the air raid cometh

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

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

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

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

Prop8


Our PM fibs again

Yeah! Rani's home!

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

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

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.

ax