 15 euros is still cheap in this country. So spend 30 euros and you'll get a phone that isn't so annoying to talk on.

What's happening on our old continent

2008-12-03T19:28:00.001+01:00

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

Prop8

Our PM fibs again

Yeah! Rani's home!

2008-11-11T11:53:00.004+01:00

So after a long flight and epic battles with french crowds in CDG airport and train ride through the country french country side at 300km/hr, Rani has come home to Strasbourg..I think she was pretty tired, the first thing she decided to do is to put a basket on her head...

She kinda looks like she came from the savana.

Or Maybe she was just happy to have some new wheels.

New post...scroll down

2008-11-10T12:30:00.001+01:00

Monday, September 8, 2008 is where it's at. I wrote it but never posted it. Now that I am back from Vancouver, I think it's time.

http://raniandaxel.blogspot.com/2008/09/things-i-will-miss-most-from-canada.html

Space Pigeon

2008-11-01T18:22:00.006+01:00

What a week!

On Monday our assigment was to design a small low cost satellite that would take detailed images of the moon for the Lunar X prize competitors to help them decide where to land their rovers. By Friday afternoon we were to have all engineering configurations sort out, have the orbital mechanics calculated, mission architecture, budget, legal considerations and schedule all packaged in a report, a presentation and a mock up to show how the satellite works! Lucky for me I ended up with a crack team of engineers and astrophysists so all I had to do is chair our meetings and sort out scheduling, and budget. ..it was a little weird as I didn't really have an assigned task and just floated around to help out. Turns out we were all up until the wee hours and were sorting out details minutes before our presentation. Somehow we managed to pull it off without too much of a hitch. We ended up calling our sat the "Spacepigeon" inspired by the first cameras attached to a pigeon see below:

James Mason came up with a cool video of our trajectory check it out:

And this is what our SpacePigeon-1 by our other James Barth:

Pretty cool looking eh? The interesting issuewith putting a sat around the moon is one there's no atmosphere so you can fly pretty low to the ground so long as you're going fast enough. Our Spacepigeon flew at 100km off the surface and would come down for a 25km fly by once in a while. Don't want to go much lower as the mountains on the moon go up to 9km high! Way higher than anything on earth. But what really affects the design is the added complexity of the moon rotating around the Earth, so we had to put our antenna on a gimble so that we can maximiz communication time with our ground station. The same was done with the solar panel so that it maximizes time in the sun. So all in we figured that the entire thing would cost $50M..any takers? Personnally I would rather spend $30M and spend six days on the ISS and do micro gravity experiments.

Second training ride

2008-10-21T00:09:00.002+02:00

So I'm now an official deciple of the Gord school of training. Work you're ass off for weeks at a time then go for epic long ride, feel like hell afterwards. The only difference is that I'm riding in Strasourg where I went for over 100km without seing a car on a beautifully paved road, designed specifically for cylists...I couldn't believe it! I think these were old farming roads so once in a while you come nose to nose with a trackter..but that's pretty rare, otherwise it's pretty much smooth sailing for miles. And it's all flat...brilliant. The only issue I had was trying to remember all the german names, I mean look at my itinirary of towns I went through today:

Wisheim

Offenheim

Ersheim

Erstenheim

Molheim

Wolsteim

Crickey!eim

What is with the "heim's" in the place.

OK gotta zzz

Paris

2008-10-20T23:23:00.013+02:00

Ok exams are over, I now have internet at home, and I have a little free time...so I can finally post something here. A couple of weeks ago we went to Paris to visit SNECMA, a french jet engin manufacturer's construction and test site. It was pretty cool, where else to they have the ability to move two tonnes of water per second every time they fire up one of these rocket puppies. The best part of the trip is the EADS-Astrium visit where they have the Arianne launcher assembly line before they send them off to Kuru. Giant tubes being built one after an other..just massive things that are tossed into the atmosphere. The sheer volume of fuel needed is staggering: 1 stage alone consumes 700 tonnes in about 9 min! That's more fuel you would consume in your entire lifetime in your car. That's what it takes to get a couple of satellites cruising around the planet at 7 km/s. Unfortunatly we weren't allowed to take any pictures inside

the site..who knows what secrets we might uncover. But we did go air plane museum which had quite the selection of space harware:

Arianne 5. One massive tube full of explosive gasses...good times for us pyros! Actually this is one of the most efficicent launchers out there for Satellites with a 98% success rate with the lowest orbit placement errors in the business aside from the space shuttle..but that's unfair cause they've got pilots manning the thing. They launch every month and a half or so.

The space craft that Gagarin flew in. The balls you see around it, are oxygen containers. They still design those today, and you can see them on the Arianne engines. Not too sure why.

Armstrong was the first man on the moon, but the Russians had robots up there already collecting rocks. One of my profs was the lead engineer for this bath tub on wheels.

The Russian version of the space shuttle. It only flew once. Then they realized that their Soyus craft was way more efficient. Still is today..kinda makes you wonder why the US continues with the shuttle.

Voyager I- This guys was sent in the late 70'; got to Pluto in the mid 90's and we only lost contact with it about 10 years ago. It's probably either destroyed or out beyond our solar system. Pretty cool huh, it even comes complete with a little map on how to get to earth and shows what we humans look like. There was big debate over this as NASA depicted a naked male and female...didn't go over well with the McCain types.

A couple of Geostationary Satellites, the one shaped like a barrel is an old design from the early 80's, and the other is based on a common european platform. These guys fly at about 30 000 km above our heads, and have a period around the earth of 24 hours. These are generally used as com relay and TV broadcasting. These guys are a hot political topic as there isn't an unlimited amount of GEO space up there, but they play a crucial communication role.

The Gang in front of the Bourget Museum..I think we were all excited just to get out of the bus!

Ooops..not space harware, that just my buddy Fred from Zambia who just discovered a rubix cube...poor guy could not put it down. Ok now for some cool space stuff.

Anyway that was the trip..got a chance to catch up with one of my coudins which was pretty cool.

The epic journey to the motherland

2008-10-11T09:42:00.005+02:00

Just got to Vancouver after an epic day on planes and in airports. Normally I would never talk about the travel day since it usually is uneventful and just filled with angst of needing to pee when the seatbelt sign is on. However, this time travel day was filled with events!

I left Strasbourg with a suitcase filled with croissants, pain au chocolats, and other goodies. My suitcase is normally for hand-carry except when I have it. For some reason they all tell me I can't bring it on the plane. When Axel is rolling it, it gets on the plane via hand-carry without any hassles. It turned out it worked out better since I had to carry it up and down the stairs in the subways and train stations and Stephane's place.

I arrived in Paris at 9 am on Thursday and decided that I was going to spend the day learning the city for real. I had plans to see the Picasso exhibit but when I got there the line up was 2 1/2 hours long at the beginning of the line! So in the future, make sure you know that you can make a reservation to go to these museums so you don't have to line up! So I decided that, rather than spending my entire day in a lineup, I was going to just see where the wind took me. I crossed the seine and ended up in the 5th and 6th districts. This is one of the trendy areas of Paris so it was a good place to head to. And then I found myself at the Musee d'Orsay so I went in! For those who don't know, it's probably one of the best collections of art and displayed in a palatable way. Unlike the louvre which would take days, this took me 4 hours with the little audioguide. Exhausting but worth the effort. I saw everything. EVERYTHING! After, I wandered for a couple of hours: walked along the river, saw Notre Dame, watched a guy do trick rollerblading. And then met up for dinner with Stephane. Stephane and I had a great night of chatter which we never have enough of since we don't normally see each other alone! I left my camera in Strasbourg with Axel (in hopes that he will actually use it) so all of my pics are on my cell phone...so quality sucks big time. I will try and pretty up some pictures for later. What is the etiquette on posting pictures for previous entries? Do you post them with the corresponding entries? Or do you post them in a new entry? hmm..

The next morning I scooted off to the airport and waited in line at the french customs (which everyone, including EU citizens have to do) for 1.5 hours. It was endless. And in reality, had they had more than 1 customs officer, it wouldn't have blipped on my radar. People missed their flights in the line and no one helped them. So if you are going on Air Canada, make sure to give yourself 2 hours!! The flight was full except one seat...which I ended up having right next to me!! So I had a great lounge seat and watched really bad movies for 8 hours. I got to Montreal and this is where the real action started...

I saw Paul Martin and his wife Eline!!! They were just getting off a flight and I crossed paths. I smiled at him and he smiled back!! I felt like an idiot. Axel makes fun of me because I get starry-eyed at politicians...couldn't care less about celebrities but there's something about the people that control governments that make me all fluttery. Anyway, it turns out my flight was overbooked and so I got booted with some perks like a travel voucher and a ticket for the air can lounge! Free food! Free drinks! and Free internet!! So I took full advantage and hung out for 4 hours. I was just about to leave when I crossed paths with Bob Richards, the founder of the International Space University, Axel's school! We had seen him before at BCIT give a talk about the moon and the Google Lunar X project and then Axel re-met him last month at a reception. Anyway, anyone who has seen him would understand why I recognized him instantly. He's very distinct in his features and he always looks like he's smiling so it was easy to approach him. I introduced myself and mentioned Axel who he remembered because there is an Axelle who is a member of the ISU advisory board. He introduced me to the president of Optech, another space company that Axel could tell you more about. We chatted about internships and Strasbourg. It was pretty cool. So I called Axel and left him a message about the encounter and ended up standing right next to my dear friend Robi Smith, who I went to India with many moons ago! She was coming back from Quebec City so we caught up on life and politics. She was my favourite person on the exchange to India, if only because she always made me laugh.

So my dad and sister picked me up and we booted it to Horseshoe Bay to make the last ferry. After 27 hours of being on the go and not sleeping, I finally shut my eyes at 1 am, only to be woken up at 4 am to one of my brother's friends almost stepping on my head! He needed a place to crash because it was cold and raining and so I assume this is where he normally comes?? not his house?!? So he crashed on the couch and I stayed awake. Hence, another rambly entry.

Internet provider expert and BNP not recommended for foreigners

2008-10-10T21:52:00.004+02:00

So I think I need to explain our french customer service fiascoes since we have moved here. From my facebook status inklings to my not-so-mini rants to people over email, I have only really given people hints of what we have been dealing with. And this will hopefully make you appreciate your own internet services, or perhaps the Canadian banking system.

If you look at one of our first entries, we managed to open a bank account AND get an account for internet which includes a phone line that has free international calls to N. America and others, and tv. We were pretty proud, and frankly cocky, that we did it all in one day. So we assumed that it would only be a short time before these services started to service....boy were we wrong!?!

The bank: When we went to the bank, we dealt with the director of the branch. A very kind woman who's desk was even more disorganized than mine! She set us up, gave us our direct bank transfer numbers (which we used to get internet and electricity etc), took our cheques with our only euro money to deposit, and took the bank transfer number of our landlord so he could get our rent into his account directly without cheques. Her branch was undergoing renos for the following 3 weeks so we would have to go to the main strasbourg branch a few blocks away for anything we needed to do. She also explained that because we didn't have a utility bill, we had to do this proof of address procedure where she would send us an empty envelope to our neighbourhood post office, and they would send us a notice to pick it up and sign for it which would enable the bank to acknowledge that we were living where we said we were living. Then it would only be a matter of days when we would get a notice that our bank cards (which are also visa cards) were ready to pick up. Incredibly easy. So we did all of what she asked. And then a couple of days later, we got an email from the bank saying that our chequebooks were ready to pick up at the bank. And then we got 3 letters giving us a little welcome and explanation of everything to do with the bank. Then we got THE letters. The ones that say "Your bank card is ready to be picked up. Here is your secret password that you need. Please bring this letter with you when you pick up your card." Sweet! I went about 4 days later to pick it up...and no card. They said it wasn't ready yet and they weren't really sure why I would think it would be ready. I said when I received the letter saying "Your bank card is ready to be picked up", I assumed it was ready. But what do I know right!?! So I called Axel and he assumed I just didn't understand what they were saying and he would go and get his card. So a few days later, while Axel was still too busy to pick up his card, I went and tried again. And same answer, with an additional kiss-off - "No, the letters and emails don't mean anything. They are sent automatically. As soon as you set up your account, the letters go out." OK...this is one of many "angry fists waving in my head" moments that I have had many of. And as many of you know, usually they don't stay in my head. However, as I explained to Anne, Axel's sister, I don't know pissed off french. Only polite french. So the best I could do was give them back their eye roll shrug and walk away, and report to Axel. He just couldn't believe that this was possible. So a WEEK later, he came with me. And got the same response. But THIS time, they told him that one of the reasons the cards weren't processed yet was because we didn't prove our address. Which is SO lame for so many reasons. One, we did their silly letter to the post office signature thing. Two, they have been sending us tons of letters, including our internet codes which we obviously used since we got the email from them saying our chequebook was ready. And lastly, here we were, with two letters FROM THEM, to US, telling us to come to the bank because our bank cards were ready!?! Anyway, Axel wanted to speak to someone else besides the teller, and her response was precious. So, it was Monday when we went, which is fine because this branch is open. However, OUR branch that was under construction, was normally only open from Tuesday to Saturday, so the teller couldn't help us until tomorrow, which is when our branch would be open. Yeah, WHA...!?!? Can people really be that illogical with a straight face!?! I was laughing because I could see the transformation of kind, friendly patient Axel to angry frustrated not so calm Axel. So we had no choice but to leave. When Axel called the next day, he spoke to OUR branch director, since it was Tuesday (eye roll), and she explained that because we opened our account during the renovation AND the end of vacation, things were just a lot slower than normal. What she couldn't explain was that they took our money with no hesitation, but held it for ransom until we got our bank cards. Crazy people = crazy system. It took us 29 days to get our bank cards.

One thing to point out...the way the banks work in France are actually great. They don't have service fees to take out money, use interac, etc. AND you can take out money without any extra fees at ANY bank atm! So even if it's not your bank, you don't get charged that annoying fee you get charged in Canada. So once you get your bankcard and give a little polite complaint to your branch director, banking can actually work to your benefit.

Internet: So, you thought that was irritating...just wait until you read what is next.

We got talked into using n9uf. What attracted us was that there was only a 6 month contract as opposed to every other company of 1 year, and the cancellation fee that everyone has to pay when they close the account was half of the other companies (45 euros instead of 90 euros). And what I discovered was that as n9uf customers, we had access to any n9uf hotspots all over the country. So we went for it. They said that the box would be mailed to us within 3 weeks and so we had to wait up to 3 weeks to get everything working. No problem.

France Telecom, which runs all of the phone lines in the country, sells the line to n9uf or any other ADSL internet service provider, so I got a text message a few days later saying "France telecom welcomes you. Your line is ready." But no phone connection. I realize now that these kind of messages are just normal in all french companies. They will send you messages but don't expect you to believe them! Anyway, we waited and waited, and 2 weeks later, we got both the n8uf box and another text from France Telecom saying our line was working. But nothing worked. So Ax paid a visit to the store that signed our contract and she looked at the contract and said "But wait! It hasn't been 3 weeks! So why do you expect it to work!?!" Axel said he assumed that the text messages from France Telecom PLUS the n9uf box meant that we had everything but, as it turns out, we had to wait 3 weeks. So almost 3 weeks to the day we signed up, we got a text from n9uf saying our line should be working! And it did. All was great. For 2.5 days. And then...the box ready light turned yellow and never turned back to green. And then comes the next part of the story.

So in France, for any company, ANY company, you need to pay for customer service. What I mean by this is that when you call, YOU pay up to 34 cents per minute just to talk to someone! And because we don't have a landline yet, calling from our cells are even MORE expensive because it sucks up our minutes. I just don't get this reasoning.

So Axel called them. And they made him go through all of the diagnostics with the box. Then they said they would send a technician to check our line. So the next day a tech called and said something was wrong with our line. He will try and work on it but he didn't have a tool he needed. So we assumed that he was downstairs or somewhere where our phone line was getting screwed up. The next day he called back and Axel ran to the window to see if he was there while they were talking. And no, the line did not work. So he told Ax that he thinks it must be our internet box. So Ax asked him if he wanted to come upstairs, and it turns out that he couldn't because he was actually calling from Tunisia! So much for "sending" a technician. Anyway, they said that it should be 3 days max when we would receive our 2nd n9uf box. So a week later we get an email apologizing for the delay but we would get it FOR SURE by the end of the week. And then a week later, we got an email saying EXACTLY the same thing. Meanwhile, Axel and I went to France (see previous blog) and it was when he was wandering the streets with Jean-Marie that he realized you could actually get a physical n9uf box from FNAC (a department store)! So he called n9uf and they said "Well, yeah, you could buy the box and we would just reimburse you...but why do that when we are sending you the box!?!" God. How annoying. So the next day, I was on my way out to buy the box from the department store when I get a text saying "Come and get your box! It is (on the other side of town and hard to access by tram or bus) at a dry cleaning store right now." So I ditched the FNAC idea and just went to pick up the box that they sent us. And got home and plugged it in and set it up and....no green light. It was awful. NOTHING! So Axel called them again and they said the technician would call us back the next day. And they didn't so Axel called again and they said the technician would PHYSICALLY come to our house the next day to fix our line at 10 am. I waited an entire day and no tech. And the next morning (which was only a few days ago) Axel let it loose on the phone. He tried to cancel our contract and it turns out, you can't do it over the phone! You have to write them a letter explaining why!?! But the guy on the phone wouldn't let Axel go without getting him to explain why he was cancelling...and when Axel did explain, they dude did not believe him. God, the whole thing is still irritating.

So the day before I left, I signed us up for the only cable internet provider in France, numericable. I am not holding my breath but according to the new contract, a technician has to come on Tuesday between 4-6 pm to install everything. We'll see.

During this entire fiasco, we have been doing several things to get internet. I was going to an internet cafe, but this was annoying because the keyboard is in french and you cannot plug your own computer in...and it was 2 euros an hour. Then we met our really cool neighbours who gave ME access (axel is still too shy to ask to hook him up too). They are with France Telecom and this box (called the Orange livebox) makes you press a button to give someone wifi access with a WEP key. But after 10 minutes, it closes the opportunity so even though I have the code, Ax can't use it until they press the button again so his computer can get on it. The problem with them is that they are afraid of the health effects of wifi so they turn it off if they are not on the computer, which is OFTEN. I now know their sleeping, eating, going out and computer habits because of this. Axel finds their concerns a bit ironic since they both smoke like crazy. But whatever. The last thing we do is get onto the n9uf hotspot which we can sometimes get at home. But it's unreliable. Sometimes you can stay on the whole day, other times it is 10 minutes and will only work an hour later. Grrrr.

So that's it. My offical rant.

The other Bergmans (from September 30)

2008-09-30T16:37:00.005+02:00

We just spent the weekend in Paris. Sunday was a party to celebrate Axel's great uncle Rolf's birthday (80) and his and his wife Claire's 50ieth anniversary. It was wonderful to finally meet this branch of the family tree since I realized that I have inexplicably been absent at all of their gatherings. In fact, a relative from Victoria (actually she is the sister in-law of Claire...I think her name was Liz?) who was there reminded us that 13 years ago, I skipped out on a dinner with the family in Vancouver (sushi dinner...she has a great memory!) because we had just started dating and we both figured it would be weird to have me there. Liz said that her daughter brought her brand-new boyfriend at the dinner and now they are still together. It was pretty funny thinking about the early days.

Rolf was Axel's grandfather's youngest brother. This family was originally from Sweden (in fact, Axel's grandfather never gave up his swedish citizenship) and ended up in France, but all of the kids ended up everywhere. Axel's great aunt, Alix, spent a year in New York and actually speaks english with a NYC accent. So Rolf went to Canada to work, and he met Claire, who was from Belgium but was sent by her dad along with the rest of her family to Montreal during the war. They eventually made their way back to France. Claire's family also moved around a lot. I had a great conversation with Frances, another in-law of Claire's, who just moved to Victoria from Kingston, about French paperwork. Oh yes, it plagues everyone! That will be for a future blog, when we can look back and laugh...no laughing yet.

What was really cool were that the mannerisms and physical characteristics I would normally only vaguely associate with Axel's dad were displayed all over the room. His 3rd cousin, Nicolas, has the exact same hair as Axel (in fact, Nicolas' mother thought for about a second that Axel was Nicolas). The same hairline and crazy wings that offshoot from the ears. The nose and mouth is definitely Bergman. Stephane and Axel have similar movements when they are thinking (which I didn't realize until now). But my favourite discovery was the "arms crossed and lean to one side" look that most of the Bergmans have. It was so weird to see them all standing at a doorway talking to each other in the pose. It really made me smile and realize how genetics really do play a role passed our eye colour.

We stayed at Stephane's again. And this time, the endless stairs didn't seem so bad. I think I just got used to all of the stairs from our place. Totally surprised myself. Stephane showed us the newest look for Decleor, the brand that he is revamping as the newest International marketing director. I started using their products last xmas when he gave me some to try and they have changed my skin. I didn't really start seriously until April when I bought a couple more products after going for one of their facials. Even Axel has noticed a difference. Anyway, Stephane has the job of re-inventing the brand. It was cool to see the concept and how he came up with it. I'll keep you all in the loop of when the new look comes out. I had no idea how complicated it is to come up with a new idea. What is invigorating is feeling Steph's excitement when he talked about it. He has finally found a place where he can just go nuts with his vision. I love it!

The day before, I spent the day with Melissa and Tony, who were in Paris for a few days after a wedding in Ireland. We went to a great vegetarian restaurant in the Marais district. This area is the gay area and has the best stores for men. So Tony had his own shopping day! The difference between girls shopping and boys shopping is actually pretty significant. I couldn't pinpoint it until that day when Tony was looking for a jacket. It reminded me of Axel's long search for a suit for our wedding. Boys don't do this much so they don't know the inventory, what is really out there, how much is too much, when it's a good deal, etc. Hence shopping with boys is always a frenzied and stressful task. And usually it ends up either fruitless or the only thing bought is the first thing they saw and mostly liked. When girls go shopping, it's calm and peaceful, yet we always end up with something. What I realized when I was there was that I really haven't hung out in Paris enough. We have always gone to see family and maybe check out a museum. So because Axel was learning about satelite imaging all day Saturday, I had a great afternoon all to myself in the city. I took a book and walked along the Champs d'Elysees, read a little in the Tuileries, hung out outside the louvre checking out the eiffel tower from afar, and finishing it off with a walk down Rivoli street which is good for shopping. Nope, bought nothing.

I left Axel in Paris while so he could check out rockets. He can elaborate because, well, the only thing I really know about rockets is that I can spell rockets. I really have to go to one of his lectures just to understand a little space lingo.

I'm going to try and catch up on the rest of our activities soon!! Hard when we have a varying and intermittent connection so don't give up on us!

A plus.

from moi

2008-09-24T23:03:00.003+02:00

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to send a message from me too. We're ok. Thanks so much for your concerns. It was a long, hard week but it's over and we're just moving on. I think what has made it easier is that we don't know too many people in this city and essentially just had each other for company, so is became much less dramatic.

What I realized quickly is that my french is far better than I gave myself credit for, especially in times of stress! I managed to answer all of the questions from the doctor, listen to her admin's extremely vague directions on how to get to the clinic behind the hospital in a different city (Schlitingheim or something like that...different city but in reality it would be like going from arbutus to granville street) to visit a doctor on the 3rd floor (which is really the 4th), go to the other doctor who turned out couldn't understand why the first doctor kept sending patients to her since she was an addiction specialist (when I gave her my letter from the first doctor, her first question was "You don't take heroin do you?" and my first question to her was "Is heroin the same word in english?"...she told me that she has had so many patients from the first doctor who she had to send elsewhere...and yes, she has called the doctor to explain the mix-up many times but the admin seems to not understand), find the other part of the clinic where I could find another doctor who could help me, explain the mix-up to the clerk and let her know that I am Canadian so would need to pay up-front, tell everyone who wanted to know why the hell we were in Strasbourg in the first place just to appease their curiosity of having a foreigner in their clinic, re-explain everything to the third doctor, understand the explanation of how to take the crazy labour-inducing pill the next day and when to come back, find the lab to get my blood drawn in the hospital in front of the clinic, and figure out how to get back home. Yes, I know it was one long sentence, but I wanted you to feel how I did during this long crazy day! Actually, it was only 3 hours but it felt like forever. Thank goodness Axel came with me when I had to go back because after the excrutiating pain, the last thing I wanted to do was translate expletives from english to french at how badly it hurt!

One thing that was extremely frustrating was how no one could believe that I was married but don't have Bergman as my last name. For a country like France which is so progressive in so many areas that everywhere else is still stuck in the 50s, you would think that this kind of thing would be more common! You wouldn't believe how many times I was asked what my maiden name was and when I said it was Cruz they assumed I didn't understand so I would explain that Bergman is my partner's name but I still use Cruz. They would roll their eyes or do the familiar "oh god, she really doesn't understand what I'm asking her" lip purse, and then re-ask the question. And then I would say that I kept my last name because it was easier. And EVERY person would tell me that in France, it is automatic to use your husband's name. So I would then say what if they wanted to use the wife's name to which they stopped harrassing. I don't want you to think that I don't like the name Bergman. It's a great name. But having Cruz my whole life and then just switching now just makes it confusing for me. The bank has refused to let me keep my name though. And my resident card also has Bergman as my last name, despite having no documents with Bergman attached to my name. It's kind of a game for me right now. How many times can I say my last name is Cruz and then have Bergman put on the file.

OK...now Strasbourg needs to be explored and because Axel is spaced out, I must do the duty. Since this medical pause, we have already checked out the european parliament, cronenberg breweries, jupiter and 3 of its moons, as well as settled in. More to come so stay tuned!

:)

Sad News...

2008-09-24T21:16:00.001+02:00

It seems my inexperience and excitement got the better of me from my last posting. Sadly Rani had to endure a miscarriage last week when she found out that the foetus was no longer growing and had to be removed. The doctors informed us that this is fairly common at the early stages of pregnancy. What made it a little more difficult for us is that in France they give you a special pill called Méthergin (Novartis product) which causes a rush of hormones simulating labour. Normally, the effects are felt a little over 48 hours later where you go into the clinic where they give you a second pill to help with the final phase. In Rani’s case, she went into contractions early and had the miscarriage on her own not needing the second pill. Apparently this is a more healthier thing to happen, the logic being the less pills the better, but Rani had to perform her miscarriage at home with me not really knowing how to help her. When we eventually did make it to the clinic though, the doctors thoroughly checked Rani out and gave her a clean bill of health, but indicated that she would have to endure contractions for a week or so. Rani is now doing much better physically, and life is slowly coming back to as normal as it can be in Strasbourg. The positive outcome is that Rani sorted it out earlier rather than later, and that we subsequently found out that this is a relatively common occurrence for many women who later go on to conceive. We’re not sure what the causes might have been, but there are a number of factors like strange foods, moving to a foreign country, or Rani’s body wasn’t ready. For my part, I’m sure to be more cautious in the future about these things, and not get too excited too soon.

Things I will miss most from Canada

2008-09-08T17:28:00.013+02:00

I actually wrote this at the end of September but I figure I will edit this and post since I have spent a month in not-sunny Vancouver and have regained perspective.

1. Cheaper and better gluten-free products

This has got to be one of the major drawbacks of being in Strasbourg. It's crazy expensive. For example, I just spent 3.20 euros on 5 slices of bread. And not even big slices.

edit: Prices are actually pretty similar but you just get more bread for your money.

2. Cheaper anything

Example One: Cloth bags for grocery shopping. In Canada, maybe the most you would spend is $5 for something super nice. Here, the cheapest I have found is 5.60 EUROS and it was crap. And they sell crappy thicker plastic bags (like the Ikea bags which are uber awkward) for up to 15 euros!

edit: OK, I spent $8.95 for some pretty swank shopping bags when I went back to Vancouver. But you can also spend 99 cents for something similar.

Example Two: A Brita water filter. In Canada you might pay $15 for one. And it may or may not include filters. Here it's about 30 euros and each filter is about 6 euros!

edit: I looked for the specific filter in Vancouver and we don't have it. dang.

Example Three: Cheap chinatown bowls. This was my source for anything breakable I needed in the kitchen in Vancouver, Hamilton, Montreal, Toronto. At most I would pay $1 for a bowl, but usually it would run me about 50 cents. Well, for the exact same 50 cent and 1 dollar bowls, Strasbourg is selling them at rockbottom prices of 5 and 10 euros!!!! I almost had a heart attack.

I could go on but I'm trying to let these things go. Damn zoom for going bankrupt. I could've started a consumer products run going back and forth and selling to expats.

edit: now that I have been back, I realize there are a lot of things that are cheaper in France. And the food in France is way better quality so maybe this is what we pay for.

3. Dog-poo free sidewalks. I won't elaborate. Just know I think I have mastered the "look 30 feet ahead, scan, and walk safely according to memorized poomine map" walk.

4. Free service numbers. This still shocks us. If you need any service of any kind (eg. Electicity company, France Telecom, internet, GOVERNMENT lines), you have to PAY per minute!!! It's crazy! They charge from 0.15 to 0.50 euros per minute. I still can't get over this. Coincidentally, our internet service provider provides a free service phone number but you can NEVER reach a person. Ever. Actually, I should expand this to all services. Nothing is ever straightforward.

edit: I won't elaborate...see rant from earlier posts

5. Asian restaurants. I still can't believe there are no real asian chefs in this country. I refuse to believe that! NEVER take a good pad thai for granted! We still haven't found one japanese restaurant here. Actually, I saw one but it was boarded up. I'm guessing it's because they charged 40 euros for one piece of sushi and people caught on.

edit: I stand by this 150%. Nothing beats Vancouver asian cuisine.

6. Websites that work. What I mean by this, is websites for things like the train, or the plane or the bus that actually tell you what you want to know, allow you to make reservations, and assume that you want the most direct and cheapest route possible. The best example is SNCF, the national French rail system. When we booked our tickets via the web from Marseille to Strasbourg, what they DIDN'T do is 1) make sure we don't have to switch train stations in Paris and 2) tell us there is a direct train from Marseille to Strasbourg!?! Live and learn.

edit: these websites are even more annoying when you are in Vancouver.

7. Web-savvy people. And I will include people like our parents in this. Because people still don't get the email concept here, they will use their child's email address rather than getting their own. Or they will give you the wrong email address many times until you realize that the "." is in the wrong spot. Or they just never check it even though you tell them you are going to email them.

8. Customer service.....

I can only come up with 7 so far. I am in the midst of writing a similar list for Strasbourg but I figure I will do that when I re-discover them (like pain au chocolats which I re-met an hour ago...yum).

A slaughterhouse, a palace, a tower and an irish pub

2008-09-08T11:11:00.006+02:00

Yesterday was the first Sunday of the month, which means, in all of France, free museum and gallery day! For those who are in the midst of planning a holiday to France, take advantage of this. You'll save a ton of money and if you get bored, you can leave without feeling ripped off!

We met up with some ISU students at the Musee Historique. This was formally a slaughterhouse. It really looks like a big barn but I'm pretty sure they spent a bit of time cleaning it. They gave us free headsets which magically turned on whenev

er you walked by certain hotspots. Except they weren't quite matched up to the exhibit you were at. It was pretty funny watching all of us get a little surprise in the headset and then run around the area trying to find the corresponding archive. We learned a TON there. First of all, Johann Gutenberg, the father of moveable type and the printing press, lived here for 10 years and developed his inventions right in the city. His hometown in Germany, Mainz, and Strasbourg celebrate his life every year on...actually I can't remember the date...I think it was in June. So here are some interesting facts that came out of his inventions. Strasbourg became the book capital of the world and all of the printers studied here and moved on. In fact the first printer in Paris was Alsatian. Being a book worm, I really got all warm and fuzzy when I realized I was living in the first book capital of the world!!! Also, the first EVER newspaper was from here! And with that, the publisher created the first author copyright law to prevent people from stealing his news! We also learned how Strasbourg was a "free city" which meant they could mint their own coins and had no real ties to anyone royal to rule them. And then Louis the 14th decided he wanted to be ruler of Strasbourg so he proclaimed it and that was that. It seemed that there was actually very little resistance to the French takeover.

We took a museum break and headed to Flam!, a tarte flambe place. It's all you can eat if you so choose, but I really don't understand how anyone can eat more than one of those! I got the legere, or light one which was the only one without bacon. And light it was not! I think it was because they used a light cheese? I mention this stop because I figure when people come to visit, this will be one of the places we eat. Cheap too.

After lunch we went to Palais du Rohan, a former palais, with shiny rooms like Versailles, but in Strasbourg. It now houses the Archeology museum of Strasbourg (which is essentially the death through the ages museum) in the basement, a vast collection of renaissance paintings which include Rafael and Botticelli on the top floor, and left its opulence intact on the main floor. Oh and a huge ceramics collection of Paul Hannog. For the ceramic buffs (i.e. Aly), this is probably an important name. For the rest of us, an interesting story. It turns out the Hannog family made the most well-reputed ceramics all over France. But a family friend of Louis the king allowed another family in the town of Sevres, to win the rights to be the ONLY ceramics maker in France! Talk about monopoly!! It's interesting how this has become somewhat of a norm, with Dijon being the only place allowed to call their mustard Dijon, Champagne, same thing, Roquefort, etc etc. So the consequence was that the Hannog family was left penniless from losing their livelihood. Oh yeah, there was also a HUGE astronomical clock just hanging out there. When I get a chance, I'll add the pics to this posting.

We then realized that it was 3h30 and the Cathedral tower was still open AND free!!! So we scurried over there and climbed 332 steps to get to 142 m to the top. Man was that hard. But worth it. Interesting tidbit. In 1521, just a few years after it was finished, the cathedral became protestant under the Reformation. And then when Louis asked for Strasbourg in 1681, it became Catholic. It was originally built as a Roman temple, and then destroyed by fire. Then rebuilt in 1284 (with the tower finished in 1439).

We ended up at the Irish Times, a pub close to our house which was playing the Hurling final. This was the craziest sport I have ever seen! You should check it out. It's crazy. They have paddles that look like beaver tails and they have to balance the ball (like the egg-spoon race in elementary school) while running to the goal and score. It's like a mixture of soccer, rugby, lacrosse and crazy people. Amon, one of the ISU students, is a hurling player (I'm guessing a really good one because he arrived late due to having to play in a hurling game back in Ireland) so this is why we ended up doing this.

On a completely different topic, we are now the official space nerd halfway house. There are a few students who did the ISU summer program and are desperately looking for a place to live. And because we have a couch, we are now helping them out with saving a bit of hostel money while they look for a home for October. We have Zauher until Wednesday, and Mickael is coming Tuesday until Saturday. Who knows who else we might end up with!!

Why Alsace is one of the best parts of France to live in

2008-09-06T18:23:00.005+02:00

I was looking up doctors who speak english in Alsace and came across a great little website for people who are moving to this area. It actually covers all of France but has a section for Alsace-Lorraine.

I accidentally pressed "public holidays" instead of "social security" and discovered that Alsace and Moselle (another nearby region) has not one, but TWO extra holidays more than the rest of France! Good Friday and 2nd Christmas Day (i.e. Boxing Day) are the bonus days! I wonder why these regions are the only ones? I'm sure I can wiki this.

Another tidbit. The European parliament must translate every document in 26 different languages! Are there really that many languages in Europe? I will look this up too.

Oh, just realized Axel posted something. Keep reading!

ISU-Week 1

2008-09-06T16:50:00.002+02:00

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...

Another interesting new factoid

2008-09-06T14:56:00.002+02:00

In Canada, when you aren't home to receive a package, Canada post leaves a little postcard with the post office address it has left it for you to pick it up. Simple because they are usually only a few blocks from your house, have reasonable hours of operation, and if lucky, is in a good shopping area so you can kill two birds with one stone.

In France, it's starts off similar. But instead of picking it up at the closest post office, you pick it up at designated business spots indicated. For example, one of Axel's classmates had to pick up his internet box at a hair salon. There are restaurants, grocery stores, corner stores which also take your package in for you to pick up! I love it. While post offices in Canada are generally in 7/11s, stationary stores, or shopper's drug marts, the hair salon takes the cake for coolest place to pick up your box that finally came.

Incidentally, our box finally came! However our landline still isn't working. Axel is dealing with this right now. If we get the landline by October, I'll be impressed.

A little americana

2008-09-05T14:50:00.003+02:00

A friend just sent this. If you haven't seen this Daily Show segment, it's worth a watch. And makes you realize how important it is to emphasize that you are Canadian here.

I met some of Axel's class last night at an impromptu donair dinner. It was there that I learned that although the class has people from all over the world on paper, in reality it is filled with Canadians and Americans with dual citizenship. For example, Axel is not a Canadian in class but French. There's another "French" guy who is really from the pacific northwest but married a french woman and has been living in Toulouse for a few years. Apparently a "brit" from the states is here too. A few people were implying that it was a way to fill the class with north americans. I just thought it was hilarious that on their class list, the person Axel and I assumed was like him (someone with a french passport but obviously from N. America), named Kevin Smith, was actually from Lyon! So in the end, we realize we can't assume anything when we see a name.

Which brings me to our current morning chats...what to name the blueberry? Thanks to all who have given us suggestions. I am not sure if Baguette would be accepted as a name in France (maybe in Canada?). It's original, that's for sure. The space nerds last night LOVED Dartanian Vader so I'm keeping that one in the back pocket for as long as I can. And if my wish comes true of having twins and a dog, naming just takes a whole new part of the brain I'm not quite ready for. I actually thought this part of procreation was going to be the fun and easy part. But now that it's actually happening, I realize that I can't really just pick a name because it makes us laugh. Or that we will assume the kid will be able to change it eventually. I remember growing up and deciding I really wanted to be named Cindy or Candy or Petunia or Penelope. Just because my name was something they never could pronounce in the roll call. So still a thinker.

Have a great weekend.

Remnants of the war...maybe

2008-09-03T16:06:00.005+02:00

This morning I was startled by an air raid horn!! It was exactly like in the movies. And it was loud. I think it was loud enough so that the entire city could hear it. It lasted about 2 minutes and then nothing. Then an hour later, it went off again. Exactly the same. I looked in the courtyard to see if people were running for their lives wearing helmets to some secret below-ground shelter but no one moved. Just acted like this crazy sound was normal. So I'm not sure if it is normal. I'll get back to you in a week.

WWI and II are still referenced in many places in Strasbourg. A few of the buildings that were ravaged by the war have been rebuilt exactly as previously, however the rooftop gun windows were kept in these same buildings. There are streets named after important dates in these wars, one of which is la rue du 22 novembre (after WWI 1918 event where the insurgency to bring a communist soviet government was stopped). Because this region has always been a grey area in terms of being french or german, it will be interesting to learn about its history how it has changed or not. Jean-Marie mentioned that Alsace has an advantage over the rest of France in terms of health care. 90% of your healthcare is covered, while the rest of France is only 70% covered. Unless of course you have a job, in which case 100% is covered. Another great reason to live in this place!

So much to learn about this city. The first thing though is to find out about the crazy horn!

...ax just got home and he acted like the air raid horn was normal. Apparently this happens once a month all over this country. Thanks for letting me know!! I should befriend someone with access to a bomb shelter, though, just in case.

The symbolism of being in Strasbourg

2008-09-02T22:22:00.003+02:00

The regional mascot of Strasbourg and Alsace in general, is the stork. There are stork statues everywhere. You can get stork postcards. Stork stuffed animals. All things stork can begotten in this city. The birds themselves have become an endangered species but if you are lucky, you can spot them nesting in the trees and chimneys.

The birds are also mascots of new babies. In Alsace, it is tradition that if your child wanted a new sibling, they would leave a cube of sugar on their windowsill and a stork would come and take it and bring back a baby in its place.

Well, coincidentally, this is the perfect time in our lives to bring on the stork. I assumed we were keeping it on the downlow and only telling our families for now...until I saw that in Axel's first blog entry, he spilled the beans. And he also told everyone in his new class. Because there was actually someone in the class who knows a really good friend of mine in Montreal (so cool how small the world is), I figured that today was the day we told everyone else in case they heard through the grapevine.

It's still pretty early to really plan for anything but some details in case you are curious:

1) I am currently 11.5 weeks along. This means that it is the size of a piece of large california roll.

2) The approximate due date is March 22. However, being lunar-centric and knowing the historical trends of when babies actually decide to come out, the full moon of March is most likely when it will happen...which is March 11th, coincidentally Axel's dad's birthday.

3) We found out about the little alien when it was technically the size of a blueberry. Hence the name Blueberry Bergman. Or blue for short. Hopefully this will not stick. I was hoping for Dartanian Vader (it's french so it should be ok'ed by everyone) but I have a feeling I will get vetoed. So any name suggestions are welcome. Anytime. I think we need help.

4) I am not so secretly hoping that I will give birth to triplets : twins and a dog. I think it would be cool to get it all over with in one shot, and have a little puppy that resembles the other two just so people know they are from the same family.

5) Not sick. Not anything actually. Just incubating an alien that has taken over my body.

Axel has had a lot of trouble keeping anything fun from any of our friends. In fact, when we got married last Leap Day, we decided not to tell anyone until after since it was only immediate family, however he "secretly" told a few people which resulted in everyone I worked with finding out in a very echoey loud but claustrophobic auditorium, not through me. Anyway, I figured that if we were away from people we knew, the information would have less chance of getting leaked. The blog, however, was our security breach!

Internet and almost a landline

2008-09-02T19:51:00.000+02:00

We met our neighbours last night. They needed three eggs. We needed internet. So we traded. It was awesome. We got to see the apartment next door which is similarly set up but with one washroom downstairs rather than ours upstairs and another toilet downstairs. They are super nice and had no problems giving us the password to the wifi.

And then today I received a text message from France Telecom telling my that our landline is activated. But it's not. Or else the line isn't working. We can't have everything I guess...but having the landline work would be a nice bonus.

Yesterday we found Vitana, a "bio" (health food) store which is just next to the cathedral which has a whole section for gluten-free stuff. Axel went nuts and we managed to overfill our granny cart with all kinds of celiac-friendly carbs. It's pretty expensive so I will have to check out the serpent vert, the big bio store, to compare prices. However, Vitana is a lot closer, and there is a really good bakery next door and a chocolate store I like to look at on the way. That morning I also found out that the route we were taking to get to the centre of town was way longer than if we crossed the bridge right at our house. This is interesting because now I can get to the centre of town in 10 minutes sauntering rather than 15 minutes with my butt in gear. Axel went for a run and it took him 15 minutes to go around the entire parameter of downtown. Mind you, he's running and not dealing with people as he's on the water rather than in the heart of the city, but that might give you an idea of how big/small the Strasbourg area really is.

Mt Saint Odile!

2008-09-02T17:40:00.000+02:00

After two weeks of being in France I finally got a chance to get out on the open road..enfin! And as Rani guessed I looked for the closest hill and went for it. Turns out that the Strasbourg area is flat as a pancake so it's only after over 50km of cross winds and about six towns (some of which have some awesome cobble stone action) that I finally got to the foot of Mt St Odile. The best part about cycling around here is that there are bike paths not only within the city but also between towns so with a little planning you can do the entire ride with limited interaction with cars..awesome (Vancouver planners take note).
Anyway, Mt Saint Odile is 9km version of Seymore where the road is a little windyer and a little narrower, but there are just as many roadies ..so I knew I was in the right place. Of course once at the top, instead of a ski hill there's a chateau that's been there for hundreds of year, and a natural spring that as it turns out is a major pigrimage site..feeling more holy already. But not as holy as the guy who was filling his car with bottled water to sell in the town below :-)

On the way home I was starting to run short on gas..didn't plan on a five hour ride (as usual), and of course it's Sunday s everything is closed..dang! Luckily as I was noodling my way home I rode right into some kind of weird festival where there was barely anybody in the town but had these amazing floats all made with real flowers..insane! So I joined the parade, and with my snazy EV outfit people thought I was part of it..although I'm starting to notice that people here do like to cheer for cyclist..(tres cool). I finally found a gummy bear stand, which got me the necessary sugar to get me home.

till next ride

Strasbourg part two (from Rani)

2008-09-02T17:36:00.001+02:00

Hi everyone!
First of all. We just found out our landline will begin to work onSeptember 2nd theoretically. Sorry for the pre-emptive message as I have heard from several people that the number doesn't work yet.
Secondly, I realized after I sent the first message that it might have sounded like we were stressed. In reality, we spent our first day wandering the streets of downtown Strasbourg filled with enthusiasm. Yes, we might have been tired and hungry as we couldn't find all of the health food stores I had carefully researched in Vancouver for some celiac-friendly cuisine and we had just moved across the county with two baskets full of provence spices, new sheets and towels from Ikea and clean laundry (which we will never take for granted again…more on that later), but Ax and I both have tendencies of nomadic life so thefirst real day in Strasbourg was really awesome.

We realized that the apartment that Axel's mom, Catherine, had discovered for us is so well-located. We are a few hundred metres from the tram that takes Axel to school (although I think he will be taking his bike more than taking the tram), a few steps from the nearest bakery, co-operative (sells local products like produce and wine AND honey), and the little grocery store (this is something I have to take a picture for the Filipinos on this list. It's called a Sari Sari store!!! We haven't gone in yet so I am wondering if it is owned by Filipinos! To those not Filipino, Sari Sari stores are all over the Philippines are your local corner store that has a little bit of everything). There's a pharmacy about 50 metres away. Called the pharmacie of the virgins. Hee hee. We also just discovered that the famous Choucruterie(sauerkraut factory) is 3 doors from us! It is now only a restaurant and theatre for small plays with sauerkraut topics so Axel and I will have to go there at some point and give you guys the goods on how good the chocrut really is. Last night we took a tour by boat of the city and found out that sauerkraut is really from China! I wonder how it became the dish of Germany and this region.

The main reason for discovering all of these nearby bonuses was for the dreaded laundry run. We don't have a washing machine in our place nor in our building and the old "laverie" just closed down last year which used to be across the street. Our building manager told us that the closest one was still pretty far so we prepared ourselves for the trek. We got ourselves another old lady rolling cart so we each had one filled with laundry and set off. We needed to get a document sent by the bank to us signed by the nearest Post Office to confirm that we live where we live, so we decided to go there first. It was only open until noon (we got there at 3) so we had to abandon that piece of administration for another day. The post office is about 500 meters away but in the direction of Petite France, the most picturesque part of Strasbourg filled with tourists from all over, german pubs and lots of cute little squares commemorating various important people ofStrasbourg. I thought it was weird that one of the most german part of Strasbourg was called Petite France, but then from the boat tour we found out that the reason for the ironic name is because there was a venereal disease epidemic and the Alsatians assumed it was the French's fault, hence the isolation to Petite France…. Anyway, back to laundry. We decided to cross over to the Laundromat via Petite France so we rolled our dirty clothes through the crowds of tourists and realized it probably wasn't the best timing, considering that this weekend is the last for the holidays before school starts and all areas of picturesque Strasbourg was filled with people milking their freedom from school and work as enthusiastically as possible. We were told later that the craziness dies down in October so we might stilluse this path to get our clothes clean since it was really pretty. Anyway, after wandering around the "Grand Rue" which is more like thesize of a Gastown Alley over Granville Street, we found the Laundromat/laverie behind construction. Coincidentally, the bank was also behind construction so it took us a while to find that too.

When we got there, there were only 3 machines that didn't have a sign saying out of order. There were actually 6 machines that didn't have a sign, but 3 of them were obviously out of order (one had no door, and two looked like they were dropped from the 5th floor). And then we realized we had no change. We needed 2 x 2 euro coins for each washer and 1 euro for 10 minutes of drying. And they only took single coins so all of my 10 cent coins were useless. So while Axel went to find a place for change, I separated and loaded the clothes into 2 machines. Axel came back with a drink which he needed to purchase to get change, 2 x 2 euros and left to get more. So I did one load and got the other one ready. He came back and we loaded the other machine, added soap, and realized that it was broken. So Axel, whom we all know as a diligent problem solver, tried to get the machine working, since we only brought enough soap for two loads. And all our soap was in the machine that was broken. Axel figured that all he needed was a wrench so he left for home to get a wrench and more soap. Meanwhile, the other machine was taken by a local Strasbourgeoisee who we ended up befriending later. Twenty minutes later, Ax returned with a wrench and more soap, but by then, three more people came in to use the machines. So we put our first load in the dryer and Axel attempted to fix the washer….which stayed broken. So we waited until the loads ahead of us were done before we did ours. I decided to try and find a health food store on the street that I had on my list as existing (it does not exist anymore), but ended up finding another Laundromat about 6 blocks away. So we have an alternative location. It was really busy though and it's in a student area so I have a feeling it's worse than ours. When I returned, Axel and the woman who was doing laundry started talking and she ended up being a great source of info. It turns out, she comes from quite a ways to do laundry, so we should consider ourselves lucky being walking distance. And school is starting so come EARLY in the morning. AND she told us the best healthfood store is in the other university district and is huge and everyone goes there. It was on my list but I figured it was too far and wasn't on our grocery route but I will have to check it out after talking to her. In the end, we learned a few things: 1) Bring change. And keep the change you have. Because we also got stuck with no change getting on the tram which doesn't take bills so we had to just get on it and hoped no one checked on us. 2) Get there early. 3) Bring extra soap. 4) It's not as far as we thought it would be, so doing one load at a time will not be so bad. 5) Bring a good book or music otherwise you'll end up playing a coin version of bocce with Axel and lose all of our money under the soap machine.

Yesterday we also hit the marché (street market) so got lots of vegetables and fruit (and local cheese…yum), the monoprix for a broom, and did a boat tour in the evening topped off with the lighting of the cathedral (totally totally cool. Too bad the cathedral lighting stops at the end of summer!). Catherine wanted us to make sure we did some touristy things before real life began, so we had to make sure we did the boat tour. It was so good that both of us decided we would have to go a couple of times to get all of the info down. It was made even more exciting when a screaming match broke out between a group of young people having a good time and talking it up and laughing loudly and a few irate tourists who couldn't hear their headsets from the noise. It was pretty funny.

Today is Sunday and Axel has gotten our bikes put together. So I am assuming that you all know what Axel is doing today. He woke up and opened up all of the maps to find the closest mountain.

For those who haven't heard from me personally, I apologize. Thanks to Jean-Marie, I found out I can get free wi-fi at the McDonald's, butI just haven't gotten myself to the point where I can buy anything from that place just yet. One of the best sources of croissants is just next door so given the choice, I ended up just using my iPOD touch to download some emails and respond to any that were urgent. I'm going to the internet café today so I will make sure to respond to everyone!!

A la prochaine! Rani
PS. If anyone is interested in a really great book on French societyand culture, pick up "60 million French can't be wrong". Written bytwo Canadians Barlow and Benoit, and given to us by Catherine, itreally helps understand the nuances of French culture. I'm halfwaythrough.

Salut from Strasbourg (Rani's first e-mail)

2008-09-02T17:20:00.004+02:00

Salut!
We have finally gotten to Strasbourg and moved in. When we arrived in France, we stayed at Stephane's (Axel's cousin who you may all notice in pictures over the years. He has managed to coordinate meeting up at least once a year wherever we are!). Stephane lives in Paris in this awesome apt right next to the metro and surrounded by street parking which is free all of August. He lives on the 5th floor with no elevator so it definitely kicked my ass going up and down everyday. Unfortunately Steph was in Indonesia so we were on our own for the 3 days we were in Paris. We had to go to Strasbourg for a day to drop off our crazy luggage that Don brought for us a month previously which we picked up from Axel's family in Antony, a suburb just outside of Paris. Axel's cousin Camille, fed our hungry souls while we picked up our stuff.

The trip to Strasbourg was painful…over 500 km eachway. And we would have stayed the night except we had no sheets forthe bed or towels. And we had to feed Stephane's cat. So we drove back after hauling our bags, our bikes and everything we now own, up 3 long flights of stairs to our new abode. The next day, Aug 18th, we went to the South of France from Aug 18 – 26 to hang out with Axel'sg randfather, sister and nieces. It was a great trip filled with swimming, playing spit with Sonya, talking books with Nadia, and chilling out with Papous and Anne. We went to Les Baux de Provence for a day and were blown away with this exhibit we saw. It's in a cathedral carved out from a cave and they have a show with van Gogh's paintings projected on the walls and columns and music in the

background. I'm not doing it justice in any way by describing it this way. Just know that we will make sure we will go every year we can as it changes.

We arrived in Strasbourg late on the 26th, so all we could do in Strasbourg was eat ice cream and orient ourselves in the neighbourhood. We found the local grocery store, various Indian, thai and Chinese restaurants, and the pretty incredible cathedral that Strasbourg is known for. Oh yeah, and the standard sausage and saurkraut cafes which I am sure we will be frequenting.

The next day (yesterday), we got our game on and got to work to find the closest bakery, veggies and fruit store before 9 am. We saw an old woman with her rolling cart so decided to follow her since all old women with carts are going to the market. But I think we scared her and she ended up escaping from our stalking efforts.

By the end of the day, we got my long-term resident card which I need for everything in France, our bank accounts, internet at home which will arrive in 3 weeks, as well as bonus finds like the market (where we got our own rolling cart (25 euros, which is actually cheap, some veggies for ratatouille and some fruits for dirt cheap (total 10euros)), the crossroads for the trams which was handy to know, the mall for some air conditioning time, a good place to photocopy, an internet café, and the best part: a Chinese grocery store!!!! That was such a find since we decided we needed rice for dinner and were dragging our heels about having to buy rice in the MarcheU which we knew was expensive. We got tofu, soya sauce with no wheat, currypaste, coconut milk for cheap, and a source for rice cookers. All in all, a good day.

What is great about this city is the close proximity for everything.We did all of this on foot and managed to do almost everything on our list. This afternoon is Ikea where we need to supplement our place with some kitchen utensils (we currently have 1 fork, 6 spoons, no knives, and 1 crepe pan). Tomorrow will be Axel's paperwork day: an appointment at 9:10 am at the university to get registered and his student card, and then his social security card and medical insurance started in France. We also need to get the electricity to come under our name. Interestingly, in order to do anything utility-related in France, you need to know the name of the last tenant and/or the name of the last person who had the phone line or cable hooked up. It's the only way the companies can figure out where you live in the buildings since many buildings, like ours, has no apartment number!?! Yeah, that's right, no number. We just live in the building, the backpart of the courtyard, 3 long flights of stairs up and the 3rd door on the left. We met our building manager who was the nicest woman and she tested all of the buzzers until she got ours to figure out which was our buzzer. I just don't get why they don't just number the doors. But maybe this is just North American mentality!?! I have a feeling this is just the tip of the iceberg.

When you call us, it's free for us. All incoming calls in Europe are free. So call often!! I think with VOIP, it's free to call France,but I'm not sure if it's just for landlines. The landline isn't working yet. Not sure when it will happen but I'm hoping it's soon since we started paying for it. Once we get internet (hopefully sooner than 3 weeks from now), we will have VOIP too so we can call Canada and the US for free.
If you are in France, you should call us. Strasbourg is 2h20 minutes away from Paris via train, and isn't expensive. And we have a very nice couch to sleep on. We'll post pics and Ax is determined to start a blog so I'll send you those details when I have them.
I'm only on the internet intermittently until we get our own so if I don't respond, don't be mad!! We miss you all.
Love Ran

Introduction

2008-09-02T17:10:00.001+02:00

Yeah!! I can finally sit down and get this Blog going. When Rani and I left Vancouver we had a lot of requests to keep in touch and share some of the weird intricacies that come with moving to France. So here's our very own family blog. 2008/2009 is going to be an eventful year for us. Rani is starting some new and exciting work projects and she's cooking us up a little wee one (we call bleu) that we haven't really come to grasp yet...yes we will be parents in very soon..yikes! Meanwhile, I'll be going back to school to learn about a field in which I have absoulutely no knowledge about..Space. Turns out I figured out where the big dipper really is only a few months ago, so I have a long way to go. Of course in all this there will have to be some ride logs..I mean how can one be in France and not go for some epic rides. So please visit often but keep your expectations low as the updates may be quite intermittent, you should be getting e-mail updates from the blog unless you don't want them, and e-mail us often as we miss you all very much.