La Belle France
Number 5 in a series of N… Now, having looked it up, I know that Chlamyde is the French word for a Chlamys. Which is a type of Greek cloak. But when I first passed this shop I was sure that it was an upmarket tailors called Chlamydia. Which is a type of sexually transmitted infection.
L’Aber Wrac’h is on the north coast of Brittany. It’s rather beautiful. On the first night, outside the pub, we found a bucket of fish. A large group of barefoot heavily suntanned and weatherbeaten young men were very amused at me taking a photo… I presume it was their fish. But you never can be sure. Pictures of buckets of fish never come out as well as you hope though, so here’s a field of maize. The conference trip was a boat journey to a lighthouse – the tallest stone built lighthouse in the world. It’s a bit rocky around there, so I guess lighthousesRead More →
This is a big week travel wise. On Friday we have a project meeting near Nice (we’re going there and back in a day, taking the lab car – this means I have to be at the polygone scientifique at 5.15am Friday morning, and we’re not due back till 10). And on Sunday I go to COSIT’09 in L’Aber Wrac’h, Brittany. This is about as far from Grenoble as it’s possible to get whilst remaining in France. That’ll be a tram-train-metro-train-bus trip, taking about 9 hours. Looking forward to it though – I still think TGVs are super cool (and there’s a good chance thatRead More →
This view takes about an hour to get to from my front door, on foot all the way. Click on it to see a bigger version, if you want. This one’s about half an hour further – the sticky out bit of grassy building & mountain you can see about half way across is where the first pano was taken from. For a 3 hour round trip it certainly blows away the cobwebs. 500m up, 500m down again…
Junk mail is plentiful here. Mostly it consists of the current special offers at Carrefour, or flyers for Speed Rabbit Pizza… but this one stood out from the crowd of colourful pamphlets. Here’s my attempt at a translation: Professor NABA Great international seeing1 medium! Payment after results, in the following 4 days. If you no longer want to suffer, contact me as fast as possible. Return of affection, fidelity between spouses, marriage, luck, clients. Protection against dangers, release from bewitchment, business, competition. To return immediately to the hearth of the person you like. He or she will run behind you like a dog behind itsRead More →
Number 4 in a series of N…. I can only assume that Albatross doesn’t have the same connotations in French…
I wandered into town on the 14th of July to see what was what, and it was a fairly impressive experience. TANKS!! GENDARMES!! POMPIERS!! SWING DANCE!! FIREWORKS!! Actually I think the swing is not a traditional component of the Bastille day experience, but it was rather fun to watch anyway. I walked up to the top of the Bastille (it, you know, seemed like a good place to visit on Bastille day…) and the swing dancers were out in force. It’s rather strange looking down on a firework display from the top of a mountain though. I always thought fireworks went 100s of metres upRead More →
I went to ITiCSE 09 last week in Paris, along with Karen Petrie from BCSWomen. Rog joined us for a day, which was great. Our talk was on opinions of women in computing – we ran a survey on women at the Lovelace and Hopper events last year and tried to work out what it was about successful women in computing (i.e., those doing PhDs or degrees or similar) that made them interested. One great outcome of the conference is that we made contacts with people in Turkey and in the USA who thought our study was interesting enough to run in their countries –Read More →
Number 3 in a series of N… La Pissarde (snigger). And when the guidebook says you can expect “vues dégagées“, round here they’re really not taking the piss.
There are two markets fairly near my flat – one huge one, under the train tracks near the centre of town, which is about 10 mins bike away, and one medium one in the other direction that’s about 5 mins cycle. My Sunday morning routine involves visiting one or the other, and I’ve been mostly going to the nearer one. It has fewer “artisanal sausage and expensive olive” stalls, and more “north african men standing behind a huge pile of unattractive bras” stalls. And the vegetables are really cheap and tasty in both. That’s 9€66 of healthy fruit and vegetables (and a kettle).