Bienvenue à Paris!

Bonjour tout le monde!

I've been in France for five days - just starting to get used to things. I'm moving into my dorm in Paris tomorrow, but this week I've been staying with a family acquaintance in Buc, a very pretty village near Versailles. Since my lab is in the heart of the city, 15 miles away, I have a bit of a commute.

I leave the very French-village "Rue de la Ferme" where I'm staying, complete with real shutters and birds that wake me up (but very musically) if I don't close them... 

(look for angry kitty under the sign)

And catch the always-exactly-on-time bus down the street. On the bus, I pass the beautiful park in Buc...

A casual giant aqueduct... 

(But actually. This thing is 80 feet tall and incredibly majestic. And you can climb on top and eat tiny wild strawberries! It's not actually Roman - some guy in the 1600s decided he was going to build a big chunk of rock that would survive anything, man. Overall, very adequate aqueduct.)

(Wikipedia)

And the gorgeous forest behind it.

I get off the bus in downtown Versailles, featuring Louis XIV's famous palace and gardens, and the attending thousands of tourists;

The very imposing town hall;

And prominently placed Starbucks and McDonald's (which has a very decent-looking patisserie section). I get on a grimy but spacious double-decker train and roll through the suburbs, 

along the Seine,

and then underground. I get off at the huge Austerlitz station, where you can buy cheap delicious-smelling pastries or a new outfit without leaving the tunnels.

When I get out, I'm just down the street from the Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière, one of the biggest hospitals in Europe, where I work. I go through the gate...

And reach the main building itself. I do not, sadly, work in this building - though that might actually a good thing, since it's probably cursed by now. The site was first a gunpowder factory (hence Salpêtrière) and then a prison for prostitutes. The building itself was for a while both the world's largest hospital and a prison. During the Revolution, a violent mob stormed the place to free some of the prostitutes and also murder some of the psychiatric patients. But then this was the first hospital to take the novel approach of treating psychiatric patients at least a little bit like people. Freud learned psychiatry here, and Princess Diana died here. 

(cmf-paris.com)

Anyway. I walk across the enormous campus, past a big church,

A nice park, with some oddly disconcerting statues,

And some ambulances to the very modern and shiny, unfortunately colored home of the Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Epinière.

I walk past the brain art in the lobby and up the stairs to the 3rd-by-French-standards, 4th-by-American floor, 

With this cool and very architecturally diverse view.

My lab is very young and international (lots of Europe and South America). People are very friendly, allthough I have trouble getting anyone to talk to me in French, because nearly everyone (including shopkeepers, etc) speaks better English than I speak French. My work should be pretty interesting once I get rolling properly - doing analysis/machine learning stuff on a giant database of Alzheimer's patients. Wasn't terribly productive this week, though; mix of IT issues/unfamiliar keyboard (surprisingly difficult to get used to)/afternoons are hard when you're jetlagged/sitting at a desk and staring at a screen the whole day is hard/StackExchange is very necessary and very distracting/I'm probably making excuses at this point and will try to be better next week. Sigh... 

In more important things:

Food! It's pretty great. Not universally mind-blowing, but consistently cheaper, tastier, and more balanced than anything you'd find in the US. My lab has a mysterious long-standing arrangement with the University of Finance, so we all go out for a subsidized lunch at their lovely cafeteria - 5 euros (~$5.50) buys two sides (pâte! fresh apricots in syrup!), a main course (rabbit! quiche!) with veggies, and bread. 

Boulanger-patisseries, charcuteries, and fromageries are everywhere; so far, my main interaction with them has been walking in, saying the obligatory "Bonjour!" to the shopkeeper, and getting too overwhelmed with delight and confusion to buy anything. Grocery stores tend to be a lot cheaper (although green beans, weirdly, seem to be considered some kind of exotic vegetable), and they look a little different from American ones - milk and eggs are on shelves, not in the fridge. Wine is sold everywhere, from about 4 euros, and nobody cares about IDs.

Transport - also pretty great. Buses, trains, and metro are easy to find and easy to use. One of the sounds the train makes is the same three notes as "Crazy... but" from "Crazy Train", so I've had Ozzy stuck in my head all week. It also took me until today to notice there might be a semantic association there...

On the other hand, Boston drivers have friends here. I've had someone stop to let me cross the street exactly twice. Most of the time, you just have to go, dodge between cars, move fast, and hope they'll swerve (because they definitely won't slow down!). My response to a car zooming at me tends to be to freeze in the middle of the street, which is perhaps not the best option - that's something to work on.  Motorcyclists are everywhere and vicious; they completely ignore speed limits and stoplights, and drive on the sidewalk or in tiny curvy pedestrian-only tunnels when they feel like it. It's kind of terrifying.

In happier news - adults in business suits ride scooters to work. Often electric ones. Sometimes pink ones. Totally normal, and they don't even  have the slightly-embarrassed facial expressions that scooterers at MIT always do. I've also seen lots of bikes and mopeds, a few roller blades, and even a couple of electric unicycles.

People - demographics are different. Paris as a whole is very colorful, of course, but my lab is almost entirely white, as is Buc; even most of my bus drivers have been young white women, which isn't something you see in Boston or DC.

I don't get to speak French as much as I'd like. People will generally switch to English after I stammer for a few sentences -sometimes because I'm appearing incompetent and they want to do me a favor, sometimes because they just get impatient. The famous French brusqueness is nowhere near universal, but it definitely exists. That said, I think my French is getting better, and I have ten weeks left to work on it. :) I just want to make sure English doesn't become the standard with everyone in the lab - that would both eliminate a chance to practice, and leave me out of the loop on a lot of casual conversation.

Looking forward to moving into Paris tomorrow, and properly learning about the city. For now, I need to enjoy my last night sleeping in the fresh air of Buc!

last minute blog post-- maggie

Since my summer has been pretty boring, I didn't really feel the need to post here but I guess I'll so a quick recap anyways.

So I was in Oxford until mid-June and then I came back to California on a Sunday evening. Monday I waited for like 2.5 hours to order a new drivers license at the DMV (my wallet got stolen while I was abroad) and then I started work at HP on Tuesday. My job consists of reading lots of journal articles and talking to lots of vendors about potential replacements for ITO (indium tin oxide-- the transparent conductor that makes your touch screen work). My boss is an MIT alum and she is fearless. I finish this Friday and then I fly to MIT on saturday at midnight

I'm living at home which is fun but also majorly weird because I've pretty much regressed to being high school Maggie again. The weather here has been amazing except it rained twice (?! never happens in norcal in the summer, I promise you), both times when I was carrying my laptop from the car into the office without a case. Definitely miss Boston though-- so see most of you very very soon (I get back the 24th).

In case you were wondering, the gender imbalance is alive and well in the computer hardware industry-- I am rarely in a meeting with any other woman (besides my boss).

Not sure what else to tell you? maybe I'll edit this later but hopefully nothing that exciting happens.

The Head of Oliver Cromwell

So I actually accidentally already posted something entirely in Estonian here a week or so ago, because I got this blog mixed up with my personal one. I did at first think "why so few posts?", and then it took me a while to ponder over when did I write the draft for "San Francisco/Flashbacks to Childhood", until the name "Adam Hood" finally convinced me that this is not my blog.

Anyway, I can't really blame LMF for so few posts, as I haven't been writing any updates myself either. Partly because I've been busy and partly because I was ashamed I wasn't leading a life as excited as I had planned.

My summer in England is drawing to a close, and judging by the weather here, the summer is already over. The smell of autumn is in the air... I am very excited, since the days of Spanish weather here were dreadfully hot, and England is finally what I had promised myself it would be: grey and rainy! 

I have four days of school and exams left next week. On Thursday, we will have the final formal hall dinner, and on Friday, I'll pack and panic, and fly home (with a 2-day stop in Latvia). "Film and Theatre Journalism" had the final exam today, where we basically wrote a news article about the "new" season at the National Theatre in London. Afterwards, there was a "tea party" to celebrate the end of the course. Despite the name, there was less tea than at the Boston Tea Party (and I doubt anyone wanted to drink that salty tea either), but plenty of cake, biscuits and some fruit.

So "Behavioural Ecology" is the only course I have left next week, apart from some leftover deadlines. I'm already starting to miss Cambridge. The number of tourists has decreased significantly in August, and the town is really breathtakingly beautiful. I will miss the ducks and the cows a lot, too. 

We saw "The Crucible" with Zizz on Saturday, and it was quite spectacular. Richard Armitage (the lead dwarf in "The Hobbit") was great, although so were the rest of the cast. I assure you my assigned reviews were far more thorough. 

Plans for this weekend include mostly Ely, £3 there and back by train, that has a wonderful cathedral, an old town centre and the Oliver Cromwell museum! For context, Oliver Cromwell was the most exciting part of 8th grade History. He was the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, but in my opinion should be mostly known for his posthumous execution. 

His disinterred body was hanged in chains at Tyburn, and then thrown into a pit. Cromwell's severed head was displayed on a pole outside Westminster Hall until 1685. Afterwards it allegedly was owned by various people and was publicly exhibited several times. In 1960 what the owners had claimed to be his head was buried beneath the floor of the antechapel of his old school in Cambridge. The exact position was not publicly disclosed, but as noted below a plaque marks the approximate location.

Wikipedia

An oval plaque at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge says:

Near to this place was buried on 25 March 1960 the head of OLIVER CROMWELL Lord Protector of the Common-wealth of England, Scotland &Ireland, Fellow Commoner of this College 1616-7.

The whereabouts of his head are also news to me, so you can imagine that Sidney Sussex is now also among the places I plan to visit before I leave. (It's right next to Sainsbury's, the local supermarket that is renting its space from Trinity College).

When the last time we met at the Blue Chicken with Zizz (a sculpture in front of the National Gallery), then this time we had agreed upon Platform 9 3/4.  Most of the trains from Cambridge to London go to King's Cross. Trains are cool.

There's a bloke whose job it is to hold the scarf up

A lot less crowded at midnight

Enjoying the sun in Pembroke

King's College (this grass you cannot walk on)

And now it's time for dinner at Pembroke. With so many flights and bus rides to come next week, I will hopefully be able to write one more post before it's time for the new semester to start. I mean it would obviously be a pity if there were no more random Oliver Cromwell facts on the LMF blog to come. 

San Francisco/Flashbacks to Childhood

Recap of my summer before Tuesday 7/29: Work work work work work hang out with people work work work work work. On the bright side, all of the main figures for our paper are done; just a few supplementary figures left to generate and a few scripts to clean up. Now for the actual blog post:

As some of you know, I've been in San Francisco for the past week, visiting my brother/the city/the surrounding area/enjoying the weather/not enjoying the fog/etc.

In the interest of not rambling on for twenty thousand words about my experiences in this city, this blog post will be mostly pictures of my various adventures:

I arrived Tuesday ~11:30 pm (PDT); not much exciting happened besides me climbing and descending a hill larger than all the hills in Boston combined. And that was an average-sized hill for SF.

Some observations that I made pretty quickly:
1) IT'S NOT HUMID, and the temperature is also much more pleasant that the Boston summer. I've had to walk around the city with a sweatshirt sometimes...in the middle of August!

2) Hills!

This looks intimidating

I made it!

3) A year ago, when my brother moved to San Francisco, my parents foisted about half their furniture onto him, so now that I'm here, I feel like I'm home!

My favorite sofa growing up. 

4) Palm trees

All the way down my brother's street

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Thursday I walked to Twin Peaks, a park in the southern part of the city. It was a pleasant walk, until I got there.

Picture of Twin Peaks (from the internet)

Unfortunately, I had not yet figured out the patterns of fog in this city. Because San Francisco sits right next to the Pacific Ocean, it has no shield against the fog, so especially in the morning, the visibility is awful, especially from high up. After a 3.5 mile walk/hike, I found that my view of the city was something like this:

I couldn't see any farther than the camera here. 

As opposed to this:

View from Twin Peaks when not foggy

Of course, within a couple hours of climbing back down, the fog had dissipated. I tried again twice; only the third time was it clear - the view was gorgeous from the top. Unfortunately, it was so windy that i was legitimately scared to take a picture from the top of the peak for fear of losing my phone; I ended up taking pictures from a slightly more sheltered location.

Sunset from Twin Peaks

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The first weekend of my vacation, Xiaoyue came down from Seattle; I spent time with her and later Kojo as well; I felt like I was being followed by a pair of paparazzis:

My token visit to Stanford

Cameo moment on Pier 39

FLASHBACKS TO CHILDHOOD

As a side note, Rainforest Cafe was a restaurant that closed many years ago in the local shopping mall. It was one of my favorite places as a child; they had live parrots and everything! I hadn't even realized it was a chain until I saw this...it brought back some memories.
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Another attraction I spent some time in was Golden Gate Park, not to be confused with the Golden Gate Bridge which is more than a mile away. Golden Gate Park is this 3 x .5 mile forested area on the west side of the city with lots and lots of gardens and a few lakes and even bison (sorry, I didn't get a picture of those)

One of many flowerbeds scattered throughout the park

Some ducks floating on Stow Lake

Stow Lake was probably the highlight; in the middle of the lake there is a hill you can climb and from the top you get a spectacular view of the city. In the interest of not encroaching on a picnicking couple, I decided to forgo the view.
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On my bucket list for this trip was a visit to the Pacific Ocean - I wanted to dip my feet in just for the sake of being able to say that I did. So I did! My brother and I biked through Golden Gate Park to a beach (which apparently stretches on for miles). To our great relief, we chose a day on which it was sunny and gorgeous:

#selfiez. That's the ocean behind me!

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The apex of my trip however, was somewhat more ambitious. I undertook a grueling 23.1 mile bike ride (round trip), full of climbing and getting lost and getting confused. The results were breathtaking:

#moreselfiez. The bridge was definitely worth the trip

It looks majestic, despite the fog. If anything, the fog adds mystery

I legitimately had no idea what to do after crossing the bridge; then I noticed that with a short climb I could reach an overlook. It turned out to be some earthworks; until the 1940s batteries were stationed there to guard the entrance to the San Francisco Bay. For tourists like me, it allows us a stunning view of the bridge, and the city beyond, without expending too much effort.

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I'm writing this post from my brother's apartment a few hours before my flight back to Boston; I think I'm going to miss this city. Coming here was a great experience, and I hope to be back someday soon.