Notre Dame

Timeframe: Nov 22, 2008

Yeah, yeah, I know I said I was gonna talk about a € 5 subway ride, but nobody really wants to hear about that (I just picked the wrong stop). What you all really want is to see pretty pictures. So here they come!



This is a shot of Notre-Dame across the Seine. I came up from the subway and this was the first thing I saw. Quite pretty :)


This is a shot of the transept of Notre-Dame just as you come in the front door. Apparently all cathedrals that are built on an east-west line have their openings on the west, with the large back windows facing east to catch the light of the rising sun.


The two biggest stain glass windows in Notre-Dame are on it's axis (the north-south part of the cross shape). Both are quite pretty. Notice how the north one is made so that there are no horizontal or vertical beams to create a much airier feeling.

Around the outside of the cathedral are small chapels. Some of these are still in use today while others seem to hold statues instead.


Notre-Dame is built in a gothic style which means it's trying to be lighter and airier than the previous romanesque buildings. Here's an example fo what the roof looks like. It's built very high to make it seem lighter (both luminance and weight).


And here's a picture of the front as I walk away.


Onto the Louvre!

Up and at 'em!

Timeframe: Nov 22, 2008

You know, it never ceases to amaze me how early 5 am is. I figured I had to leave that early though because the train is supposed to leave at 6:30 or 7:00 (two different trains) and Kevin said I should try and be there 40 minutes early since I didn't have a ticket yet.

Well, I got to the gare on time (6:20), but it turns out the earliest train is really at 7:30. Oh well, I didn't need an extra hour of sleep anyway :) Besides, the pigeons in the train station kept me company. I had a picture of the pigeons, but it turned out way too dark. They look just like American pigeons anyway, same size and everything.

The TGV didn't strike me as fancy as I had imagined it. I thought the train was going to be some mag-lev super-speedy train, but it turns out it's just a normal train that didn't seem to go all that fast. Although, the only experience I have with trains were the ones they used in Bulgaria and this one was much newer and nicer. The rails were also considerably smoother, so they didn't make that repeating sound everytime you hit a new section of rail (I can't explain, but if you've been to Bulgaria you'll know what I mean).

An odd thing happened as we got closer to Paris and started going through many tunnels. On many of the tunnels (maybe all of them, I'm not sure) the pressure changed and I had to yawn to fix it, just like on an airplane. It happened a bunch of times even though we weren't changing elevation. Kevin's guess is that due to the speed of the train and the narrowness of the tunnels that perhaps the train is compressed a little, compressing the air inside.

Most of the ride had nice pastoral views of France, but as we got closer to Paris it got much grungier. I've since been told the suburbs just outside of Paris are one of the dirtiest places in the country, so that's probably what I noticed. There were lots of nice towns spread throughout the countryside, even a few picturesque farms with smoke rising from the chimney early on a Saturday morning. Either I'm too absorbed by the view, busy reading books, or I don't think that pictures through windows work very well. Pick one of those excuses that you like best and pretend that I used it to explain why I never seem to take pictures from moving vehicles.

Brad in Paris!

Timeframe: Nov 22-23, 2008

Well I went and did it, I went to Paris. And although it cost a fair amount (roughly € 270 all told), and it snowed while I was in Versailles, I still think it was worth it.

Now, I have tons of pictures (I drained my camera battery twice over the weekend), but you all know how I hate putting up pictures (although I realize that's what everyone's here to see). So, I'm going to start with a small post -- with no pictures -- that gives a short overview of everything I did. That way I have a short list of everything I should upload pictures for write about. With Blogspot's picture import system smaller posts should make it easier to upload everything. I don't promise I'll put pictures up tonight though, but I'll force myself to make sure pictures (both from Paris and from Tours) are up before Friday (hopefully sooner).

So, here was my itinerary:

• Take the TGV at 7:05 (silly incorrect schedule)
• Take a € 5 subway ride (stops shouldn't have the same name if they're not in Paris)
• Walk across the Seine to see Notre-Dame cathedral
• Walk to the Louvre (I walked through every room in about 4 hours)
• Walk the Champs Elysées (reminds me of a long Times Square)
• Saw the Arc de Triomphe
• Walk to the Tour Eiffel and take the elevator to the top (1.5 hours in line)
• Hotel in the Latin Quarter (and I thought my apartment was tiny!)
  
• Visit to Versailles (reminds me a lot of Newport RI, except for the SNOW!)
• Nutmeg Staters on the metro trip home
• TGV back to Rennes

So that's basically what I did. That means you can anticipate 11 Paris posts this week, including pictures. Who knew writing a blog was so much work? :)

Sunday in Tours

Timeframe: Nov 15, 2008

A short photographic journey of my two hours in Tours between conference sessions.


This is the park right beside the conference center. It was a nice little breath of nature in the middle of the city.



This is the hotel-de-ville which literally translates to village hotel, but it turns out that what it really means is town hall. You can't see it very well in this shot, but there's a roundabout around the garden as well.



Just a shot down a small city street in Tours.


This important looking building, with all it's fancy statues and flags, is the train station :) Pretty fancy hunh?


I wandered my way into a museum courtyard (although due to the fact it was Sunday and I was really supposed to be here for Church in a half hour I didn't go in to the museum itself) and they had this really cool looking tree outside.



The front of the Tours cathedral. Why must everything be under construction.


A beautiful gothic cathedral, here's the nave


and the apse


and a huge rosette window that's on the front of the cathedral.


and I finished it all off with a picture of the local opera house. I wonder why people don't put statuary on the outside of buildings anymore.

Where's my meat!

Timeframe: Nov 15, 2008

Another interesting cultural note, this time about meat. Since I had been eating so many baguette sandwiches I thought I it would be easy (and cheaper) to try making one of my own.

So I headed to the local market and look at the meat. Here deli sliced meat is sold in square packages, that much I'd noticed already. What I hadn't noticed is the quantity within each package. Meat packages come in 3 sizes

• 4 Pack
• 2 Pack
• Single Pack

Now, when I say 4 pack, I don't mean 4 packages of meat, I mean 4 SLICES of meat. That's right, they sell it by the slice! You can buy a package that contains one slice of ham if you want it. Quite amazing.

By the way, the sandwich ended up being really good. Although I used too much dijon mustard, which was spicy enough to clean out my sinuses.

Conference de Pieu

Timeframe: Nov 16, 2008

Well, even though they said we were supposed to leave at 6:30am, they were late. Again, the church is the same everywhere :)

I got to the building at 6:15 am, and a nice old couple were nice enough to let me sit in their car while we waited for people to get there. It was weird to hear the old couple listening to the song "I Kissed a Girl...", but I guess US culture is invading everywhere, for better or for worse.

We took a bus ride into Tours (which took about 3 hours) through pastoral France. It was really very pretty, although it was dark for the first hour or so. I did some reading for work and watched out the window when I could.

Turns out that here they do both the adult and general session on the same day. It makes a lot of sense considering some people had to come from so far away. So there was a 2 hour session in the morning (10 am to noon) and 2 hours in the afternoon (2 - 4 pm). That left me 2 hours to visit Tours between sessions while I was munching on my baguette and cheese. I'll put another post about that later because I took tons of pictures (80 of them to be exact, although not all are good) and it's no fun to load lots of pictures into blogger.

The conference itself was okay, very similar in content to one you'd go to in Utah. The building we were in was quite different however. Not like a stake center at all.



Although, after talking to an Australian girl (who married a Frenchman in my ward), this is what it's like in other parts of the world too. We always seemed to do them in our own buildings in Bulgaria, but maybe that's because we either had few members who actually came, or a big building (the old Cuban Embassy).

On the bus ride back I sat next to a missionary from Washington state. He was a nice guy and we just talked about random stuff. Kinda like BRTing (Building Relationships of Trust: a missionary tool they teach you at the MTC).

Soutenance et Pot de Thèse

Timeframe: Nov 14, 2008

A lot of people are giving their final defense (soutenance) of their PhD thesis (thèse) around now. So far there have been a couple of people from our group and 2 out of the 3 people in my lab. On Monday Chuck Hansen (the teacher from Utah who gave me the opportunity to come over to France) is coming to be on a PhD jury for Guillaume (William) who's a lab mate of mine.

Today was Kevin's soutenance. He'd already defended in the states (University of Central Florida), but to get his PhD from the university here in Rennes he needed to defend again. It was interesting to see his whole talk about the tree and grass stuff we'd talked about earlier. Even though the teachers seemed friendly, they were very aggresive in their questioning. Although Kevin seemed to handle all the questions fairly well. The presentation was 50 minutes long and they grilled him for another hour after that.

The "Pot de Thèse", which is a small gatherwing with food after the defense, was interesting. In the few defenses I've been to in the states they put the food out before the defense so people can eat while they're watching you defend. But here the party was half an hour after the defense was actually over. They had a bunch of little finger foods (some of the cakes were tasty, along with the flan), and Kevin even brought a bunch of bottles of real champagne. I know that wouldn't work well for a work party in the states, but I have no idea if you can do that for a thesis defense or not. It was basically a bunch of people hanging around congratulating Kevin and eating free food and booze. Think missionary farewell and you'll have a pretty good idea of what it was like.