Golfers and suitcases

Fun French fact of the day: you are never supposed to put ice in your drink, even on the hottest of days, because drinking cold water is apparently dangerous for your health. It is equally dangerous to run out of minerals, so one could learn the Periodic Table just by reading the labels on the bottled water shelf in a convenience store.

My roommates/apartment-mates arrived, and so has (albeit a little later) Kayla's lost suitcase. It decided not to take the London flight and spent a quite peaceful night in Boston, where it was discovered in the morning and eventually delivered right to our door. Speaking of which, another fun fact: the French are all about saving energy, so at night the staircases and hallways in every apartment building are pitch black. When you enter someone's building, the first thing you do is search for a tiny green light that marks the position of the switch. You then have about a minute to run up the stairs and find the apartment door, otherwise the light turns off and you're back to the starting point.

Ok, back to roommates. They both seem very nice and friendly. Lourdes' boyfriend is waiting for her back in the States, and although she loves it here she's still feeling a bit down about not being to see him for another four months. Kayla, on the other hand, is on the lookout for French guys but is still somewhat shy about speaking the language. That'll probably go away soon, especially with Brad and myself making everyone speak French even amongst ourselves. The policy is not yet enforced in our apartment, however, but we're working on it.

Today I visited my new lab for the first time. It's enormous, taking up an entire floor of the building and employing over 8 postdocs, many graduate students and quite a few technicians. The people there speak French and English roughly 50-50 percent of the time, as many are foreign and don't have a good grasp of French. After talking with my potential mentor, it looks like I will have a project there, but the string attached is that I will have to dedicate a LOT of time to this - they're busy people and don't want to invest time in teaching me whatever it is they're doing if I'm not going to produce any results. Interestingly, the whole story about the French working very little does not hold up in science at all. The people I met told me that they're usually in the lab from 8am to 8pm, with a short lunch break in the middle.

As I was getting there, I got pathetically lost when the bus passed my stop. I later figured out that you do need to let the driver know you want to get off, but the buttons that you have to press are tiny, unmarked, and hidden. Anyways, the bus made so many turns between the missed stop and the next one that I wandered hopelessly off course and ended up on a golf field (don't ask), where a very surprised golfer explained to me that I was actually right in front of the building I've been trying to find for the past two hours.

I'm uploading all of this using the University's WiFi network, but the campus is a good 50 minutes walk from our house so this is not going to work as a permanent solution. We're doing our best to get the internet started up, and have already created a French bank account, which is one of the key requirements. I'll let you know when things get settled!

Bonne journée,
Vlad

PS A few pictures are now on Facebook!