35-hour work week

Green Tea Addiction

2011-12-07T07:12:00.000-08:00

If you are like most people, you have probably drank green tea before, and it probably looked something like the above picture. I actually like green tea quite a bit, although I usually prefer it cold. But did you also know you can eat green tea? In fact it seems you can make just about it anything out of it.

Green Tea TP

I have tasted a few different green tea treats on various occasions. Green tea flavored Sprite, green tea Kit-Kats, and various other green tea cookies or biscuits. I enjoy them.

But some people really enjoy them. One of those some people is my wife.

The main haul

My wife is absolutely addicted to green tea. With very few exceptions (green tea sprite) if it has green tea in it, particularly Japanese matcha, she wants it. On a recent trip to Japan she acquired the above stockpile of green tea related treats, and over the next few weeks she acquired the additional treasures below. Cookies, candies, noodles, cake, ice cream, cooking powder to make her own green tea goodies, and even some of the regular stuff you can drink. I don't think there is a green tea related product she has not yet sampled.

The second find
and even more.

If you are ever wondering what to get her for Christmas, just make sure it is green.

Pepsi Pink

2011-12-07T07:08:00.000-08:00

Pepsi Pink is a strawberry and milk flavored brand of Pepsi, apparently only available in Japan. I know what you are thinking... Pepsi + Strawberry + Milk--that drink must be awesome.

It is not. It very much is not.

Top Accordion

2011-10-02T08:02:00.000-07:00

America has America's Top Model or American Idol. The UK has X-Factor and Britain's Got Talent. France has...

Top Accordion!!!

Colmar, France

2011-09-04T07:23:00.000-07:00

Colmar is a medium sized city in the Alsace region of France. Just a few kilometers from the German border, this part of France has ping-ponged back and forth between German and French control for centuries. After the end of WW2 it returned to French control, and it seems likely to stay. The German heritage is instantly clear though. From the architecture to place names to winstubs to the local cuisine (sourkraut and flammekuchen and pretzels and other Germanish things).

Pretzels

Alsace is pretty famous for the number of picturesque little villages. The big city of Colmar is relatively huge at 65,000 people when most of the villages like Ribeauvillé or Kayersberg clock in around 3-5 thousand. When you are traveling around the region there is literally a different village every 1-2 kilometers, so George and I had originally gone up with the intention of renting some bicycles and just slowly cycling around the region. However, as we took our vacation in the middle of August, which is when everyone else in France goes to the beach, we go to Colmar only to find that all the bike rental shops were closed.

One of those little villages

Okay, so the bike option is out lets see if we can rent a car. Crap, forgot my passport so the car rental thing is out. Can we take a bus? Buses are on holiday schedule and so are not running on Sunday or Monday (which was the Assumption holiday in France). So as we were out of options we instead ended up hiring a private driver! Yup, from now on we are doing our traveling millionaire style with a private car to provide front door access to all the sites.

Not the car we rented

For 90 Euros (around 130 bucks) we got a private guide for 6 hours who took us right up to many of the cool spots of the area. He took us right up to the front door, and then picked us up wherever we ended up. His was very knowledgeable of the area, and quite funny and interesting too. He took us to see Le Château Haut-Koenigsbourg, the beautiful villages of Rorschwihr, Ribeauvillé, Hunawihr, Riquewihr, and even the Statue Of Liberty!

Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the guy that designed the Statue of Liberty, is from Colmar

The castle was pretty cool. There are, of course, lots of cool castles in France, but this one was pretty unique in that it seems more like a really, really rich and well-fortified hunting lodge than most of the other castles or France. The Palais de Versailles or the Louvre (used to be a castle) or even Carcasonne all look like castles out of Cindarella or other Disney movies, but this one looked more like something out of The Game of Thrones or some other hardy, northmen type keep. Very woodsy, with lots of animal heads and horns and antlers decorating the walls or used to make furniture. Many other castles in France are physically more impressive, but this one had character :)

I wish we had had time to visit more of the area, rent some bicycles or a car, but at least we packed what we could into our 3 days. For more photos of the area, click here.

Bubble Tea in Lyon

2011-07-30T09:03:00.001-07:00

Bubble Tea is the result of a weird Taiwanese experiment in combining British style milk tea and southeast Asian style tapioca desserts. Apparently not very popular at first, it exploded in popularity in the mid 1990s, and now can be found in many large cities in the world, except--or so I had mistakenly thought--in Lyon. In a rare google failure, searching for "Bubble Tea Lyon", "Boba Tea Lyon", or other common names didn't turn up any results, but a friend of a friend of a friend invited George to this little Taiwanese place the other day, and now the secret it out :)

Taste & See

Apparently this place opened a little more than a year ago, but sadly remained unknown to me until last week. It's a bit out of the way, and not easy to see until you are right up on it, but it's definitely worth a visit. It's pretty close to a popular private school, and Lyon Universities 2 and 3, and apparently gets pretty busy during the school year (especially when the weather is cold and people crave hot drinks). It also has a handful of food options, but not much vegetarian except for Taiwanese style french fries. George, who spent 5 years living in Taiwan, says the food is quite authentic and while I cannot vouch for its authenticity, it was tasty. Like all Asian restaurants in Lyon, they have nems, which I think are originally from Vietnam but are synonymous with "Asian food" in Lyon :-).

Not the complete menu

So definitely a great restaurant/salon de thé to add to your list. FYI, like many shops in Lyon they are closed for the month of August for summer holidays.

Taste & See
50, Rue Pasteur
69007 Lyon

View Larger Map

Torino, Italia

2011-06-27T10:01:00.000-07:00

Every couple of weeks I get an email from the French transportation company, SNCF, listing their current promotions, future deals, travel packages, etc., and about a month ago I got one advertising some really cheap train tickets to Turin, Italy. Checking my calendar, I also had a long weekend coming up, the weekend of Pentecost, so George and I decided to take advantage of the 3-day weekend and the promotion on train tickets and head to Italy to stuff ourselves on pasta and pizza and cheese and porcini mushrooms.

Turin is much closer to Lyon than Paris--more than 150 km closer actually--but due to the fact that it is on the other side of the Alps and the lack of transportation options that entails, it takes about twice as long to get there by train as it does Paris (4 hours vs. 2 hours), but trains in Europe are pretty comfortable, and our tickets were cheap, so we just packed some snacks and a good book and walked over to the train station to catch our train.

When we got to the train station we checked the big departure board to see what platform our train leaves from, but where you would normally see a platform number, our train had Sortie porte des Alpes (Exit Portal to the Alps). Having absolutely no idea what that meant, we headed over to the information desk and were told to go out the back exit. Out the back exit we went, and there we saw why our train tickets were so cheap. Our train was a bus!

The bus trip over was pretty cool though. The trip from Lyon to Turin goes thru some beautiful mountains and countryside, particularly on the Italian side of the Alps.

Turin itself is not a particularly popular city for tourists. For obvious reasons, Florence, Venice, Rome, and southern coastal cities attract more tourists, but Turin still has a lot of cool stuff to see.

The famous shroud of Turin that Jesus was buried with.

Numerous cool statues

Amazing churches

Giuseppe Verdi

Famous composers

Nice parks

And even cool medieval castles.

And Turin was just a really cool city to walk around. Most of the walkways in the center of town were covered and shaded like the one above, and as you got a bit further out the walkways and sidewalks were still wide and tree-covered and well separated from the roads.

But the most important thing about Italy, of course, is Italian food. I loooooooovvvvveeee Italian food, especially the amount of vegetarian choices.

For more pictures of Turin, click here, and if you are in the area, Turin is definitely worth a visit.

Paris, again

2011-06-19T08:33:00.000-07:00

This is where we stayed

I'd been to Paris before, a couple years ago at just about the same time of year, and to be honest I was a little underwhelmed. I was only there for 2 days, the weather sucked, it was super crowded, our hotel was in a less then desirable part of town (just a couple blocks from the lovely Moulin Rouge), I was sick with Whooping Cough, and with our awesome bad luck we managed to eat at some of the crappiest restaurants I have ever been to.

This time, however, was a complete 180. We stayed in an awesome part of town just across from the Jardin du Luxembourg (Luxembourg Garden), in an amazing apartment (pictured above) that some equally amazing friends lent us the keys to. We did a little research first to find some good restaurants (outside the tourist areas :-), and we actually went inside the Louvre Museum (which is free on the first Sunday of the month). In a weird twist of meteorological law, the weather in Paris was amazing and much better than the crappy weather we were having in Lyon. And to top it all off, we had a nice dinner in a little French brasserie with the soon to be famous Bobby.

Cool fountain in the Jardin du Luxembourg

Paris obviously has a ridiculous amount of cool things to look at. During our first trip to the city, we tried to run thru the city as fast as possible snapping photos of the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe (Arc of Triumph), Notre Dame Cathedral, the outside of cool museums like the Louvre or Musée d'Orsay, only stopping to grab some food and sleep. But this time, since we had already seen all that stuff, we slowed down and just visited a couple places in Paris and even got to go inside! We still only had 3 days, but we paced ourselves.

the Basilique du Sacre-Coeur

We started our weekend with a trip up to Montmartre. I knew absolutely nothing about Montmartre other than Rick Steves suggested it on one of his travel shows, and we didn't go there last time we were in town, so we decided to take the trip up there. Turns out they have the awesome church pictured above, some nice art shops, a cool park, and pretty nice view of the city. As the name Montmartre suggests the area is on a hill, and as we were lost trying to find an extremely poorly marked spot on our map (thanks Rick Steves!) we even made a few extra exhausting trips up and down that hill.

To cool ourselves off after the above impromptu hike, we took a detour thru Belleville to hit up one of Paris' Chinatowns for a refreshing--and impossible to find anywhere else in France--Bubble Tea.

Not available in Lyon

Lyon, France is often called the Culinary Capital of France, or even slightly more pretentious in French Capitale Mondiale de la Gastronomie (The World Capital of Gastronomy). This is mostly due to Lyon being the home of the world famous chef Paul Bocuse, but in their defense, the French food here is REALLY good. The international offerings here, however, are a bit lacking. There is good north African food, great pizza (I guess that's Italian :-P), an extraordinary amount of sushi restaurants (If your only exposure to Japanese food was in Lyon, you'd have to assume that the Japanese eat nothing but sushi), but for the most part the Asian food here is pretty bland, and there isn't much American food outside of a handful of overpriced Bagel shops and a couple decent burger places.

Paris, however, is a HUGE city--many times larger than Lyon with many times the number of people. It is also, without a doubt, the most international city in France with people from all over the world calling Paris home. Because of this, it has a much wider variety of non-French offerings, and also much more authentic offerings. We had really good dim sum, Korean food, Japanese food (not sushi), vegetarian middle east-ish food (falafel, humus, moussakaa, etc.), and some good old American diner food (pancakes and omelets and hashbrowns).

But the highlight of the weekend was the Louvre.

This is as close as we got to the Mona Lisa

The Louvre is a really cool museum. An old palace, the place would be cool even if it didn't house some of the most famous and important art and historical works of western civilization. The place is BIG. If you move thru it a pretty decent pace, you could see everything in a day, but to really appreciate it, you probably need at least 2. We only had about 5 hours, so we decide to take it all in at high velocity (well, most of it anyway).

Taking a break from running thru the Louvre

There are some really cool museums in Europe--The Vatican Museum in Rome, the Prado Museum in Madrid, The Natural History Museum in London, and many more--and The Louvre is definitely up at the top of that list. I've unfortunately never been to any of the really cool museums in the US, like the Smithsonian or MoMA, so some day I'll have to check those out to see who has the awesomest museums :-)

But it'll be hard to compete with the Louvre. I mean, just check out these statues of creepily aroused monkeys below :-)

Ancient Egyptians were weird

For more pics of Paris (mostly of the Louvre) click here

Going to the Préfecture

2010-11-24T04:27:00.000-08:00

My permission to live and work in France is conditional on my continued employment, and renewable in (kinda) 1 year increments from the date of my entry into France. I came to France just over 2 years ago in early Novemember, so every October I have to head down to the local préfecure to exchange money, photographs, and truely ridiculous amounts of photocopies for a 1 year extension on my stay here.

Now immigration procedures in most countries are pretty strict, tedious, expensive, and seem to be crafted solely to discourage legal immigration as much as possible. Having dealt with immigration in the US, and having friends who have dealt with it in various other countries, I think I am pretty safe when I say France takes the cake in terms of unecessarily complicated and useless bureaucracy.

At least the building looks cool

For most federal legal proceedings one has to go to the local préfecture and speak with a fonctionnaire. Préfectures are kind of like states, or maybe counties, and France is split up into 100 of them. My préfecture is fortunately just a 15 minute walk from my house, pretty much right in the middle of Lyon, but other than that little bit of fortuitous, there is nothing remotely pleasent about my (bi-, sometimes tri-) annual trips there.

As mentioned above, my permission to work here lasts for a period of one year, and then I must renew it for another one year period, ad infinitum. But that is only kinda true. Since my Id expires in November, I must go to the préfecture in October with my stacks of paperwork and in return, they give me permission to stay for just 3 more months, and at the end of that 3 month period I can return for my id card which at this point is now only valid for about 9 months (since it is dated from the expiration of my previous card, not when I actually receive it). So Id renewal therefore takes a minimum of 2 trips--one for the request, one for the pickup.

I say minimum, because this requires extraordinary preparedness on the requester's part, as well as a bit of luck that the préfecture is not too busy. Last year when I came back in 3 months, they apologized and said my card wasn't yet ready and they gave me another 3 month extention and told me to return for my real card. So by time I actually got my 1 year Id card, it was already 6 months old.

This year was a-whole-nother level of suck.

The worst thing about dealing with the French government is that everytime you pay them a visit, they have absolutely no idea who you are. Despite the fact that the French government has approved my stay in France 3 times (once for the initial visa, and two Id cards), every time I go for renewal I must bring all the same documents--birth certificate, marriage certificate, passport, work contract, proof of address, etc. Of course bringing an up-to-date work contract and current proof of address makes sense, but birth certificate and marriage cerificate. I'm pretty sure my birth details haven't change since last year, and fortunately neither has my marriage status.

But that is the French way. Apparently they just toss all that paperwork I give them every year into the trashcan, and when I bring it all back the next year, they are so happy that a brand new person has immigrated to France.

So per usual, George and I get up early to get a nice place in line and head to the préfecture with our dead trees and passport photos. This is exactly the same paperwork I gave them last year, and the year before, with the exception of the work contract and my last electric bill which need to be up-to-date. After 4 hours of waiting we hand our paperwork to the nice lady and she tells us that the rules changed this year and we are missing a few documents and that we have to come back with all the proper papers.

The new rules require photocopies of EVERY PAGE in your passport, as well as a signed affidavit to not be a polygamist. Seriously, as if signing a piece of paper promising not to break the law was the magic bullet for ending crime. Okay I said, I have my passport, can I just use your photocopier to make those extra copies and we can continue? "Out of order" she says. It is at this point that I notice every single machine in the office has an out of order sign on it. From the freshly stocked vending machines to the coffee machine to the photobooth to the array of photocopiers in the corner. What, did an electro-magnetic bomb hit this place?

You'll have to excuse my cynicism if I do not believe that

Well, rules are rules, so we collect our things had to the nearest photocopier and come back in two days to enjoy another half-day at the government offices. After another 4 hours of waiting, we happily give our documents to the functionnaire expecting success to hear "I cannot accept this translation of your birth certificate, it is not certified by one of our certified translators".

What? We had this translated in the US, and it is the same document we used last year. Well, the rules have changed she tells us, here is a list of certified translators.

Well, 3rd times the charm right? After 500 Euros (about 700 bucks) worth of translations (work paid for them, not me) we came back and this time we are treated to seeing the police drag a guy out of line by his hair for cutting in line (right in front of us :-), so with this little enjoyment boost and our confidence that we finally have all the documents together we hand them over and finally get our 3 month temporary card in exchange. Yay!!! And it only took a combined 13 hours of waiting in line, and about 15 minutes with the functionnaire. I'm crossing my fingers that they will actually have our official card when we return in 3 months, but I'm not holding my breath.

Dealing with the government officials themselves is not an overly unpleasant experience, but the environment itself couldn't be more uninviting. The préfecture opens at 9am, but by this time already has a line of at least 200 people waiting outside. The interior space of the office is tiny, and all your paperwork is checked BEFORE they let you in, so most of your waiting is outside the office. Being outside by itself is not really a bad thing, but coupled with the fact that 35% of French people smoke (and about 95% of people waiting in line at the prefecture) and the French (and apparently most of those who wish to be French) genetic inability to form an orderly line, this ~4 hour wait ranks right up there with some of the most unpleasant experiences of my life. People bumping into me, cutting the line, and blowing smoke in my face while I am trying to stay warm in the early winter mornings is definitely not something I look forward to, and once inside things do not get much better. Sure you cannot smoke inside, but trying to cram 100s of people into a space made for about 50 has its own problems (seriously, there are only about 20 seats in this place, and standing room for about 20 more).

And to top it all off, a recent article in the French newspaper Le Figaro ranks the Préfecture du Rhône (my prefecture) the 5th worse in France for issues of immigration and identification. That is 5th worse out of 100! Some procedures take 13 times longer than the more efficient offices.

red is bad. I live in a red one :-(

Thank God for my iPod and GameBoy.

Road Trip Part Deux

2010-11-16T12:52:00.000-08:00

Veterans' Day is a national holiday here in France which means I don't have to go to work that day, and since it fell on a Thursday this year I decided to faire le pont and make it a 4 day weekend. Plus it's been cold and rainy in Lyon, so a trip to the sunny south of France would definitely be welcome. Conviently timed with our 4-day weekend, George's Sister Ming is currently working in Marseille, so we decided to take advantage of the free place to stay and make that our base camp.

Marseille is a perfect example of poor planning and even poorer hygiene turning an otherwise amazingly beautiful location into an amazingly ugly city, but it is smack dab in the center of some of the most beautiful parts of France. Plus as we have been to Marseille before, it made a good spot to park our car and our butts at night, but spend our days as much outside of the city as possible.

Old arena at Arles

We started our journey about a half hour north of Marseille in the city of Arles. Like most cities in Southern France, Arles was in its hay-day about one hundred years before the birth of Christ, which is when the Arena pictured above was constructed and it is still used today to host concerts and, unfortunately, bullfights. Interestingly the Spanish community of Cataluña just across the border from France has recently voted to ban bullfights, maybe the French will follow soon.

Romans like theatre with their gladiator fights too

There are numerous other roman ruins scattered across the city, in various states of (dis)repair. Seeing all the problems I had to deal with in my comparitively young 85-year old house in Seattle, I am always amazed to see 2,000 year old structures of any kind still standing, and the ruins around Arles are no different. During the next few days we would discover that these types of artifacts are fairly common in the South of France.

Nîmes has an old Roman arena too

Next stop, Nîmes. Other than being the birthplace of the (in)famous Jouan Amate, Nîmes claim to fame lies in its remarkably preserved Roman arena and the totally superfluous ^ character above the "i" in its name. The arena is currently also, tragically, used for Bullfights, and while the one in Arles, above, is older and bigger, this one has an awesome statue of a bullfighter in front of it, which is pretty cool to take pictures with.

Nîmes is also home to the best preserved temple of the Roman Empire. Built just over 2,025 years ago, it is still in great condition probably due to all the construction guys working on the front and right side of it (which is why my picture is of the left side, but you can still see some of the construction barriers). We've got one of these temple jobbies near Lyon too, in the suburb of Vienne, but this one is certainly in better shape. And it was sunny and warm when we visited this one, and cold and rainy when we saw the other, so this temple is apparently appeasing the gods better.

The Jardins del la Fontaine are apparently also one of those things you shouldn't miss when going to Nîmes, but we missed it, so you'll have to go to wikipedia to get your fix.

Le Pont du Gard

We missed the famous Gardens because we wanted to get out of town early enough to see the Pont du Gard (Bridge over the river Gard). This bridge was also build nearly 2,000 years ago as part of the old Roman aquaduct system, but aside from being big and old it was honestly a bit unimpressive. We also didn't really succeed in getting there before dark, so you should check out wikidpedia for some better pictures. Interesting factoid, the Pont du Gard owes its survival over the centuries to the fact that it was a very popular toll road for crossing the river, which shouldn't be suprising for anyone who has driven around the South of France where the only thing more common than old Roman ruins is toll booths.

After visiting France's first tool road, we went to the incredibly cool city of Avignon, but since it was super dark by this time, I don't have any pictures to prove it, so here is one from wikipedia.

Palais des Papes

Day 2 started with a visit to Aix-en-Provence (The waters of provence), which as its name sort of hints at, is famous for fountains, but I somehow managed to not get any good pictures of them, so next up a castle!

This castle is in Allemagne-en-Provence (Germany in Provence). Apparently there used be a few cities in France named Germany, but for some unknown reason the others all changed their names right around World War 1. The castle is apparently a bed and breakfast now and closed for the winter season (is it ever really winter in Provence), so aside from this view from the parking lot I don't have much to show.

Moustiers-Sainte-Marie

Allemagne-en-Provence was the beginning of our journey following the Verdun river which cuts a Grand Canyon (their words, not mine, although to be fair those are both French words) thru the south of France, and eventually led us to the picturesque village of Moustiers-Sainte-Marie above. Perched on the sides of some limestone cliffs, the city has a waterfall running thru the middle of it, a giant golden start hanging across the chasm behind it, and about half-way up that chasm an old chapel that surprisingly (to some of us) didn't have a bathroom. You can see the chapel and the star below (the start is the little shiny thing in the top, slightly right hand side of the picture)

After leaving Moustiers-Sainte-Marie we just followed the Grand Canyon back to the nearest highway and then back to Marseille for some rest before our last day in the south.

That Grand Canyon I keep talking about

Our last day in the south was to be along the famous Côte d'Azur (the blue coast or more commonly, the French Riviera).

We made it as far as the famous Saint Tropez pictured above, but by far the coolest city we visited on this trip was Bormes-les-Mimosas pictured below.

The village

The view

The winding streets of the old town center

The old tunnels and bridges

The old stone buildings and tile roofs

The us

I hope the pictures above do some justice to absolute beauty of this village. Every road we walked down, every view over the next hill, every well-preserved building or cobble-stone pathway, every plant which still had nice flowers in November--the village was simply gorgeous.

On our way back home from the South George and I stopped in the city of Orange to grab some lunch, and SURPRISE, Orange has an old Roman amphitheatre too. As you can also see from the picture below, as we left the warm, sunny south, we slowly returned to the cloudy, rainy Lyon.

The roman Theatre of Orange

There is still a ton of stuff we didn't see, of course, as we only made it about half way from Marseille to Italy, so all that stuff east of their (Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo, etc.) will need to be explored later. To check our more pictures of this little part of Provence, click here

Happy Halloween

2010-11-03T09:49:00.001-07:00

I was never much of a Halloween person when I lived in the US. Sure when I was little and could get some free candy out of dressing up and trick-or-treating I loved Halloween, but once you get past a certain age dressing up and running door to door is just creepy and/or sad and not very likely to result in free candy, so Halloween just became another one of those nights where I just sit on the couch watching (scary) movies and pretend not to be home when someone knocked on the door.

But as the old saying goes, you never know what you got until it's gone. Halloween is not a big thing in France, although it is certainly gaining in popularity, so around the end of October every year, my holiday spirit starts to perk up a bit.

Halloween starts with Jack-o'-Lanterns. We were unable to find normal, American sized pumpkins so we settled for a couple small European ones. I also did not have any real carving tools (just a single kitchen knife), and more importantly no artistic talent of any kind, so the resulting Jack-o'-Lanterns are unlikely to impress most, but I am fairly sure they were the only ones on my street, so I was proud of them.

Costumes are the next most important thing for Halloween. As I am sure I have mentioned before, George and I have very few possessions, so spontaneous costume making is a really difficult task for us. There are a couple costume rental places in Lyon, but their offerings are either cookie-cutter and lame, or extremely expensive, so we spent a few days browsing and thinking before coming up with something we hoped wouldn't put us in the lame-last-minute-costume crowd. I have a few fake musical instruments laying around the house (Rock Band!), so George decided to be a hippie rockstar, and I always have a fridge full of cheese so I decided to be this:

La Vache qui Rit (The Laughing Cow)
Jack-o'-Lanterns: Check
Costumes: Check!
Party: Oh yeah

George pulling on my teats
A few friends of ours here throw a pretty rockin' Halloween bash every year, so we put on our dancing shoes and our new, cool costumes and went out to shake our things.

Happy Halloween Everyone!!!

Tosh (May 8, 2002 - September 18, 2010)

2010-09-22T12:35:00.000-07:00

Big dogs need big sticks

On Saturday September 18th, the greatest dog in the history of dogs laid down to rest and closed his eyes for the last time. The last few weeks had been tough, and he was ready to put this world behind him. Somewhere in doggy heaven a big, clumsy, goofball of a dog is chasing skunks or snoring, ridiculously loudly, on God's front porch.

Baby Tosh with his two brothers

We first saw Tosh when he was 5 weeks old. He was a discount dog as his future owner was deployed to Afghanistan and could no longer take him. His mother was a 125 lbs, solid black Newfoundland, and his father was the same black and white Landseer variety as Tosh. A winner of countless show competitions, Tosh's father was quite the stud dog, even fathering numerous puppies years after his death--including Tosh.

The breeder had brought the puppies outside for us to see, and locked the big dogs inside to give us a little quite time with the puppies. Tosh's uncle didn't like the idea of being separated from all the excitement outside, and as a sign of things to come he proceeded to lower his head and barrel right thru the screen door and made a bee-line for George. George was a bit freaked out by the big dog bearing down on her, but after a couple licks to the face and some playful bowing, she was quite enamored with the big guy.

The breeder also explained to us that she intentionally breeds smaller, more active Newfoundlands and all of her dogs were about 10-15% below the average newfie size. We thought this was great, as it was temperament and not size that attracted us to the breed, and really we thought the current big dogs she had were certainly big enough. We signed on the dotted line and she told us to come back in 3 weeks when Tosh would be ready to come home with us.

3 weeks later and Tosh had already doubled in size. At 27 lbs he was already a respectable sized dog, and by 6 months he was probably the biggest dog I had ever had. Despite the smaller size of his closest relatives, and the breeder's assertion that she breeds for smaller size, Tosh would end up being quite a bit bigger than than the average Newfoundland--35 inches at the shoulders and an average of 165 lbs.

Yes that is a full sized picnic table behind him

Tosh never quite understood how big he was. He preferred (to usually disastrous results) to play with the little dogs, his favorite spot on the couch was the smallest spot in between two people already sitting there, and he never let things like small openings prevent him from trying to get thru. Once while tied up outside a restaurant, he drug a solid stone picnic table about 8 feet while trying to get closer so some people that were making "Oooohhh he's so cute" sounds but were too scared of his size to get close to him. I couldn't push the table back to its original position.

One of Tosh's favorite playmates was literally 1/10th his size

As part of the puppy training classes we took him to, we were supposed to be able to lead our dogs off-leash thru a simple obstacle course. The course was pretty similar to the ones you see the pro agility dogs run--a small hoop to jump thru, some staggered cones to run the slalom, and an ramp leading to a short elevated platform. Tosh was never a fan of jumping, and generally preferred to keep atleast 2 feet on solid ground, so he simply ran into the hoop knocking it over, and being by far the tallest dog in the class, he slalomed thru the cones by simply walking over them and straddled the ramp and platform to the end of the course. The instructor passed him out of amusement.

One of the rare times Tosh got all 4 feet off the ground

Despite his struggles early on with obedience training, Tosh eventually became the best behaved dog anyone could want. He never chewed on anything, dug any holes, chased cars or any animals (other than skunks, unfortunately), and he only barked on command. Yes he frequently broke stuff, slobbered on stuff, and once while sick and trying to settle his stomach he ate nearly every plant on our newly landscaped patio, but those were not behavioral problems, just big clumsy dog problems.

Tosh makes a good blanket

Tosh spent the last 2 years of his life in doggy paradise. Grilled steaks for dinner, frequent treats from the neighbors, and new dogs in the neighborhood to play with. But as with all of us, age, and size, was starting to catch up with him. About a year ago he tore his ACL and spent a couple months hobbling around in great fear of any steps more than a couple inches high. He eventually recovered reasonably well from this, but age was taking its toll on other parts of his body. After weeks of listlessness and lack of appetite he dropped 20 lbs and was clearly having a tough time. Frequent whimpering and blood in his stool and saliva only made the picture more clear. Cancer and age had, unfortunately, claimed another victim and the world lost its greatest dog.

Tosh doing what he does best

Rest in peace big guy. There will never be another like you.

More pictures of Tosh here.

Eastern Europe Part 2

2010-09-01T10:27:00.000-07:00

[Disclaimer: As mentioned earlier my camera was misplaced in Prague, so all the photos in this post are of the crappy-cellphone variety.]

One of the many amazingly cool statues in Vienna

4 hours by train from Prague, Vienna is the current capital of Austria and the last capital of the Holy Roman Empire. Famous as the city of Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss, and Haydn, it is drowning in music halls, operas, and musical history in general. It is also, in my opinion, the most beautiful city in Europe.

Vienna was originally a Celtic city, but pretty quickly came under the rule of the Roman empire, and was even briefly threatened by the Mongolian empire of Genghis Khan as his son Ögedai marched the armies across Eastern Europe. After about 1500 years of being part of someone else's empire, they returned to championship form with 3 consecutive dynasties, the Badenberg, Hapsburg, and finally the Holy Roman Empire which later became the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and lasted until 1918, making it one of the most recent empires in Europe. Briefly occupied by the Nazis during WW2, and the Allies for about 10 years after, it very quickly regained its glory as one of the most prosperous cities in Europe.

Ludwig van Beethoven
Due to its long-lasting empires, and relatively benign occupations around WW2, Vienna's amazing architecture and riches accumulated during its time of power remain in really good shape. Rome's riches are mind-bogglingly cool, but being thousands of years old, part of the allure is imagining how magnificent Rome used to be. There is no need for that imagination in Vienna, the city still is that remarkable.

Parliament
I'm not much for hopping on and off of tour-buses, so we didn't take any "official" tours of they city. We did, however, grab a map from the Mozart tour company, so we spent a day hopping from places that Mozart slept or played music and ended the day with a pretty magnificent performance of some of his most famous works by the Viennese Orchestra. After the unintentionally comic performance of American show-tunes we saw in Prague, this was an incredibly enjoyable performance (and a much better use of 25 Euros).

George Clooney is huge in Europe
Not having much need anymore for all the palaces, summer palaces, and other remarkable creations built just to show off imperial power, many of these amazing constructions are now put to more practical use as libraries, schools, or museums. We visited the Museum of Natural History in the aptly named Museum Quarter, and I think I spent as much time marveling at the architecture and statues of the old palace grounds as I did studying the museum exhibits themselves.

This is a science museum
The main library in Vienna is another of these amazing buildings. Located just behind the parliament in an extremely large and extremely impressive building that probably stressed the ability of lazy royalty to traverse its many steps, it was one of the first buildings in Vienna to have an elevator. While I am sure it was an amazing invention at the time, the lack of doors and the inability to actually stop (to let people load and unload easily) makes it a bit of an adventure for the more modern lazy among us.

cool elevator
Vienna is definitely one of the places everyone should get to at least once in their lives. For more amazingly bad cellphone photos (and videos) of Vienna, and a few from Prague and Berlin, click here. And please do a Google image search for Vienna too, to get much better pictures than my horrible photos here.

Eastern Europe Part 1

2010-08-09T12:35:00.000-07:00

The three weeks I spent in Berlin were the last few weeks of about the past 2.5 months of putting in extra hours, so after wrapping things up there, George and I headed to Prague and later Vienna for a few days of relaxing before heading home.

Prague sucked!

Creepy statues in Prague

Okay, Prague didn't really suck, but getting your camera stolen can really ruin a first impression. Add that to the Czech people's genetic inability to smile, and your overall impression of the city might be affected a bit. Maybe it's just me (I can be a jerk at times), but Prague seemed like a pretty negative place sandwiched between the super-friendly cities of Berlin and Vienna.

More creepy statues in Prague

As mentioned above my camera got stolen, therefor the only pictures I have of Prague are the couple I took with my cellphone because I wanted to use them as wallpaper. So you'll have to take my word for it when I tell you Prague is a beautiful city (or just search google images, as there are thousands of photos to back me up). Despite the best efforts of the United States Airforce, Prague was remarkably damaged very little during WW2, so many of the historic buildings remain in excellent shape. The historic downtown, the bridges over the Vltava river, and of course the famous Prague Castle that dominates the skyline, are all just as amazing as the postcards make them look.

Check out the wikipedia article on Prague for more pics

Prague was a bit touristy though. Some things seemed quite expensive for what you got, and if you didn't specify up front that you wanted the cheap version, or the cheaper seats, you were automatically sold the most expensive version, without any explanation of the options. We got suckered into spending 26 bucks for seats that were only about 5 feet closer to the stage than the 16 dollar seats for a show that should have cost about 5 bucks at most. It looked promising from the outside--a large billboard that displayed a large band playing songs from various American musicals, but once inside it was a sole pianist and a singer who was occasionally accompanied by a saxophonist.

All three performers were definitely talented, but the production values were pretty low, the venue not very impressive, and the singer had the strongest Slavic accent I heard while in Prague. As she sung songs like Somuh Vere Dere sa Place fer Rus (you might almost recognize that from A West Side Story), I could only smile in amazement. Her voice was excellent, and she even did a bit of tap at the end that was pretty impressive, but she was extremely difficult to understand at times. I certainly do not want to poke fun at anyone's accent, I know I have a horrible accent when trying to speak any language, but I wouldn't even attempt to sing songs in ~~a foreign~~ any language in public, much less ask you to pay me for it.

Other than amazing architecture and unintentionally humorous musicals, Prague is also home to a ridiculous amount of Thai massage parlors. I'm not sure what brings all of these Thai masseuses to Prague, but if you have the endurance for that kind of stuff, the price is good and the service was friendly.

Does this look like massage to you?

I love when my wife rubs my neck or shoulders, especially after driving for a long time, or working in the yard or something, so I assumed that paying a professional for their massage services would be incredibly relaxing and invigorating. However, after paying the professionals at the Venitian Hotel's Spa in Vegas for something called a deep tissue massage, and then having someone literally stomp on me during this Thai massage, I have to say that I just don't get it. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, which is hard to imagine since I am just laying there, but professional massages just hurt!

Overall Prague was cool. But skip the pay performances and just hang out at the cool bridges listening to the street performers. They put on a better show, and you only pay as much as you like.

I leave you with this bit of street art from Prague.

The Infinite Ignorance of War

Three weeks in Berlin

2010-08-02T13:00:00.000-07:00

Growing up in the USA I have a very specific, and most likely wrong, image of what a German city is supposed to be. I lived in (or near) the pseudo-German American tourist traps of New Braunfels, TX and Leavenworth, WA, and Octoberfest is probably the second most important holiday of any American city with a decent sized population of university students.

Leavenworth, Washington

So when I think of Germany I think of large sausages, sauerkraut, giant beers, and people in liederhosen. Berlin didn't exactly match my preconceived notions. In fact, it didn't even almost match them. Currywurst is more common than Bratwursts, sauerkraut was difficult to find, and I didn't see one person in liederhosen. Berlin definitely had its share of giant beers, but they also had beers like this:

I thought Germany had laws against stuff like this

Given the length of my stay, work put me up in a residential apartment, rather than a hotel. The apartment location seems to have been picked especially for me, as it was surrounded by asian noodle places, indian food, pizzerias, and even a mexican food place! All my favorite types of foods, and all places where the word 'vegetarian' doesn't mean fish. I didn't eat any meat (including fish) the entire time I was in Berlin, and I don't think I ever ate the same thing twice.

While the geographic location was excellent, the elevation kinda sucked. 6th floor apartment in an old building with no air conditioning and no elevator meant the first thing I did every day when returning home was take a shower, and while I originally thought the extra flights of stairs would be good for working off all the fatty foods I was eating, I quickly decided I would rather be fat. There is a reason God created elevators! And air conditioning!

But the apartment was cool (esthetically, if not temperature wise). Quite big and comfortable with a gigantic bathroom and the largest refrigerator I have seen since moving to Europe (about the same size as the normal (American) sized one I had in the US). It also had a pretty cool terrace, a TV from the 1980s, and a VCR. Seriously, a VCR?

The future of home entertainment

Since I didn't bring any VHS tapes with me to pass the evenings, I spent most nights out eating and exploring the city (oh, and working a bit too). At nearly 900 square kilometers, Berlin is a gigantic city. Roughly the same size as Dallas, Texas it is 18 times larger than the city I currently live in, and with a metro area of nearly 5 million people, it also dwarfs the 1.2 million that live in the Lyon metro area. Having gone to Berlin for work, I only had the weekends and evenings to do my exploring, and given the immense size of the city, I am sure I just scratched the surface, but I would definitely give the city the thumbs up. Tons of good food, SUPER bike-friendly, great public transportation, lots of libraries and book shops, cool history (although somewhat scary and depressing recently), numerous parks and public spaces, friendly easy-going people, and quite cheap--the city scores highly in all the important categories. The near total lack of air conditioning was a bit of a bummer at times as neither my working place nor living place nor 90% of restaurants had AC. Despite being nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37 C) almost every day I was there, I was repeatedly told that it really doesn't get that hot in Berlin, so they don't really need AC.

To test out the bike-friendliness of Berlin, we decided to take a bike tour of the city. Fat Tire Bike Tours provided the tour guide and the bikes (my bike was named Chump, and George's was named Charles Barkley--practically synonyms), and miraculously the city provided the first sub 90 degree day all week, so we had a nice 5 hour city tour in great weather. I got great pictures of all the cool Berlin landmarks, parks and a good shot of me sneaking across the border at Checkpoint Charlie.

In fact, I took a lot of really cool pictures in Berlin. I am sure some of them are even Ansel Adams quality.

Artist recreation

Unfortunately due to my ever-worsening Alzheimer's disease and an unscrupulous store clerk in Prague, I no longer have a camera (or more importantly, a memory card) to extract those photos from. So if any famous magazine editors are reading this and some anonymous Czech guy tries to sell you some awesome photos from Berlin, give me a call.

But the disappearing camera just gives me a reason to go back.

Counting in French

2010-05-31T04:28:00.001-07:00

Counting seems like a pretty universal concept. I'm sure as language was first invented, words to express various quantities of items were some of the first grunts we settled on.

Counting seems relatively standard these days too. Sure every language has its own word for one, but the concept of one remains the same. In fact most languages even have a remarkably similar progression of numbers--0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and we can combine these 10 digits to continue the progression for ever. 11 is very logically 10 and 1, 12 is 10 and 2, 952 is 9 hundreds 5 tens and 2. Quite logical, and it conveniently never ends.

These 10 digits of Indian origin (the country in Asia, not the natives in the US) have even become the standard for nearly all languages on the planet (at least by number of speakers). From English to Chinese to Russian to their origins in India, these digits mostly replace the native numeric representations for most pratical uses. When was the last time you wrote something in Roman Numerals?

Most humans have 10 fingers which are amazingly useful tools for counting in a base-10 counting system, but not all languages originally counted by 10. For example, the original Celts of Europe--who were famous for wearing no shoes and therefore having access to 10 additional counting digits--counted in sets of 20. Instead of having numbers like thirty, forty, fifty, etc. they would just have twenty and ten, two twenties, two twenties and ten, etc. Even in English we still have those weird words like eleven and twelve before we switch back to something that more resembles a base-10 counting system (thirteen, fourteen, etc.) and by 20 we are back to a very systematic base-10 system.

Before being conquered by the Romans, France was a mostly celtic country and some of that cultural heritage is preserved in their utterly bizarre counting system. The French, the champions of the metric system, do not even have a metric (base-10) counting system--at least not entirely. Things start out fairly similar to English and we count quite normally from one to sixty-nine, but for some odd reason the French have no word for seventy. Well, actually they do, they just chose not to use it, and instead the say sixty-ten. Similarly we have sixty-and-eleven, sixty-twelve, all the way up to sixty-nineteen for 79.

The French word for eighty is similarly unused, and instead we have four-twenties. Four-twenties-and-one, four-twenties-two, etc. leading up to four-twenties-nine, and after that, where we would logically expect a word for ninety, we get four-twenties-ten. I would have to say that there is no more horrible number in French than 99, which in this pseudo-base-20 counting system is four-twenties-nineteen!

As mentioned above, French actually does have words for seventy (septante), eighty (octante), and ninety (nonante), the French just chose not to use them. However, some francophones outside of France do use this more modern (and logical) vocabulary, as George and I were a bit surprised to hear when we were recently in Brussels. George purchased some fruit at a small grocery and the grocer gave her the price as nonante-huit (98), and George, being familiar with the weird French version, had no idea what he said. It took me a minute to realize what he said as well, and when I translated from logical Belgian French to weird base-20 French French, quatre-vingts dix-huit (four-twenties-eighteen), she immediately understood and the cashier and another customer in line laughed a bit at us.

We actually have some small remnants of this in English too. We are all familiar with Lincoln's "four score and seven years ago" entrance to the Gettysburg address, but outside of quoting old Abe, I don't think I have ever heard anyone ask for four score of anything, and I have certainly never been quoted a price at McDonald's as four score and eighteen cents.

Welcome to the 21st century France! You can leave your pre-historic counting system at the door.

Weekend in Brussels

2010-05-25T13:40:00.000-07:00

The Grand Place
I've been working long hours and extra days a lot lately, so when the 3-day weekend for Pentecost came around the wife and I headed to Brussels for a few days of not-working and much needed recuperating.

Brussels is about 400 miles north of Lyon, and just over an hour flight time. It is the capital of the Kingdom of Belgium, and the de facto capital of the European Union. Technically situated in the Dutch speaking part of Belgium it is a mostly French speaking city, but it seemed everyone we ran into spoke 3 or 4 different languages! It's a fairly big city with about 2 million people in the metro area, and given the abundance of international and European organizations located there, it is a very multi-cultural city too. Famous for beer, waffles, chocolate, the Smurfs, comic books, and the birth place of french fries--it seems to have just about all of life's necessities.

Creepy Tall People
We arrived in Brussels just in time for one of the coolest parades I have ever seen--the Zinneke Parade. I have no idea what the origins of this parade are, but every 2 years the people of Brussels come together and put on one of the coolest, weirdest, sometimes creepy, and most creative parades I have ever seen. There were no motor vehicles or giant balloons in this parade, just small hand pushed or bicycle pushed carts, and lots of cool costumes. Some bands and signing groups participated too, and there were even a few fire breathers and other carny folk.

Not sure what these are
The tall people 2 pictures above kept leaning over and whispering qu'est-ce qui se passe (what is happening?) while being chased by the whatever these things are clinging to the wall here, while the women below where chanting some children of the corn type music. It was really impressive and well rehearsed for a one time event in a biennial parade.

Imagine creepy choir music
The parade wasn't all creepy. The theme this year was à la table (at the table), so the displays were supposed to be somewhat food or dining related. This wasn't always apparent, like in the pics above, but there were some funny on-theme characters too.

Officer Green
Some acrobats

Looks like fun
and whatever this is

looks like something out of the Dark Crystal
Brussels is pretty cool when not putting on Tim Burton-esque parades too. The city is littered with statues, awesome parks, cool plazas, and to George's great delight a gourmet chocolate shop on every corner.

Crusher of sea monsters
Brussels, well Belgium in general, is also pretty famous for comic books and cartoons. The most famous of course being The Smurfs (Les Schtroumpfs in French), and less famous in the US, Tintin. I think the image below comes from Tintin, and there were many comic style artworks around the city like this one.

And Beer! France is well known for high quality wine, but is not known--for good reason--for high quality beer. I don't drink much, but when I do go out, or when I buy beer at the store, I almost always buy Belgian beer. Even the king of beers, Budweiser, is now owned by a Belgian company, and one of my favorite brewers in the USA is called the New Belgian Brewing Company (even though they are located in Colorado). So when I think of good beer, Belgium usually comes to mind.

George is not much of a beer drinker though. In fact, before this trip to Brussels I do not think she has even drank one entire beer in her life. Well she found a couple beers she could enjoy, and by the last day she was having her first beer before 10am just like a real pro.

You know you have a problem when your first beer comes before noon
Brussels also has a lot of great (and varied) restaurants. I had vegetarian chili for lunch one day! I don't think you can get any kind of chili in Lyon, and you can hardly get anything vegetarian either. Good Thai food, which is also pretty much non-existent in Lyon, was also pretty common, and I even ate at a Chi-Chi's restaurant. While I doubt the Michelin guys will be handing out any stars to the afore mentioned restaurants, it was a pleasant surprise and it's nice to have the options.

So we had a great time in Brussels. I think it was an awesome city, and I could definitely see myself going back a few times.

You will find more pics of Brussels here and more pics of the Zinneke parade here

Tax Time

2010-05-10T12:39:00.000-07:00

Being a US citizen living abroad, I have the privilege of paying both US and French income taxes. Numerous forms, W-2s, 1099s, Déclaration Revenus, etc. and lots of numbers, rounding, adding, double checking, guessing at instructions (in English and French), some swearing, and of course ... paying. Maybe privilege is the wrong word. What's the opposite of that?

Last year (this year's taxes) was the first year that I was fully a tax resident of France, so although I still had to file my US taxes this April, I didn't actually owe anything (other than the $30 fee to TurboTax and 10 bucks worth of postage). Similarly, for the tax year before that, I was still a tax resident of the US, so I paid taxes there, and didn't pay anything here in France. This is the first time I have had to file and pay my French income taxes.

French taxes work a bit different than in the US. French income tax is basically broken into 2 parts--social taxes and actual income taxes. Social taxes are what pay for our government healthcare, retirement, unemployment, and basically all the social services that this socialist country provides. Social taxes are taken out of every paycheck and these add up to about 20% of my salary.

The other tax is not withheld from your salary, and you can either pay it in one lump sum at the end of the year, or pay in installments over the next year. This income tax pays for defense, police, roads, teachers, etc. and is paid much like you pay your income taxes in the US. In May the government sends you some forms, and you fill them out and send them to your local tax office.

The form is a little different than the 1040 form from the US. For one, it comes pre-filled out. They enter your name, address, filing status, and even how much money you made last year, and you just correct any errors and add up all your deductions. Being childless, homeless (i rent), and not having anything at all to call a deduction, I simply have to sign my name and that is that. They will then verify everything and send me a bill. According to the forms (the math is pretty easy since I have no deductions) I owe an additional 7% of my salary in income tax.

So in total, the French government takes about 27% of my salary in income taxes.

Oh, there is actually a 3rd part of the income taxes too--the TV tax. In France you pay about $150 per year just for owning a TV. But in exchange for that, you get nearly commercial free TV, so that is a tax that I have absolutely no problem with.

So in revised total, 27% + $150. That's income taxes in France.

Reminiscing

2010-04-25T13:49:00.000-07:00

Much of my free time recently has been spent following the NFL draft. Being a Cowboys fan we didn't have much to look forward to this year, with a pretty late first round pick and couple picks in the later rounds, but we still managed to pick up a good wide receiver with plenty of attitude and off-field problems (including a current suspension from NCAA football) who should feel right at home in Dallas. This bit of "haven't I seen this before" got my reminiscing about life before moving to France, so I wanted to post a few of my favorite pics from the home country.

Somewhere near Forks, Washington looking out over the Pacific Ocean. The Washington coast is not very developed, and much of it is National Park, so you get a lot of trees, rocks, and driftwood, and not many people or buildings. Some spots, like this one, have some really cool rock formations and small islands just off the coast and right behind us is one of the only temperate rain forests in North America--The Hoh Rainforest--which averages about 14 feet of rain every year (400 centimeters).

Seattle is not right on the ocean, but rather on a large bay called Puget Sound, which is separated from the rest of the Pacific by the Olympic mountain range that juts out of the water to the West of Seattle and forms a peninsula about the size of Ireland. The forests out on this peninsula are pretty amazing. The abundant rainfall keeps the plant life very green and very thick, and the low population in comparison to the land area keeps them very tranquil. I usually consider myself a city person, but hiking thru these forests, I often wonder why.

The climate around Seattle is also ideal for growing tulips, and the skagit valley area north of Seattle exhibits this every April. Every spring we seemed to have more and more tulips in our yard in Seattle, and I don't remember ever planting one.

The abundant rainfall of the pacific northwest isn't limited to Washington state, Oregon gets a fair amount of the wet stuff too. The border between Oregon and Washington is mostly formed by the path of the Columbia river as it makes its way to the ocean, and along this gorge you can find some of the most beautiful waterfalls in the world. Multnomah Falls above is one of the more popular ones.

The beaches of this part of the country are also pretty cool. The water is usually too cold for us humans to enjoy without proper mental and physical protection, but for some reason marine mammals love it. Seals and orca whales are probably the most common water mammals, but sea lions and otters are fairly common too. I'm pretty sure I got this picture on one of the San Juan islands.

California has a few cool things to look at too, and probably the most amazing site in the world is the incredible giganticness of the California Redwood trees. I have a giant dog, and that fallen tree makes him look like a chihuahua.

Washington has some big trees too.

Surfing is another thing I miss from living on the coast. I never did as much surfing as I would have liked to, but I got out a few times, and I often dream of warm water and big waves. The west coast of France has a pretty big surfing scene, so I will have to make a trip out toward Biarritz sometime this summer.

And of course, the thing I miss the most from living in Seattle is my dog Tosh :-(

For more random picks from mostly around the pacific northwest, click here.

Hey! Nice breasts!

2010-04-11T11:44:00.000-07:00

Growing up I never gave much importance to learning other languages. I spent most of my youth in Texas and therefor had some passive exposure to Spanish and managed to pick up a bit here and there, but I never really put much effort into learning any languages. In fact, when required to study a foreign language in High School, I picked Latin precisely because nobody would ever really expect me to speak it.

Living with George for 14 years has resulted in nearly daily exposure to Cantonese, but to be honest it is usually limited to vocabulary related to food, me being a jerk, or my inability to keep the toilet clean. Visiting her family in Hong Kong I usually have to get thru slightly more complicated sentences related to how much I like Hong Kong, when I will move there, and when I will be having children.

I've been in France now for about a year and a half. When I moved here I could barely say hello in French, but now I think I can pretty much say anything I need to say. I still speak like a 3 year old, have a horrible accent, and rely on short games of charades to make up for my limited vocabulary, but I get by.

French grammar is not too bad, and Chinese (Cantonese) has probably the simplest grammar of any language on the planet, but both of these language are really hard to pronounce for my 'merican tongue. Sounds that I am just not used to making, or hearing, result in some words that are clearly different words for a native speaker sounding almost exactly the same to me. Usually the context of the complete sentence will make it clear what word was meant, but not always. One of the harder sounds in French for us English speakers is the French 'u', which is a sound somewhere between the vowel sound in "loop" and the vowel sound in "ewe", and when I first started studying French, I was watching an educational program teaching french adjectives of location which included the important examples below:

Le lait est au-dessus du pain dans le réfrigérateur.
(the milk is above the bread in the fridge)
Le pain est au-dessous du lait dans le réfrigérateur.
(the bread is below the milk in the fridge).

The only difference between these sentences is the ending vowel sounds in the french words for above (au-dessus) and below (au-dessous), and I must have rewinded and rewatched this video 25 times before realizing that I was simply never going to know if the milk was above or below the bread in the fridge, and that hopefully my life never depends on me solving any French riddles regarding the relative locations of objects.

I haven't yet come across any situations in French where I have made a complete idiot of myself by mispronouncing something, although I have certainly had cases where I was more benignly misunderstood. I've honestly been a bit disappointed by this, as I am always reminded of American movies where the hero's basic knowledge of a foreign language leads to all kinds of hilarious misunderstandings. Like John Candy's character in Splash when he and Tom Hanks are pretending to be Swedish scientists so they can sneak in and rescue Darryl Hannah. As only Hollywood luck would have it, one of the guards is half Swedish and he questions our heroes in Swedish asking what they are doing there, to which John Candy mistakenly replies "Hey babe, I got a 12 inch penis".

I have absolutely no knowledge of the Swedish language, but I have to imagine one would need to speak the language quite well to respond in such a way, and that it would be difficult to mistakenly refer to your genitals when trying to say something more appropriate like "We are here to see the mermaid".

But maybe not. In my infrequent and not very efficient efforts to improve my spoken Cantonese, I will point to random objects around the house and ask George to tell me how to say it. Last night I randomly pointed to George's breasts, and she responded hung bo (胸部), which to me sounded exactly the same as a word I already knew--horrible (hung bo 恐怖)--with the only difference in pronunciation being the tone at which one pronounces the word. To make this even worse, the word for "very" in Cantonese is the same as the word for "good", and so to my ears that cannot hear all the different tones in a language like Cantonese, the phrase "very horrible" (好恐怖) has pretty much the same pronunciation as the sentence "nice breasts" (好胸部).

I can totally see myself walking down the street in Hong Kong, and some women comes running around a corner covered in blood or something screaming about a terrible accident, and in my efforts to say something supportive like "oh, how horrible" I might just inappropriately compliment her on her woman parts.

Happy Easter

2010-04-05T12:26:00.000-07:00

France is a predominantly catholic country, and Lyon a predominantly catholic city, so we celebrated this Easter the traditional way:

bmx bikes

graffiti

freestyle bikes

breakdancing

and
De La Soul

The 7th annual L'Original Festival of Lyon was this weekend, a 4 day celebration of skateboarding, biking, graffiting, breakdancing, and hip-hoping, culminating today with a free show in the plaza in front of the mayor's office featuring a Lyon-based breakdance crew, The Pockemon Crew, and one of the best hip hop bands ever, De La Soul.

Happy Easter everyone! I leave you with a video of De La's most popular song (which totally makes me feel old :-( )

Road Trip

2010-03-30T13:31:00.001-07:00

When my dad came to visit a year ago, we took the train up to Normandy and rented a car for easy access to all the WW2 spots. Most of the sites we were interested in were pretty close together, so I don't think we put more than 320 kilometers on the car in that trip.

The Spanish border is about 500 kilometers from Lyon, and Barcelona is about 100 km past that. You can drive there in about 6 hours, or take a train in about 6 hours too (there is not yet a high-speed line all the way). Flying technically only takes about 1.5 hours, but with trips to and from the airport, getting thru security, boarding times, etc. it adds up to about 4 to 4.5 hours too. It is just far enough to make driving the best option, especially if you have more than one person to share the costs and if you plan on driving around a bit when you get there.

My friend, used-to-be neighbor, and current caretaker of my dog Tosh was recently in the Barcelona area for work, so George and I decided to grab a rental car for the weekend and put in our first hours on the French highway system.

Not the exact car I had--mine was black

We signed up for the cheapest smallest car they had, but they ended up giving us a brand new Ford Fiesta 4-door. By French standards, this is a medium sized sedan, and by US standards it is slightly bigger than a Smart car. The car was comfortable though, easy to get everyone in and out of, and had cruise control and HD radio to make the road trip more comfortable. As gas is about 6 dollars per gallon in France, I was also quite happy that it got around 50 miles per gallon.

Highways in France are extremely well kept (by the extremely high tolls), so the ride over was easy. We got a little turned around when we stopped for dinner in Perpignan but we ended up making it to my friend's hotel room in Blanes in about 6.5 hours.

View from the hotel room in Blanes

Blanes is a small vacation city about a half hour from Barcelona. Situated right on the beach, it is very popular with the northerners who come down to escape the frigid weather of their home countries. When we arrived it was pretty nice--sunny and about 65 degrees, and maybe even a little warmer when we went over to Barcelona.

The entrance to Park Güell

I've been to Barcelona before, and it is a great city. Tons of cool things to look at, good climate, nice beaches, and great food. We spent a day in the city eating, doing a little sight seeing, and shopping for things that we cannot find in Lyon (like refried beans) before heading back to the hotel to sleep off the food coma.

We spent Sunday exploring the gardens and beach around the hotel in Blanes. The weather was getting noticeably worse.

As we headed back to Lyon the sky was clouding, the wind was blowing, and the temperature was dropping. It was still in the low 50s--not really cold--so I didn't think much about it. As we got about 100 km into France I started noticing some white stuff blowing around the car, and I could not figure out what it was. Pollen? Some kind of bugs? I mean, I am in the south of France, it was 65 degrees yesterday, and I am nowhere near any mountains--this can't be snow. Well, after a few more kilometers it became apparent that it was indeed snow, but it was still just a few flurries on a completely clean highway, so nothing to worry about, right? A few kilometers more, and there is quite a bit of snow on the side of the road, and cars are driving noticeable slower. By the time we hit Nîmes, the roads where covered in snow, cars were barely moving, and to top things off, our GPS died.

The great blizzard of 2010

As I said earlier, it should have taken about 5.5 hours to get to my friend's hotel, but as we got a bit lost it took 6.5 hours. Logically, it should have taken 5.5 hours to get home from the hotel, but as we got stuck in the worst blizzard I have ever driven in, it took 11 hours. The last 7 hours to go only about 250 km (160 miles), with no GPS, nothing to drink, and an extremely full bladder.

Still, it was a fun trip. Seeing friends, eating tapas, and enjoying the (temporarily nice) Spanish climate was worth it.

Food thief in the office

2010-03-19T06:03:00.000-07:00

Over the past few weeks we have had frequent emails in the office regarding the disappearance of various people's foodstuffs in the upstairs kitchen. We have pretty small work areas here, and of course we only have the shared refrigerator upstairs, so most people keep their snacks, left-overs, and drinks in the shared kitchen space. Apparently someone considers everything in the shared kitchen space to be fair game for shared consumption. Here are a few excerpts from these emails:

3 weeks ago:
[french office] pain au choc stealer
Celui qui me vole regulierement des pain au choc sera prié de m’en racheter et la prochaine fois, au moins de prévenir quand il tape dedans

basic translation: Whoever keeps stealing my pastries needs to buy me some new ones.

2 weeks ago:
Those cokes in the fridge are not for everyone, please stop drinking my cokes.

1 week ago:
title: Milk in the fridge
body: The milk isn't free either, a**holes

and the most recent:
steal my food = kick in your a** so hard you will not be able to sit for 3 days.

A couple of things stand out to me about these emails. First, the are becoming progressively more hostile (presumably as people keep stealing food), and second they have switched from scolding their coworkers in French to scolding their coworkers in English.

We have a company policy of sending important emails in English. We are currently working with a German company and an American publisher, and we have a satellite office in Austin, Texas, so it just makes everything easier when emails are in English. For emails that only involve people in the french office, however, French is more often used. I doubt the guys in Austin are drinking the milk in the french fridge, so as these emails became more hostile and more English, I couldn't help but notice that I am the only guy in the office who isn't fluent in French. Do they all think I am stealing their snacks?

It's not me man, I swear. I don't even like chocolate, french milk is still weird to me (so I only drink it with cereal) and I prefer pepsi to coke.

War, what is it good for?

2010-02-27T03:16:00.000-08:00

It's been nearly a year since I visited the American Cemetery in Normandy pictured above, but I was recently watching a WW2 movie and it made me remember this trip. There are nearly 10,000 Americans buried in this cemetery, all but 1 of them casualties of WW2 (with the one remaining a soldier who died in the first world war). The cemetery is huge, as one would expect to hold 10,000 graves, which makes it even more astounding that these 10,000 represent a tiny portion of the 400,000 Americans, more than 20 million Russians, and countless other casualties of the war that was supposed to be the war to end all wars.

Visiting the various war memorials around Europe you get to read stories of various events in the wars, or stories of the lives of various people. Soldiers who died storming the beach, or trying to save their friends, and soldiers who didn't even make it to battle, as bad weather, operator error, or just plain bad luck ended their lives early. These stories highlight the heroism and tragedy of war, but also the absurdity.

Living in Europe now, it is actually very hard for me to imagine the events that led up to these conflicts. I have been to Italy and Germany, and other than speaking a slightly different language, there doesn't seem to be any battle-worthy differences between them and France or other parts of Europe (other than perhaps amongst the soccer fans). Just an example of this, the game I am working on now is produced by an American company with development split between us (a French company) and a German company in the former East-Berlin. Germany and France are perhaps the best of allies these days and the two countries at the front of the push for a united European Union. What were all these old battles about?

Much better use of a canon

Human beings in general seem pretty bad at conflict resolution, but when you add missiles and tanks and ships, you really magnify the problem. Now only if I had a way to force everyone to believe the same way I do...

Cold, cold, cold

2010-02-14T05:20:00.001-08:00

It has been really cold in Lyon this winter. As I write this blog, it has been 5 days since the temperature got above freezing, and we have had 3 snow storms that actually left enough snow on the ground to cause trouble on the roads and leave the grocery stores lacking of fresh products. It's been so wintery here that the skateboard park near my house has looked more like a snowboard park lately.

I need a small park board so I can try this half next time it snows

Everyone tells me that this is the worst winter they have ever seen in Lyon. This is only my second winter here, and it didn't snow once last winter or hardly ever drop below freezing, so it is certainly colder than last year. Even after the snow came back and melted the snow, it remained really cold. And cold here is cold! Probably because I do not have a car, and spend more time outside walking, biking, waiting for a bus, etc., but I am wearing my warmest jacket and many layers of clothes and still feel like my toes are about to fall off. Even the farm animals are trying to cover up more to stay warm.

nice hat

However, while the cold weather and frequent snow has made life a little more difficult here in the city, it has made the weekend trips to the alps AMAZING! After riding in the Alps last winter I was honestly a little bit disappointed. The resorts are cool, huge, numerous, and the food is great, but the mountains just didn't have enough snow on them. Most of the good resorts were way up in the mountains, way above the tree lines to maximize the possibility of snow and cold, and I really like to ride deep snow, through the trees, off-piste as much as possible. So last year was a little bit meh for me.

Those fresh tracks there are ours

This year, however, has been awesome. Tons of fresh snow, and we have been able to go to some of the close, and lower elevation, resorts and hit the off-piste tree-runs all the time. And surprisingly--to me anyway--many french people do not like to ride/ski (or drive) in this type of weather. They prefer the clear, sunny skies and groomed pistes, so the resorts have been half empty. I have to admit, it is nice to ride in warm sunny weather with clear, awe-inspiring vistas of the Alps around you, but I'll take cloudy skies and falling snow over that any day.

My friend Michel gives the snow conditions the thumbs up

Riding in the deep stuff is a lot more work than just sliding down the groomed pistes too. I love leaving the resort totally exhausted (and a little bit in pain) every day, after really pushing it to hit every little jump, drop, fresh powder bank, etc. You really have to lean, push, and sometimes jump into your turns when the snow can easily cover your board, and of course when you fall (which I do ~~a lot~~ occasionally), it takes a bit more energy to dig yourself out and get back up. I usually end these types of days like this:

Exhaustion has gotten the best of me

I know many parts of the US are experiencing unusually cold and snowy weather as well. My parents have had quite a bit of snow in Dallas, and Washington, DC now seems a better city to host the winter Olympics than unseasonably warm Vancouver, Canada. Many of my friends back in Seattle are ambiguously happy with the warmer weather in the city and sad that there isn't a lot of snow in the mountains this year. For me, I just cannot wait to get back up to the mountains.

Best Superbowl commercial ever!

2010-02-09T01:49:00.000-08:00

No it wasn't the Bud Light beer house commercial, or one of the e-trade talking baby commercials. We have neither Bud Light nor E-trade in France, and therefore no need to show advertisements from either of them. In fact, not one of the commercials that you (you in the U.S.) saw during the Superbowl was even shown here.

This commercial--the best one ever--was actually a commercial that I have seen before in the U.S., and while the commercials are entertaining it was not the content of the commercial that so impressed me, but the product the commercial was advertising. I first thought that maybe the French re-broadcasters had made an editing error and forgot to edit out this commercial for something I have been solely missing, but it was no error and my life will soon be more complete (again).

No it wasn't a commercial for Dr. Pepper or Taco Bell or Maui Sweet Onion chips, but something more essential to a happy life.

Duh duh duh. Duh duh duh.

Sportscenter! The best show on American TV, and probably the show most watched at the Stradley home when we lived in the states. I have cable tv solely for one channel--ESPN America (the oddly named version of ESPN we get in France), and while this channel is the only option for enjoying American sports in France, it is not the same EPSN you get in the U.S. The most important difference being NO SPORTSCENTER!

Well my suffering ends in just a few short weeks. Starting March 1st, EPSN America will begin showing the best show in sports and I will be just a little bit closer to heaven.

I leave you with a shot of the good old days when Dan Patrick was still with ESPN and before Keith Olbermann became a pompous, bizzaro-world-Bill-O'Reilly, jackass.

Nice mustache Keith!

Absinthe

2010-01-30T02:21:00.000-08:00

The Absinthe Drinker by Viktor Oliva

Absinthe is an alcohol distilled from the flowers and leaves of the wormwood plant. It is a pretty potent beverage, and it has been rumored to have hallucinogenic properties and to make people crazy™ (like Vincent Van Gogh who was very fond of the stuff and died in an insane asylum). Due to these rumors, it is illegal in many countries, including the United States, but became legal again in France about 20 years ago and it seems to be quite popular here. It is sometimes called La Fée Verte (the green fairy) because of the purported psychoactive powers and the normally green color of the drink.

Going our with friends and colleagues in Lyon, absinthe frequently ends up in front of me at some point in the night. I rarely order it, but last night I found myself at a bar that seemingly specialized in stuff, aptly named La Fée Verte so I ordered one glass, and somehow ended up with 3.

Absinthe tastes a bit like licorice, and feels a bit like kerosene in your stomach. It is usually served with added sugar, either caramelized around the edge of the class or just as a big sugar cube in the middle of the drink, and is often also served on fire. I am still undecided about whether or not I like this drink, but at least I didn't burn myself this time.

I do not really understand why bars, or restaurants, like to serve things on fire. Obviously the fire needs to be extinguished before it can be consumed, and absinthe is served cold, so the fire doesn't add much to the drink. I suppose it helps to caramelize the sugar or something.

The first time I had absinthe I was at a pub with a friend watching some American Football and drinking some Irish beers when the bartender came over with 3 glasses of the devil's brew. He set one in front of me, one in front of my friend, and the other in front of himself and lit them all on fire. He then gave a brief description of the drink and how you are supposed to drink and then gave us a demonstration. With the glass flaming in front of him, he slammed his hand palm down on the glass, which cuts off the oxygen supply to the fire and quickly extinguishes it. When the fire burns off the last of its oxygen, it creates an air pressure difference and the suction causes the glass to stick to the palm of your hand. You then lift your hand up with the glass stuck to the bottom of it, and slam it back down on the table (lightly) which I guess mixes up the drink a bit and releases it from the bottom of your hand. Then it's bottom's up.

This was all pretty cool, but the entire time this guy was giving his speech and demonstration, my glass was still on fire (my buddy's fire had gone out), so as fire does, it had done a good job of heating up the sides of the glass. The bartender reignited the fire on my friend's glass, and then following his instructions we both slammed our palms on the glass, lifted it up and slammed it down again. This went well for my friend with the newly started fire, but as I slammed my palm on my glass I now had an extremely hot glass stuck to the bottom of my palm and after slamming it back down, I had a nice circular blister on my palm for a week.

So last night when the absinthe came out on fire, the first thing I did was blow it out, and slowly mix my drink with a spoon. I'll leave the manly fire extinguishing to the guys with a higher pain tolerance than me.

I have to say thanks to all the people I went out with last night (I am sure they all read this :-)). There were 7 of us, and we consumed a decent quantity of alcohol, and I think I only paid for 2 drinks! French people are quick on the credit card when it comes to paying for their friends, so I am sure I owe 6 other people a few rounds. Next time is on me.

Oh, and it is a proven fact that drinking absinthe greatly improves one's ability to speak French.

Another trip to Paris

2010-01-10T11:48:00.000-08:00

Paris, Texas that is. Actually, despite living nearly 18 years of my life in Texas and having family there, I had never been to this Paris before. If any of you have been to Paris, TX, this probably comes as no surprise to you as the above be-hatted replica of the Eiffel Tower is about the only thing to see there.

The other Paris has a bit more stuff to do, and a slightly bigger, and original, Eiffel tower but I think the cowboy hat makes the difference. Maybe we can stick a beret or a scarf on the one in France.

Slowly making its way here

2009-12-06T12:58:00.001-08:00

Taco Bell has recently opened a store in a shopping mall in Madrid! It is currently the only Taco Bell in Europe (outside of US military based), but I have heard they plan to open a few more in Spain and then open a couple in England.

I doubt they will ever make it to France. Other than McDonald's and Subway, American fast food has really struggled in France. We got a couple KFCs (one near Lyon), and a handful of Pizza Hut's and Domino's Pizzas, but that's about it. Burger King made a valiant effort to survive in France, but it didn't make it, and Coke has nearly kicked Pepsi out of the country :-(

I've never been much of a fast food fan, and in fact before moving to France I couldn't tell you the last time I ate McDonald's, but I do love Taco Bell (it's cheap, it's vegetarian friendly, they serve Mountain Dew, and it's surprisingly healthy compared to most other fast food), so I would love to see a Taco Bell open up in Lyon.

One can always dream...

Venice

2009-12-06T12:56:00.001-08:00

Venice is the Las Vegas of Italy. Not in the number of casinos or strip clubs, but in that it only exists to attract tourists. While Vegas was created pretty much just for this purpose, Venice has slowly devolved into it. The one time capitol of the Latin Empire (after sacking Constantinople), it is now the capitol of over-priced food and souvenir shops. Don't get me wrong, Venice is cool, it just feels a little like Disneyland.

Venice is a collection of a couple hundred islands in the marshes off the north-eastern Italian coast, connected by bridges over the 100s of canals the city is famous for. There are no motor vehicles on the islands, so all transportation is by boat, gondola, or a new pair of Nikes. The architecture in some parts of the city dates back to the 12th century, and everything is quite well preserved. It is certainly a very picturesque city.

Venice is also dripping in history. Like all European cities, it has an old church or two, but it also has amazingly preserved palaces, ancient hospitals, tons of shops selling masks and clothing from the height of Venetian power, and a remarkable number of concerts and plays for such a small place. George and I caught a really cool show of people in period dress performing music pieces from various Italian operas.

As you have probably also heard, Venice is sinking. Not metaphorically like the USA or Dubai currently are, but actually, literally sinking. Everyday a little bit more water flows into the city during high tide, and they city is always trying to figure out how to prop the city up a bit longer. The main tourist area of Piazza San Marco is actually criss-crossed with elevated walk-ways to keep the footsies dry, and on our trip to check the area out early one morning (right around high-tide), we made use of them ourselves. Even the Saint Mark's Basilica itself was under assault by the rising tides.

Global Warming

The inside of the church is pretty cool too, but for some reason they don't let you take pictures inside of Saint Mark's Basilica, and the couple I sneaked when security wasn't looking didn't turn out so great, so here is a picture of the nearly as cool church next door.

Everyone should definitely visit Venice at least once in their life, probably best before it is underwater. To see more pics of Venezia, click here.

Lily Allen has a potty mouth

2009-12-02T03:13:00.000-08:00

One of the things I like about French TV, other than the nearly complete lack of commercials, is that it is totally uncensored. Movies are shown in their original format, with their original dialog (except when only the French-dubbed version is available), and with their original content and length. In the US, only the expensive pay cable channels like HBO or Showtime show unedited movies, and all the other channels (even the cable channels) edit the movies for language, nudity, sometimes violence, and even to shorten the movie to fit in the designated time slot!

Like French TV, French radio is also not censored, and this song is quite popular. Personally, I am not offended by "bad" words. I do not use them often, but their use doesn't bother me and in fact seem natural in certain situations. But, like most Americans I think, I have been brought up to recognize the taboo of them. A group of construction workers standing around a job site my cuss like sailors, but if an old women or child walks up, they immediately switch to more accepted language. I think I am the same way. Cussing in certain situations just seem weird to me.

Lily Allen is an English pop/alternative singer whose latest single, F*ck You (excuse my French), is quite popular in France (and most of Europe). For the most part the lyrics are very tame, but the oft-repeated chorus contains many uses of the F word. Or more accurately, like most choruses, just repetitions of the same single use of the word (which you can probably guess from the title of the song).

Perhaps the most Surreal example of this for me, was when George and I were in Rome, Italy. It was our last day in Italy and we decided to go to the grocery store to buy some pastas and sauces to take back to France with us. It was a pretty normal grocery store--a few kids, a couple old ladies, and a few other random people picking up the necessities. As we were deciding how much we could stuff in our luggage, Lily Allen's new hit came on the radio, and the middle-aged Italian guy working behind the deli counter was apparently quite the fan. He was humming and dancing and chopping his meat and when the chorus came around, he burst into song--F*ck You. F*ck you very, very muuuuch. The old lady buying meat from him didn't seem to mind.

You can hear the song here--uncensored of course. Or a censored version here.

I should clarify that all French TV shows are rated (like in the US) and shows rated not suitable for children can only be shown after a certain hour, and all TVs/cable boxes have the ability to block certain channels and/or programs. I guess the difference is that the decisions are left to individuals, not enforced by some government agency.

Happy Thanksgiving

2009-11-18T13:12:00.000-08:00

November 14th was Thanksgiving Day in France. Not having any family here in France, George and I decided to celebrate Turkey Day with 100 of our closest friends. Not having 100 friends, we settled for about 15 friends and 85 strangers.

Thanksgiving is not, of course, a French holiday, but it is not, as some people think, a purely American festival either. Thanksgiving is a relatively big holiday in Canada too, complete with a Canadian Football League doubleheader just like the NFL doubleheader we get every Turkey Day in the US. While American Thanksgiving is always on the last Thursday in November, Canadian Thanksgiving is celebrated on the second Monday of October. French Thanksgiving, being celebrated mostly by American and Canadian expats, is therefore celebrated on November 14th (or any available weekend in between the two holidays from the homeland).

Of the 100 people at the dinner, I would say 35-40 where American, 5 or 6 Canadians, 1 Australian, 1 Venezuelan, a couple Chinese people, and the rest French. The food was mostly traditional American food, with a couple french appetizers mixed in for variety, and of course a huge amount of wine (although we did have wine in a box, which always seemed particularly American to me). The food was really good, particularly the sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie, both of which are hard to find in France.

George and I made deviled eggs, which I had always assumed was a very American food. Turns out deviled eggs are actually from Italy, and are not uncommon in France, so to make mine more American, I added some Heinz Sweet Relish that I bought while I was in Hong Kong a few months ago, since relish does not exist in France.

The conversation was good too. We met a few more couples around our age, a few more Americans, and got to discuss the difficulties of watching American sports live in France with all the technical and time-zone related problems that entails.

All in all a good night. After getting lost trying to walk home, George and I ran into one of the couples from the dinner and ending up going out for more drinks and discussions of Michael Jackson lyrics, finding vegetarian food in Lyon, and other important topics.

How American is American?

2009-11-03T11:44:00.000-08:00

Is this guy American?

The headlines all read "The first American to win the New York Marathon in 27 years" as Californian Meb Keflezighi crossed the finish line 41 seconds before Robert Cheruiyot of Kenya. Americans applauded, newspapers lauded, and sports pundits and internet bloggers assaulted. Mebrahtom Keflezighi?!?! That doesn't sound American. He's just another African import wearing an American jersey--not a real American.

Meb Keflezighi was not born in the US, but he moved to this country 22 years ago when he was 12. He trained at US high schools and ran track at UCLA and has competed for the US in numerous international events. He has never competed for another country, and has lived the majority of his life in the US.

How American does one have to be to be American? The last American to win the New York marathon was actually born in Cuba and moved to the US when he was 2. He was never accused of not being American enough, but that was before we had the internet and the ego-inspiring, argument-inducing power of anonymity.

Our last republican candidate for president, John McCain, wasn't even born in the US, although both of his parents were. And, of course, we all know Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

Our 7th president, Andrew Jackson, was born in the US, but only 2 years after his parents immigrated to America from Ireland. Neither of his siblings were born in the US either.

My wife was born in Hong Kong, but spent less than half of her life there. She is an American citizen, and if anyone asks where she is from, or what her nationality is, she replies American. She never thought much about it until we were recently invited to a Thanksgiving dinner celebration here in Lyon, and the French organizers asked her to cook some traditional American Thanksgiving food. She replied in shock "I'm not really American" and promptly asked me to cook something American for her.

How American are you?

Milan

2009-11-01T07:56:00.000-08:00

The Milan metro area is home to over 7 million people, making it the largest metro area in Italy, and one of the largest in all of Europe. Over 6 times the size of my current home of Lyon it certainly feels like a much bigger city, and as the Italian center of finance, business, and fashion it offers many options for entertainment, museums, and most importantly, food!

I didn't know much about Milan before going there other than Leonardo da Vinci spent a lot of time there, and it is home to one of the largest cathedrals in the world--the Duomo di Milano.

George at the Duomo
I like French food, but I love Italian food. Growing up my mom used to cook me lasagna for every birthday, and Italian approximates of spaghetti-ohs and fast food pizza are a staple of every American diet. So as mentioned above, one of the things I was most looking forward to in traveling to Italy was Italian food. We ate nothing but Italian food while in Italy (although we were tempted by a Mexican place) and it was, with only one exception, amazing. One of the best things about Italian food is, unlike French food, the Italians do not think you have to put meat in every meal to make it good. Only one of the meals I ate in Italy had meat in it and you have plenty of vegetarian options at every restaurant.

One area of the culinary arts where the French definitely rule though is desserts. Desserts in Italy are kinda blah, and desserts in France are like heaven (or maybe hell, since they are so yummy and so not healthy :-)

Good advice

Although not super important as a tourist only in town for a few days, another cool thing about Milan is that it is super bike friendly. Bike lanes where everywhere, usually well separated from the main road to protect you from the insane, Evil Knievel-inspired scooter drivers, and like Lyon Milan has a city-wide bike rental system. Since we were only in town for 2 and a half days though, we skipped the bike and just hopped on the slightly confusing, but rather cheap and efficient metro system.

The man that made Dan Brown a millionaire

Leonardo di Vinci was born further south in Florence, but he spent much of his younger years in Milan almost inventing lots of things that almost worked and painting one of his most famous works, the Last Supper. We visited the science museum which housed many of his scientific works, but unfortunately there is a 2 month waiting list to see the Last Supper, so we settled for a post card of it from the pretty cool church next door.

The Last Supper is in the little yellow building next to this church

After getting my da Vinci fix, we headed over to the second coolest thing in Milan, the Duomo di Milano. By far the most impressive church I have ever been to, the building is absolutely amazing and contains an equally amazing art collection. Access to the roof gets you a close up view of the intricate details of the arches and spires, and one of the best views of the city of Milan.

The Catholics sure make some impressive churches

Milan was also a very green city (vegetation wise) with plenty of parks, and trees, bushes, and grass everywhere. One of my biggest complaints about Lyon is the lack of green, and in Milan it seems to be a very important aspect of city planning and judging by the age and height of many of the trees it has been for quite a while.

Tranquility

There are still many new places I want to visit in Europe, but I have to add Milan to my list of places definitely worth another visit. For all the pics we took in Milan, clicca qui

Goosebumps

2009-10-11T12:30:00.000-07:00

Goosebumps are a physiological response to an uncomfortable situation. Tiny muscles at the base of hair follicles tighten, forcing the hairs to stand upright, and the follicle to bulge slightly producing the bumpy look. This reflex doesn't provide any noticeable benefits to modern humans, but perhaps at sometime in our past we had more hair and tensing our hair muscles made us look bigger or provided better insulation against injury or cold. All animals with hair can get goosebumps, but it is perhaps more noticeable in animals with feathers, like geese (hence the name goosebumps).

Goosebumps are perhaps most well known as a responsive to fear, and as such have lent their name to an extremely successful series of children's books by author R.L. Stine.

I'm pretty sure I never read any of these books growing up, but I have seen a few of the TV adaptions. I normally don't make a habit of reading children's books, but I have found them to be an useful tool when learning foreign languages. When trying to improve my Spanish, I read Isabel Allende's Las memorias del Águila y el Jaguar series, as well Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal, and now in attempting to improve my French, I have turned to Monsieur Stine's Chair de Poule series.

Goosebumps are also called goose flesh in English, and in French they are called chicken flesh, or more accurately hen flesh, chair de poule. Having never read the English versions, I cannot make any comparisons, but the few that I have read in French are quite entertaining. And more importantly they are short (120 page small paperbacks on average), and do not use overcomplicated language or slang.

I've tried to read more "mature" books in French, but that usually ends up being more frustrating than entertaining or educational, especially given my recent preference for authors like William Gibson, Khaled Hosseini, Dan Brown, and Cormack McCarthy. It's very frustrating to read, extremely slowly, through many chapters of a book and then realize you must have horribly misunderstood something earlier because nothing is making much sense anymore, so I've resigned myself to children's books for the time being, and the Goosebumps series was the first I came across in the Library.

Public book readings are still common here, authors are treated with much respect, there are more bookstores per capita than most cities I have been too, and the libraries are always packed. They even have a TV show here that is just a host (usually a beautiful woman) reading for hours, so the French probably rank quite high in any "literary" rankings.

I do a lot of reading at the park, on the subway, or in other public areas, so a grown man reading Goosebumps books solicits quite a few strange looks here. I think maybe I should make excuses like "I am just reading them so I can discuss them with my kids" or lying that I am an aspiring children's book author myself, but in the end I just kinda smile meekly and bury my head in my book. Maybe after a few more Goosebumps books I will speak French well enough to pull of the aspiring author lie.

Busy, busy, busy

2009-10-04T02:59:00.000-07:00

September turned out to me an extremely busy month for me. Work, health, family, obligations, blah--sometimes these things get all clogged up and you just have to slog thru the cleanup (and my propensity for procrastination certainly doesn't help).

As mentioned earlier, the video game industry is very milestone driven, so once per month you up the effort a bit to polish off a demo for the suits to guarantee the next paycheck. As you progress further in development the expectations and requirements for these demos become higher, and depending on how good you are at scheduling, your work efforts might also increase.

We've done a pretty good job of scheduling our project, with the minor oversight of the ridiculous amount of vacation you get in France (and by ridiculous, I mean awesome). By French law everyone is guaranteed 5 weeks of vacation per year, which accrues at a rate of just over 2 days per month. This works pretty much like the vacation you get in the US, you can save up a certain amount, and you use it whenever you want.

At Arkane we also have extra vacation (called RTT--Réduction du temps de travail) which is essentially compensation vacation since we work 39 hour work weeks instead of the standard 35 hours. This means every employee also banks an additional 4 hours per week of time off, or 22 days per year. These days are granted in November, and must be used by the end of the next November or they expire and you do not get paid for them. That expiration date is just under 2 months away, and nearly every member of the team still has 10+ days to take, and some have more then 15! Work has agreed to buy some of them back to prevent the entire team taking the next month off, but still we had to account for this time off in the planning.

Btw, I accounted for my time off by planning a trip to Italy next week :-)

So work got a little hectic for a bit, but in the end everything got worked out, and we didn't kill ourselves too much. Just as the work situation resolved itself, however, I received a friendly mail from the French government reminding me that I live in France, and when you live in France you are supposed to pay taxes in France.

I only lived in France for 7 weeks last year, and I did actually pay taxes on my income, but I paid it to the US government (boo). The US government requires its citizens to pay taxes on their world-wide income, regardless of where they happen to live or earn it, so even in France I have to report and pay taxes in the US. There are tax treaties between the US and France to prevent double taxation, so mostly what this means is that I just have to fill out a bunch of extra paper work clarifying who I pay what, and my US taxes this year were a whopping 42 pages of forms and addenda that I almost certainly didn't fill out correctly, so I was pretty scared about going thru the same nightmare in France (and more to the point, in French).

Turns out the French tax forms are much simpler than the US. 4 pages, most of which I got to leave blank, and just one addendum where I apologize for being a stupid foreigner who didn't know any better, and I eagerly await their response on whether or not I owe any penalties or if they will kick me out of the country.

September was also the time for catching up on my health issues. After squinting at my monitor at work for the past 3 months, I finally got around to getting an eye exam and ordering new glasses. The doc told me my eyes looked fine, and just that my prescription had worsened a bit and sent me off to the eye glasses shop to pick up some new spectacles.

I visited a bunch of eye glass shops looking for the best deal, but eventually settled for a shop near my house with a mediocre deal because the salesman was extremely helpful, explained everything thoroughly (in English even), and provided probably the best service I have had in France. I found the frames I liked (Armani frames to go with all my Armani suits), paid my 50 bucks (after insurance) and came back in a week to pick them up. Everything was going great until I put them on and felt like I was going to pass out.

I tried them for a few days hoping I just needed to get used to them, but after a bit it was clear that something was wrong. I returned to the shop to get them fixed, and the salesman broke out his own machine for testing your vision and found the prescription provided by my ophthalmologist to be way off, so some new lenses were ordered and I am still squinting as I type this sentence, but I will hopefully be able to see clearly by mid next week.

If you are in Lyon and need new glasses, go to Lynx and ask for Mr. Helfre.

To reward me for my busy week though, Lyon provided the best weekend weather we have had in a while. It was absolutely gorgeous yesterday so George and I went for a walk around the Croix-Rousse area of Lyon and found a really cool old Church we had never been too with this kinda creepy statue of the pope kneeling over a human skull.

Pérouges

2009-09-06T11:50:00.000-07:00

Pérouges is an ancient walled city about 20 miles outside of Lyon. Originally founded by Italians about 900 years ago, it became part of France in the 1600's and hasn't changed much since. The walls are still mostly intact, and the buildings and streets are all stone and tile.

George and I had been here before. A few months ago we were invited here by some friends to attend a Tibetan music concert, but the concert was late and we didn't have much time to look around. What little we did see though was cool, so we knew we would have to come back--but certainly not for the next Tibetan music concert. We essentially just paid 20 euros to listen to 4 white guys hum for an hour, and then a Tibetan guy yelled at us and occasionally played a drum for the remaining hour. The 4 hummers had me struggling to stay awake though, so the drum banging, yelling guy was a welcome change.

The rooftops of Pérouges

Pérouges isn't a very big place--6 or 7 restaurants, 2 hotels, a handful of souvenir shops, and a couple hundred residential buildings. Only about 1,000 people live there, although I think the number of people in the village trebles each day (especially on weekends) with tourists. There is one slightly interesting museum and a couple awesome restaurants, but other than that you just walk around and marvel at the outstanding picturesque buildings and roadways. We got there super early to take lots of pictures before the tourist buses started dropping people off, and then hit the museum and George's favorite restaurant (favorite, because we have been there twice now!).

George waiting for her favorite restaurant to open

After lunch we enjoyed a couple pieces of Pérouges' famous Galette de Pérouges, a sweet, slightly pizza-ish dish which mostly tastes like sugar with a splash of lemon. I like it, especially when it is served hot, but to be honest I think there are a lot better pastries to be had in France.

For more pictures of Pérouges, click here. I'll leave you with this typical shot of small town France.

Geneva

2009-08-29T10:22:00.000-07:00

In our never-ending quest to not spend a weekend at home, George and I took a day trip to Geneva, Switzerland this last Saturday. By train Geneva is only about 2 hours and 30 euros from Lyon, and hotels in the city are quite expensive, so we just decided on an early train in and a late train out. Geneva is not a very big city, but like London, all of its museums are free, so depending on what you want to do in the city, 1 day may not be enough. I would have liked to have more time to see more of the museums myself.

One of the many cool museums of Geneva

Geneva doesn't look all that different from most french cities. It has a small, ancient cobble-stoned picturesque city center surrounded by a slightly newer business and residential areas, all perched on the banks of Lake Geneva. Despite being one of the cities on the forefront of the protestant christian movements of the 1500s, it even still has the obligatory French catholic cathedral on a hill looking over the city.

Even though Geneva is a very French city in terms of architecture, language, and cuisine, it is also an extremely international city. Over half of the 500,000 residents hold foreign passports, and due to the presence of so many international organizations, there are even more temporary foreign residents to add to the international mix. I think Spanish was the language we heard the most on the streets, and English, Chinese, German and Italian were all common as well. And most importantly, the had reasonably priced Dr. Pepper and Pop-Tarts, and totally unreasonably priced, but very good Chinese food.

Geneva is a very expensive city. Some things, like soda, ice cream and most groceries were a bit cheaper than Lyon, but pretty much every thing else was quite a bit more. Restaurants are extremely expensive, and public transportation is expensive by French standards. Thumbing thru the real estate mags at the bus stop, I found real estate to be a bit high too. The Swiss pay less taxes than the French do though, so maybe it all evens out.

Geneva is also home to the European headquarters of the United Nations, and has been since its founding in 1945, which is quite strange considering that Switzerland didn't even join the UN until 2002. I suppose the UN guys just didn't want to waste all those empty League of Nations buildings, and the views of Lake Geneva probably contributed to the decision as well.

Entrance to the UN building

It's kind of hard to see in the picture above, but one of the chair legs has been broken off rather violently. This isn't just some expression of angst in modern art, but a symbol of the devastation that landmines are causing around the world--violently destroying a limb (or limbs) of about 50 people per day. Landmines are one of the most horrible devices man has ever created. They cost less than $10 to make, but absolutely destroy the lives of way too many people around the world, and countless livestock, pets, and wild animals. Landmines aren't actually designed to kill, but to maim. Killing the enemy is too easy, the enemy just buries their dead and moves on, but severely wounding the enemy affects the entire group--demoralizing the survivors, and slowing them down as they now need to care for a severely injured comrade. Despite this, about 50% of the people wounded by landmines die of their wounds, because landmines mostly plague the poorest countries which are the least equipped to deal with them.

There is simply no excuse for the continued use of landmines. All countries should sign the ban put forth by the international community in Ottawa. Over 150 nations have signed this treaty, but unfortunately the largest manufacturers and users of landmines refuse to sign. If you live in the USA, China, Russia, or India, please petition your government to sign this treaty and stop using these nightmarish devices.

For more pictures of Geneva (and less preaching), click here.

Bicycle Love

2009-08-18T12:27:00.000-07:00

Velov is a portmanteau of the french word velo (bicycle) and the english word love (love), and is the name of a joint venture of the city of Lyon and a french advertising company to provide low cost bicycle rental service throughout the city and many of its suburbs. The city provides free space to park the bikes and some free advertising space as well, and the advertising company provides the bikes and maintenance and rental services for just enough cost to cover their expenses. I think it works quite well, and it is very popular in Lyon.

To use the bikes you have to purchase a membership card, and then you can rent a bike anytime you want just by swiping your card in front of a card reader at all of the bike rental spots. The membership costs 1 euro for a day, or 15 euros for an entire year, and there are weekly or monthly options as well. Once you have a membership, you can borrow a bike for up to 30 minutes for free, and then pay a fee of about 75 cents per half hour after that. I can bike from my house to work in 12 minutes, and in fact I can bike all the way across town in just about 30, so for most people the bike rentals are free once you have the membership.

This weekend I was able to convince George to take a bike out with me, and we rode out to the Lyon suburb of Villeurbanne, to check out some more of the interesting architecture of Tony Garnier (who I wrote a brief bit about earlier in this post).

When these buildings where built in the 1930s, they were the tallest buildings in Villeurbanne, and the neighborhood is still known as Gratte-Ciel (skyscraper) because of this. Real skyscrapers are actually extremely rare in France--the city of Seattle, Washington has more of them than the entire country of France--so I guess the name hasn't lost much of its significance since then.

The area is very well planned. Large streets, with wide sidewalks lined with many trees for shade, and plenty of cafés and restaurants with outdoor seating for enjoying the nice summer weather. This street is also home to one of only two Starbucks in the Lyon area, and one of only a handful of Subway restaurants (although new Subways seem to be popping up all over the city now). The presence of these two restaurants is a big plus too, not because I am a huge fan of either (I don't even drink coffee), but because this was a sunday in August which means that nearly all of the french restaurants were closed, and the nice summer weather I mentioned above was a lie because it was about 94 degrees and humid, and American franchises all have great air conditioning systems

The neighborhood is also extremely white. All of the buildings are plane white with no color other than whatever flowers decorate the many balconies. It is also extremely clean, which is pretty rare for 80 year old white buildings. My friend Jouan at work calls it the communist quarter of Lyon, not because they have universal healthcare and good public transportation, but because everything is so orderly, utilitarian, plain, and white.

I liked the area, although I think it is a bit too far out from the things I want to be close to (work, mexican food, the store that sells dr. pepper, etc.), but like I said earlier, Lyon is not that big of a place, and this is only 3 more subway stops past my house, or an additional 15 minutes on the rental bikes.

I'm ready for some (American) football

2009-08-10T14:11:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year again. Teams have been in the camps for a few weeks, and the preseason games are starting. (American) Football is not that popular in France, so of the 8 sports channels I already have, none show any football (other than the superbowl), so when football season starts up, I call my cable company and add the "Full Sports" package, which includes ESPN America, to get my football fix.

My cable company is one of the most expensive cable companies in France, but it is also the only company that carries ESPN America, so they got my business. My cable bill will go up by 6 Euros per month (about 8 bucks), but I get another soccer channel, another soccer channel, a soccer channel devoted to the local Lyon team, another one for the local Marseille team, an extreme sports channel, and ESPN America.

ESPN America is not quite the same as the ESPN channel that you get in America. In fact the name ESPN America is quite nonsensical to me, shouldn't it be ESPN France?

The bad things about ESPN America are:

1.) No version in HD. Sports, and football in particular, were the whole reason I bought an HDTV in the US, and paid extra for the HD channels. ESPN America is only available in low-def.
2.) No NBA games. The NBA rights are owned by French channel Canal+, which costs about 30 bucks per month, and only shows a couple games per week, usually after midnight (live).
3.) No Sportscenter! Sportscenter is what made ESPN ESPN. Probably due to the lack of NBA rights mentioned above, but not having sportscenter is a big let down :-(

The good things are:

1.) No soccer. Probably because the 14 sports channels I now have that show soccer, and of course the big games come on one of the main public channels too, ESPN here doesn't bother to show any soccer. or tennis. I like soccer, and tennis, but I want my ESPN to focus on the sports the french channels do not cover.
2.) Lots of NHL. ESPN in the US doesn't cover NHL anymore, you have to get the Outdoor Life Channel (now Versus). OLC/Versus is not a bad channel, but it was not available on all cable companies in the US. ESPN here shows a lot of NHL broadcasts, including Hockey Night in Canada.
3.) More sports. We don't have Sportscenter, but we do have Mike & Mike and Pardon the Interruption in the morning, and in the evening we have NFL Live and Baseball tonight and shows like that. Outside of those shows in the morning and evening, all of the other programming is sports!
4.) Very few commercials! Like all channels in France, commercials are rare. If you are staying up late to catch games live (6 hour time difference with the East Coast) then you get the same broadcast as the US, with all the lovely commercials, but if you are watching the taped rebroadcast, all the commercials are stripped. You get to cram more sports into the same amount of time.

I just got thru watching the rebroadcast of the Hall of Fame game (the first game of the preseason), and I watched it in a little less than 2 hours (compared to 3 live), and in case you missed it, here is the best play of that game.

France is on vacation

2009-08-03T05:23:00.000-07:00

Listening to the news this morning, the anchor said that 15 million frenchmen/women took to the roads and rails this weekend to start their summer vacations. They were joining 5-10 million of their fellow countrymen already on vacation, and will be joined by another 5 to 10 million next weekend. All togehter I would say that about half of the population in France will be on vacation this month.

We get alot of vacation in France. The government mandated minimum is 5 weeks, and most people probably get more than that. I get 6 weeks of vacation that I can take whenever I want, plus another 4 weeks of holidays and compensation for working more than 35 hours per week, and this amount of time off is not uncommon in France.

Apparently the French hate August--at least those who do not live in the mountains or on the coast. Everyone is gone. And not just 1-week of vacation gone, gone for the entire month. My inbox at work is full of "I'll be back on August 27th" emails from all the people leaving on vacation this week, and everyone has been asking me when I plan to take my summer vacation. Half of the restaurants near my work are closed (for the month), and even the library and post office is taking time off. I am in desperate need of some new eye glasses, but couldn't get an appointment until mid september (which I made in mid July) because all of the opthomologists are working on their tans.

Except for having to deal with all the closed shops and restos, I think this is a good time to be in Lyon. The sidewalks are less crowded, I'm almost guaranteed a seat on the metro, and if I had a car I am sure I would be happily chatting about the lack of traffic this morning. George and I saw Up in 3D on opening night, in the only theatre in Lyon showing the movie in English, and the theatre, which is normally packed, was 3/4ths empty. Restaurants, the ones that remain open, are less likely to require reservations now. And I was able to sit in the park by my house and read this weekend without getting hit by a rogue soccer ball.

I think I will continue to not take vacation in August.

Late night dinners

2009-08-02T13:10:00.000-07:00

The video games industry is plagued by periods of crunch time--necessary overtime to make sure what needs to get done gets done. Games-in-development live a very precarious life and constantly need to prove their worth to their increasingly ~~fickle~~ frugal publishers, so from time to time we put in the long hours to make sure we have something impressive for the guys that pay the bills. And, of course, at some time you need to finish this game so the publishers can make all that money they gave you back.

I've worked for some companies that seemed to never stop crunching and others that seemed to manage these milestones better and work more reasonable hours. So far my stay in the land of the 35 hour work week has been relatively crunch free, but we recently had a few technical difficulties that led to late nights last week to (mostly) get things done.

Companies can ask (or force) you to work late, but they certainly cannot ask you to skip dinner, so when the late nights come a calling, the calls go out for Late night dinners.

Late night dinners in France are surprisingly similar to those in the states. First night we had burgers and friend chicken, or at least the menu had burgers and friend chicken, what we got was pretty much inedible. The burgers looked like they were made of plastic, and apparently had the consistency of play-doh. The fries looked like fries, but were cold and pretty much swished to a pulpy potato mess when you squeeze them too hard (like trying to pick them up), and the fried chicken still had feathers.

That's supposed to be bacon

Every piece had these weird thick hair/feather things sticking off it

The rest of the week's dinners were better. Tuesday night was Chinese food from a local place called Mendo's that has pretty good main dishes, but generally over-priced, over-salted, and under-tasty appetizers. Wednesday was pizza, and well, pizza is pizza (although the french are fond of putting raw eggs on top of their pizzas which might be a little weird for some Americans. Hi Dad!). Thursday was Indian, and I loves me some Indian food, and Friday I didn't work too late, so I just had a PB&J sandwich when I got home.

Click the crappy cell-phone pictures for bigger versions.

A jolly good time in London

2009-07-19T11:28:00.001-07:00

George Washington, this guy is pretty popular in England

This last weekend, George and I took a quick trip to London and Cambridge to eat Dim Sum, Malaysian food, good Chinese noodles, (actually decent) Mexican food, BBQ and corn bread, vegetarian food, pop-tarts, starburst candies and drink Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper. Oh, and we saw some cool sights too.

London is probably the most international city in Europe (if not the world). Only about half the population are people of British decent, another 10% or so are other Western Europeans, and the remaining 40% are mostly of Asian decent--Indian and Pakistanis being the largest groups, followed by Chinese, Malaysian, other south east Asians, and apparently at least a couple of Americans and Mexicans.

Lyon is about 90% French, 7% Middle Eastern or North African, and about 3% other.

The huge diversity of the population of London leads to a huge diversity in the food choices (amongst other things, but I was just interested in food). Most of the things I mentioned above simply cannot be found in Lyon, and the few that can are pretty expensive, so our trip to London was heavily focused on food. We ate 4 meals a day, snacked non-stop, and even brought some stuff back with us. I'm sure I gained 10 lbs.

We also did a little shopping while we were up there. London is an extremely expensive place, but the exchange rate lately has been very favorable for the Euro so things didn't seem too expensive, and London had pretty much everything on sale. We bought 15 books for about 20 pounds ($30), bought a little clothing, and tried to buy shoes, but my size 10.5 feet are incredibly common, and everything I liked was not available in my size :-(

Oh, and shops stay open past 8 in London!!! Grocery store stay open until 11 or even midnight!!! And they are even open on Sunday!!!!!!!

We did go sight-seeing too. London is probably not as architecturally stimulating as Lyon, but it still has some really cool buildings.

Westminster Abbey and some cool building next to it.

We visited Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, the Parliament building, the London Eye, The Tower of London, the Tower Bridge, and most everything in between. When we were not eating (and sometimes even when we were eating), we were walking around checking out all the sights, or sitting in the incredibly hot, incredibly expensive subway system waiting to get to the next cool stop.

Short diatribe about the London Tube. The Tube is the subway system of London and it does a pretty good job of getting you around town, and even goes out to Heathrow airport to make it easy to get into the city. It's relatively fast, and there are lots of lines. It is also extremely crowded and not air-conditioned. With London's climate you would think the lack of AC wouldn't be much of a problem, but it never got above 75 when we were there, and it was still miserable in the subway system. Packed shoulder to shoulder in 90 degree heat is not a fun ride.

But it gets you were you need to be. And is only about 3 times as expensive as the Lyon metro system.

To make up for the extremely uncomfortable and expensive Subway system, London has made all of their museums free. And their museums are AMAZING! We only had time to visit an art museum (there are lots) and the Charles Darwin Museum of Natural History and they were both very cool. Being the nerd that I am, I liked the Natural History Museum more, but the art museum was cool too.

George is Art

You can spend a whole day in each of these museums, but you are not allowed to eat in there, so we could only spend a half a day at most. And before leaving the art museum we did walk past a piece of art that made us both very sad.

I miss my dog

After eating some Indian food, we decided to head over to the coolest bridge in the world. The Golden Gate Bridge or Brooklyn Bridge might be bigger, and some of the Roman Bridges of antiquity are more technically impressive (given the date of their construction), but the Tower Bridge in London is just cool. Viewing it from the side of the river it looks really cool. Walking across it is really cool, paying 14 pounds (21 bucks, for 2 people) to walk up 800 stairs to the top and watch a really short video about how it was created is not so cool. If you are reading my blog Tower Bridge people, your bridge is worth 8 pounds tops!

We spent 4 days hanging out in London and took one day to take the train up to Cambridge. Cambridge is a much smaller city than London, about 60 miles up the road famous for its universities (collectively named Cambridge University). The had very interesting architecture, lots of churches, and of course all the colleges of Cambridge.

King's College

I highly recommend a trip to London. It's a really cool city. For more pics, check out this.

Happy 4th of July

2009-07-04T13:37:00.001-07:00

It was pretty hot in Lyon today, so to celebrate the birth of our homeland, George and I watched Transformers 2, shopped for flip flops, and ate fried ice cream with a sparkler on top--all indoor, air-conditioned activities.

Happy 4th everyone!

This week in entertainment

2009-06-27T10:21:00.000-07:00

Friday night after work I was craving some Mexican food so George and I headed over to El Sombrero for some fajitas and burritos. El Sombrero is not as good as Mexico Lindo (which I blogged about earlier), but it was still pretty good and had a larger selection of food.

While waiting at the counter to pay, I noticed a flyer for Les Invites de Villeurbanne, a music/theater/general entertainment festival in the Lyon suburb of Villeurbanne. Flipping thru the flyer, two things caught my eye. First, Fishbone was playing tomorrow, and second it was free! I love Fishbone, and I love free too so I knew what I would be doing Saturday night.

George and I had already had plans to see Coraline Saturday and we had other errands to run, so we got up early for the matinée showing. Coraline is Henry Selick's (the guy that did the nightmare before christmas) adaption of the Neil Gaiman novel, and as you might expect (if you are a nerd that likes graphic novels and stop motion animation) Henry Selick + Neil Gaiman = awesome. I really liked the movie and it was a great start our busy Saturday.

After the movie we had planned to get a little lunch, return some books to the library, buy some groceries, and go home a get cleaned up before meeting a friend for dinner and the Fishbone concert. Upon leaving the cinéma, however, we were greeted by thousands of provocatively dressed men and women marching thru soap bubbles to the beat of slightly too loud techno music. The Gay & Lesbian community of Lyon was parading their pride, and extremely tan buttocks, thru the neighborhood.

Nothing says Gay Pride like speedos and soap bubbles

After losing an hour enjoying the parade, we ran most of our errands and got cleaned up to meet my friend Michel for dinner at an awesome French restaurant near our house called Olivier's. I highly recommend Olivier's to anyone wanting great, and reasonably priced, french food in Lyon.

After dinner we wandered towards the Square de la Doua in Villeurbanne to catch the music. According to google maps it is only about a mile from my house, and after a couple wrong turns and two miles of wandering around, we heard the music and finally ended up there. The place was pretty packed and The Sweet Vandals from Madrid, Spain were just starting their gig. If you like Fishbone, you would probably dig The Sweet Vandals too.

All the walking around trying to find this place made me thristy, so I headed over to the beer tent to grab a beverage. In effort to reduce the massive amounts of trash, mostly empty plastic cups, generated at concerts, the organizers of this event decided not use disposable cups at all. To get a beer, you rented a hard plastic cup for 1 Euro and could refill it as much as you wanted for 2 euros per fill-up. At the end of the evening you returned the cup for your 1 euro, and the amount of trash generated was surely reduced. Bravo Villeurbanne.

Fishbone with Annette Funicello in the movie Back to the Beach

Fishbone was one of my favorite bands growing up. The band was formed in 1979 (I was 3 years old), and although only two of the original members remain those two are the lead singer (and lead saxophonist) and lead guitarist, so the music still sounds the same and still rocks. Like in the video above, the lead singer still jumps around on stage and acts a fool the entire show, despite being close to 50 by now. If you have never listened to Fishbone, you should.

The concert ended pretty late, so Sunday was a lazy day for George and I. We just laid around the park across the street from our house (Parc de la Tête d'Or) and read books and people watched.

Tuesday I had a date with some friends to see another concert in Lyon, a Japanese Drum show up in the old Roman Amphitheater on the hill overlooking the city. Unlike the Fishbone show, this one was far from free (33 Euros!) but it sounded interesting and I have wanted to see a concert in the old Roman Amphitheater since we visited Lyon 2 years ago.

George is not much of a fan of eclectic world music, and after paying 20 euros to watch a bunch of guys hum for an hour at a supposedly "Tibetan" music concert a couple weeks earlier, she decided to sit this one out.

This is where the concert was held. Look comfy?

The concert was very good. It mostly consisted of about 10 guys playing japanese drums of various sizes, but it also included dancing, a little singing, and more humor that I had expected. It was better than I thought it would be, and attending a concert in a 2000 year old ruin is pretty cool too. The ambiance was great, the acoustics were surprising good, and it is just cool to know that 2 millennia ago some Roman citizens sat here and watched gladiators fight lions or something. Sitting for 2 hours on 2000 year old stone seats, however, is pretty much exactly as you expect it to be. It was cramped, uncomfortable, and there was hardly any room to walk between the rows of seated people. The vendors did sell only Pepsi at this show though, and there is exactly one restaurant in Lyon (in a suburb of Lyon actually) that offers Pepsi, KFC, so the choice of beverage was a nice departure from the Coke dictatorship of Lyon.

Wednesday I had a date with the boss. The guy that runs the company I work for has been working in the Austin office for a couple years now, but he comes to the French office every now and then. Dinner tonight was Tunisian food. I had never had Tunisian food, but it was surprisingly non-exotic--a plate of couscous (rice) a plate of grilled meat (I had chicken) and a shared pot of vegetable stew to pour on the rice and meat. It was very good.

After dinner we went down to les berges for a drink. The river front of Lyon used to be covered with parking lots, but about 4 years ago they started removing the parking spaces and adding bike trails, benches, and open spaces and there are a lot of barge style boats tied up to the sides of the river that now serve as bars and restaurants. It is a very popular spot in Lyon, and when I left at midnight there were still many people there.

Thursday and Friday were pretty normal working days, and Saturday is going to be our normal errand running and movie watching day. We are going to meet a couple friends to watch the new Russell Crowe movie State of Play.

Tomorrow we are heading back to Île Barbe for a Salsa Festival. Ima teach George to shake it!

Next week will likely not be as eventful as this one. In our effort to experience and learn more about France, we are having dinner with a stranger Tuesday. We signed up for something called Lyon International which pairs newly arrived foreigners with Lyonnaise locals for dinner and/or other activities.

We've been keeping very busy here. Weekend trips to medieval cities, weeknight dinners with strange french people, joining local groups for welcoming foreigners, concerts, theater, etc. With the exception of the movie tickets, the concert in the Roman ruins, and the travel expenses, all of this has been free! Some people might think it wasteful or at least weird to have their tax dollars go to things such as this, but I think cultural enrichment and entertainment is a fine use of tax dollars.

Carcassonne

2009-06-19T15:30:00.001-07:00

Cité de Carcassonne
Carcassonne is located about 450 kilometers south-west of Lyon, equidistant from the Mediterranean Sea and the Spanish border. The city was founded about 100 years before the birth of Christ, but the castle wasn't build until about 500 years after that. Over the years, more structures were built and existing structures rebuilt, but much of the original 1600 year old stonework remains (The Romans built stuff to last).

In the early 1800s Napolean declared that the fortifications of Carcassonne were no longer necessary for French national defense, and the walls which were already in a state of disrepair started to crumble and collapse. Towards the end of the 1800s though, city officials (and famous architects) convinced the government that the city was worth preserving, and they are still preserving it today.

It's not easy keeping thousand year old walls standing

The city is mostly a tourist attraction today, but it's not simply a large museum or park. People still live inside the city, shops still sell goods inside the city, and restaurants aplenty still rip off tourists with overpriced mediocre food.

shops in the city

Carcassonne is named after the Lady Carcass who saved the city from the armies of Charlemagne by throwing a fat pig over the wall at him. I've been to Caen up in Normandy as well and visited Charlemagne's old castle and it doesn't hold a candle to Lady's Carcass' pad, so I can understand why he wanted it.

Charlemagne's lame castle in Caen, Normandy

I don't really understand why throwing a fat pig at him scared him off, but it must have worked, because Carcassonne has a statue to commemorate Madame Carcass' sacrifice for their city, and there are numerous paintings and carvings of a woman throwing a pig throughout the city.

Lady Carcass

Like most medieval cities, Carcassonne was big on burning witches, guillotining people, and other forms of extreme punishment and torture. They even have a museum devoted to instruments of torture with some humorous items like the iron mask thingy designed for women who talk to much, or the modified handcuffs designed to punish poor musicians. However, most of the items are right out of horrible nightmares or Eli Roth movies and it is really hard to believe that people really used these items on other people--especially people who considered themselves Christians.

The ironically named Pope Innocent IV signed the order giving the church permission to use torture during the inquisition in order to get confessions of evil-doing out of suspected witches or warlocks. This wasn't Dick Cheney level waterboarding torture either, this was the real deal with hot sharp metal things and ropes and stretching and poking and burning. The pope had also decided that if a suspect could withstand the torture without confessing then he must be pronounced innocent, so the church was crafty enough to ensure that withstanding the torture resulted in the inability to flaunt your innocence (death) and question the infallibility of the church. Oddly enough most of the torture procedures required the suspect to be naked. Also quite odd was that most of the suspects were women. I just happened to have a women with me, and an available torture device, so I decided to give it a go (sans nudity).

The Pope told me I could

George, of course, questioned my desire to torture her further saying, and I quote, "Living with you is torture enough." We'll be married 13 years this July and she still loves me.

These days there is an even larger city of Carcassonne outside the walls of the old city of Carcassonne, but unfortunately I didn't have time to go down there and check it out. Something for next time I guess.

More picture of Carcassonne here

The Pirate Party

2009-06-18T12:06:00.000-07:00

In the United States we pretty much have 2.5 political parties--the Republicans, their nearly identical twins the Democrats, and the non-Democrats or Republicans who usually can't manage to get more than 2 or 3% of the vote despite being the only people who are really trying to change the status quo.

In Europe they have lots of political parties, and even though many countries are also dominated by a few big ones and "coalition" governments of like minded parties, they have much more variety in the political options than Americans. Sweden, for example, has 7 parties represented in their parliament, and 4 more large parties represented in other ares of government (11 political parties!).

According to recent polls the Pirate Party is now the third largest party in Sweden, and they even won 2 seats (out of 736) in the recent European Parliament elections. The US probably has a Pirate Party too, and they have other humorously named political parties like the Marijuana Party or the Blue Enigma Party (humorously named in that a party with such a name could never get mainstream support in the US), but the Pirate Party is a for real party in Sweden, and gaining popularity in other parts of Europe as well.

Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about European politics, and the above (probably incorrect) summary was just an introduction into the rant below.

The Pirate Party is all about copyright and intellectual property law reform, and they used to run a website to help people "share" movies and music on the internet. I have never thought much about piracy, except when trying to finish the PC versions of our games at work and the publisher makes us include some horrible copyright protection software. I get my books and movies from the library and buy my CDs and games. I'm pretty thrifty in general, so I don't buy enough to be put off by the prices, and besides I generally think the entertainment these products provide are worth the cost.

And then I moved to France.

Games, movies and CDs in France are nearly twice as much as they are in the US. They also usually come out--games and movies at least--much later in France than they do in the US, if they come out here at all. And when they do come out here, they come out with this horrible little piece of technology called a Region Lock!

Games and movies sold in Europe only work on game consoles and movie players sold in Europe! I moved to France with my US bought computer and my US version Xbox 360. Both of these pieces of hardware work perfectly fine in France as long as you play US bought movies and games on them. If you want to play a french movie or game you must buy the appropriate french hardware.

I paid over $300 for my Xbox! Why should moving to France effectively disable it? I would really like to buy some new games, which by the way cost near twice as much here as they do in the US, but I cannot!

Movies are no different. Luckily my laptop does enable me to change the Region so that it can play french movies, but it cannot play US movies at the same time, and the computer software will only let you change the region 5 times, after which it locks! My xbox, which is already connected to my tv, is a very good DVD player, but it simply outputs a blue screen with an error message if I try to play a french movie.

Even internet websites are "region locked" these days. In the US you can go to comedy central's website anytime you want and watch the last couple weeks of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Or go to ABC.com and watch that version of Lost that you missed. In France you may go to these websites too and watch a "Sorry this content is not available in your region" error message. Sure you can watch Lost on French TV too, and it might even have an English language option if you are lucky (CSI and Heroes do, Desperate Housewives and House do not), but you'll have to wait until 2010 for this year's season.

I'm not pirating my movies and games yet, but I do totally understand the Pirate Party's growth. The world is getting smaller and smaller everyday, and artificial barriers setup to "break" products used outside their place of purchase is just ridiculous! And of course the internet provides ways to get around these artificial barriers, and if companies keep making it harder to get the products that people want, people will just get them for free off the internet.

Okay, rant over. Maybe I'll go read a book or something. Companies haven't figured out how to region lock those yet.

Annecy, France

2009-06-06T11:36:00.001-07:00

Annecy is one of the coolest cities in France. It is right at the foothills of the Alps about 25 miles south of Geneva, Switzerland, and about 30 miles south of where scientists will destroy the world soon.

Annecy is pretty much a tourist town. There is some industry there, even a small game company (or a really small office of a gigantic game company, Ubisoft), but most of the town survives off tourism. Lot of restaurants, gift shops, boat rentals and lake cruises, etc. and a beautiful lake surrounded by the alps on 3 sides.

The lake spills into the city via numerous canals and rivers that eventually connect up with the Rhône river that cuts my town of Lyon in half. These canals are absolutely gorgeous (see the picture above), but look even better with these two handsome guys standing in front of them.

Anyway, for more pictures of Annecy, click here.

Whooping Cough!

2009-05-21T12:41:00.000-07:00

Nearly a month ago I developed an itchy throat and a slight cough. No fever, no headache, no runny nose--just an annoying cough. Allergies or something I thought. It'll go away.

After a couple weeks the cough progressed to something a little past annoying. It was still just a cough, but it was keeping me up at night and occasionally left me breathless after particularly bad coughing fits. Plus my dad had come to visit, and the cough was freaking him out.

The doctor first diagnosed me with a particularly bad bacterial bronchitis. Like most bacterial infections, there is not much you can do about it except take anti-biotics and wait. So that's what I did.

After about a week of waiting, my cough became even worse. Really strong fits were nearly incapacitating me every 15 minutes or so, so I called the doctor up again. My doc was leaving town for some conference in Paris, so she sent me to the hospital to get another set of chest x-rays, blood tests, and the whole works to figure out what was going on in my lungs.

French emergency rooms are just like American ones. Many hours of waiting in a room full of people you'd rather not spend many hours breathing next to (including me). Nearly 5 hours, 2 x-rays, 1 blood test, and 0 dollars later (I really like french healthcare), my doctor returned to tell me I had coqueluche. The doctor wasn't quite sure what coqueluche was in English and my pocket dictionary didn't know either, so I wasn't sure how freaked out I was supposed to be when she told me what I had. I rushed home to ask google if I was going to die soon.

Whooping Cough. Really, whooping cough!

Whooping cough is also a bacterial infection, so again the only treatment is anti-biotics and waiting. Just like in the US, the doctor will write you a prescription for a drug or two to help you thru your sickness, but unlike the US, the doctor can also write you a prescription for time off work to recoop! My original doctor had already given me a week off, and the new doctor gave me another week.

We don't have sick days in France. If you just miss a day or something recovering from a hangover, you just have to use one of your (40) vacation days. If you are really sick and have to go to the doctor, they write you a time-off prescription, and you take it to work and you get that much time off paid. This was very weird for me, and I actually felt quite bad taking all that time off.

May was shaping up to be a short work month for me. There are 5 public holidays in May in France--May 1st is French Labor day, the 8th is WW2 victory day, the 21 is Ascension, and the day after is off too, and June 1st is Pentacost. I had also taken 4 days off for vacation with my father (to whom I also gave the awesome vacation gift of whooping cough while he was here), and now I had taken an additional 6 days off for illness (part of the time-off my doctor's prescribed overlapped with the above holidays).

Interestingly before coming to France I went to my doctor to ask if I needed any special medical procedures and he said no. I took my dog to the vet and asked the same question, and my vet vaccinated my dog against bordatella (doggy whooping cough) because normally we don't vaccinate dogs for that in Seattle. If I was a dog, I wouldn't be sick right now (yes I am still coughing 26 days after first catching this!).

Vienne

2009-04-28T12:44:00.000-07:00

Vienne (or Vienna in English) is the capital, and largest city, of Austria. The famous home of Mozart, Beethoven, and Johann Strauss. It is the birthplace of the waltz and one of the most beautiful cities in Europe.

Or at least I assume it is, I've never actually been there. We didn't go to that Vienne, we went to the Vienne in the suburbs about 20 kilometers outside of Lyon.

This Vienne was awesome too. A much smaller city of less than 30,000 people, it's just an 18 minute train ride from the station near my house. Like Lyon it was founded by the Romans over 2,000 years ago, and has a few interesting, and well preserved, ruins from that time. Like this:

We only spent a day there, but that is probably enough to see what you want to see. There is a really cool Roman history and art museum and a pretty nice castle a few miles outside of town that we missed, but otherwise we saw the big highlights. A couple of really cool churches, the Roman temple above, an old roman amphitheater, and a really nice park (with a pretty good skate park next to it).

One of the cool churches

Like all cities in France, Vienne has a pretty cool church on the hill over looking the city named after Notre Dame (Our Lady). It's not as cool as the one in Lyon or Marseille, but it also has a pretty cool view of the city. If you look on the right hand side of this picture, you will see the remains of the old castle looking over the city.

I also ran into one of the most famous people in France getting her hair cut, so of course I had to interrupt her and get an autograph and a photo!

Actually I have no idea who this person is. Her mother stopped me on the street and asked me to play a joke on her daughter for her 20th birthday. So I ran into the beauty shop telling her how much I loved her last movie and how I really wanted her autograph and a picture. I look like a total dork in this picture, but I thought it was cool, and I hope she did too.

Overall we had a good day. Saw a lot of cool stuff, talked to a few cool people, had a really good italian dinner, and watched some drunk kid puke on the nicely landscaped trees near the train station. They have a roman festival and a jazz festival coming up, so I will probably return for another visit soon.

Anyway, for more pictures of Vienne, check this out.

Ska-P

2009-04-25T16:19:00.000-07:00

Una de mis bandas favoritas estuvo en Lyon esta semana, y George y yo fuimos a verlos el viernes. Ska-P es una banda español de ska/punk rock. Su musica es rapida et sus letras son muy critica al capitalismo y la mondialisation, et un poco anarquista (como la mayoría de las bandas de punk rock). Me gusta mucho, tuve que ir.

Ska-p Live

If you are not down with anti-capitalist, animal rights activist, anti-globalization, pro-union, peace loving, mohawk having, spanish punk bands, don't bother clicking the link above. But if you like your punk rock with a brass section, you might dig it. That video is not the concert I went to, but since my nikon coolpix is incapable of capturing decent audio, I linked to a slightly more professional video of a live performance. That video is from a earlier performance in Paris.

Despite being a spanish band singing in spanish in Lyon, France where nearly nobody speaks spanish, the place was packed. George was upset that they had a different band open for them (apparently in Hong Kong, concerts just have a single performer), but they played for about 2 hours after the opening act, and the crowd never stopped moving.

Security for shows like this is a little different in France than it is in the US. In the US I have had pocket knifes confiscated, been told my camera was too sophisticated to bring in, or even told back packs simply are not allowed. At this show, my backpack, pocket knife, and camera were fine, but I had to check my water bottle! Seriously, they took my empty water bottle and gave me a number so I could pick it up after the show.

The concert was held at Halle Tony Garnier in Lyon, which was originally built about 100 years ago as a place to sell and slaughter cattle.

I think the place is a bit fancy for a meat market, but Tony (the Tony Garnier this place is named after) had a plan when he built it. He had planned out a utopian industrial city where all of the people would live close to their places of work, and all the schools and factories and stuff would be beautiful and nice to strengthen the community. He also didn't put any law enforcement or churches in this area, because in such a beautiful paradise of a city, people would govern themselves fairly.

Interestingly, this utopian area of Lyon is called "The United States" (after the name of the main road that runs thru it) and like most industrial areas of any city, it is not one of the nicer areas of town.

In fairness to Tony, World War 2 began before he could finish his project. Right about the time WW2 ended and France was picking up the pieces, Tony died.

Île Barbe

2009-04-22T13:01:00.000-07:00

Île Barbe (barbarian island, or maybe island beard) is a small island in the Saône river on the north side of Lyon. It was originally a monastery, but I am not sure what it is now. The north 3/4ths of the island is closed off behind giant fences, but the south side is a nice little park connected to both sides of the mainland by an uncomfortably skinny bridge (that is open to vehicle traffic too).

The area around Île Barbe is kinda cool too. I especially like this.

Marseille

2009-04-19T08:24:00.000-07:00

Marseille is just a few hours south of Lyon. It's right on the Mediterranean in the heart of Provence, where it is always sunny and warm. So of course when George and I arrived in Marseille it was pouring rain.

Actually, when we first got there it was just cloudy. So we took our time getting from the train station to our hotel, and grabbing a nice lunch on the way there.

Marseille has a really cool train station.

After getting lunch and checking into our hotel, we decided to head out to explore the area. That was just about the same time the monsoon rolled in. Our hotel was located in the super touristy Vieux Port (old port) area, but instead of heading straight to the area most exposed to the elements, we decided to explore the city north of us a bit and keep the buildings around us to protect from the wind a bit. This was probably a mistake.

Neither of us knew anything about Marseille expect that it was on the sea and was famous for soap. Well, for a city famous for soap Marseille sure is dirty! The streets were covered in trash, the buildings covered in grafitti and falling apart, and the stench was pretty bad at times. Maybe it was the monsoon blowing over trash cans or something, but whatever it was, our first introduction to Marseille was not starting good. We ended up getting subway for dinner and taking it back to the hotel, because we were a little bummed with the environment.

The next day the weather cleared up a bit, and the rain turned to a light on and off again drizzle, so we headed to the cool part of town. The old port area of Marseille is pretty cool. The port is tiny, but it has these awesome forts at each side of the entrance to protect it, and the area is clean, nice, and full of great restaurants.

one of the cool forts protecting Marseille

The Food in Marseille is awesome! Being a port city, Marseille is more diverse than Lyon, and the old port area being the main tourist area, is probably even more diverse in its food offerings. Chinese, vietnamese, indian, tunisian, american, etc., the food choices were many. We had awesome seafood, some really good indian vegetarian food, a nice Louisiana style cajun dinner--everywhere we ate was awesome.

After exploring the port area for a bit, we took the touristy train ride up to the church on the hill (apparently all French cities have a church on a hill over looking the city, usually named Notre Dame). This Notre Dame isn't as cool as the Notre Dame overlooking Lyon, but it might have had a better view. Although the city of Marseille is a bit ugly IMO, it is located in a really cool coastal area surrounding by water and hills/small mountains (kinda like Los Angeles in that respect).

Everything in Marseille has a lot of steps leading up to it

The church was cool and the views of the old forts were awesome, so we decided to head down and get a closer look at them forts.

The forts were awesome, and the weather, although still cloudy, was starting to be okay, so our second day in Marseille was turning out much better than our first. We strolled this fort for a bit, and then walked all the way around the harbor to see the other one (can't the make a bridge or something?). Afterward, we had a good seafood dinner and went to a bar to see the local Marseille soccer team take on our local Lyon soccer team. Despite ending in a tie, Marseille took a one point lead over Lyon for first place in the league, so the Marseillaise were quite excited.

Our third day in Marseille began with me squinting as I woke up to the unfamiliar sight of the sun coming thru our hotel window. As mentioned above, Marseille is located in the beautiful south of France right on the Med, so we decided to hop a boat out to the sea and check out the surrounding areas.

Awesome Cliffs!

The cliffs and coves and beaches around Marseille are spectacular. The water is unnaturally blue and very clear, and overall just beautiful. When I go back to this area, I want get outside the city and do some hiking and kayaking of my own. Or maybe rent a sailboat and explore the area at my leisure.

Despite our rough introduction to Marseille we had a good time. The port area is cool, the area by the church is nice, the food is awesome, the people were great, and the natural setting is amazing. When you have a chance to go to Marseille, avoid the area north of the old port, eat a lot, and be sure to get out on the water. Oh, and buy some soap!

To see more pics of Marseille, click here.

Yummy, yummy American food

2009-04-10T13:36:00.000-07:00

There are not many "American" restaurants that I like enough to worry about not being able to find them in Lyon. As mentioned in an earlier post, a good BBQ place would be nice, but for the most part when I miss American food, I mean the stuff I eat at home. Stuff like this:

Some of this stuff can be found in Lyon. Peanut butter is becoming more common, but still 3 to 4 times more expensive than in the states, and I have seen relish in a couple places (similarly expensive), but a lot of the american junk that I like cannot be found in Lyon.

Cereal is a big problem for me. I love cereal. I eat it for nearly every breakfast, and generally at least one night per week (is that healthy?). The supermarkets of Lyon have quite a few choices in the cereal isle, but every store has pretty much the same choices--Frosted Flakes, Golden Grahams, Corn Pops, and 45 different kinds of chocolate cereal. I don't like chocolate, and don't really like my cereals to be that sweet either. I like to eat cereals that I can pretend are good for me, like Raisin Bran, Chex and Frosted Mini-Wheats. I have yet to find any of these cereals in France. Maybe I just do not know where to look yet.

Hong Kong has most of the things I missed though, so when George and I went there recently, we brought extra luggage just for groceries.

When I first came to Lyon, I could not find peanut butter, pancake syrup, pancake mix, or a few other things that I knew would be hard to live without. Coworkers were no help, and internet searches only found stores in Paris that carried these types of things, until I found Lyon Eats. That site not only contains directions for finding lots of american products, but when those products cannot be found, they have the closest french approximation! Probably the most important website I found after moving here.

Thanks LyonEats!

I'm Apte (with an e)

2009-04-04T13:16:00.000-07:00

Because my health insurance is provided by the government, they have a vested interest in keeping me healthy. As such, they require me to pay them a visit every 6 months or so for a check up. I was summoned last week.

In France the average person "costs" about half of what the average American "costs" for healthcare. In the US these costs are split pretty evenly between the government (medicare, medicaid) and private payments (like health insurance and personal out of pocket expenses). In France the government pays for about 80% of it. Despite spending less than half of what the US spends of health care, people in France somehow live longer and healthier. Lifestyle certainly has a lot to do with this, but I also think that the french approach to healthcare is better than the US approach.

You often hear that prevention is better than reaction. It is much cheaper to keep people healthy than to wait until they become unhealthy and then try to fix them. This seems like common sense to most people, but despite how obvious this seems, I have never had a health care plan in the US that required, or incentivized in any way, regular doctor's visits and checkups. I am just as busy and lazy as the next American, so of course I never took my own initiative and scheduled my own regular checkups, and I cannot even remember the last time I went to a doctor for a non-emergency.

In France these regular checkups are required. And they are free. They check your eyes, make you pee in a cup, check your blood pressure, check your weight, ask about your diet, your work, any aches or pains, etc. Pretty routine and the goal is just to catch the bad things before they become too bad. As long as everything is good, they give you a piece of paper that says Apte and let you go on your way. If things are bad, you get something else, and are maybe required to visit other doctors or prevented from returning to work (with full pay, of course :-). I got an apte, and a big pat on the back for getting my blood pressure down from the first visit I had when I first got to France. The only negative was that I cannot remember the last time I had a round of vaccinations (polio, tetanus, diphtheria), so the doc gave me an address to get my vaccinations updated. Also free, of course.

I wonder what impact something like this would have on the average healthiness of the US. If these regular checkups detect problems, they send you to a specialist for consultation. If the doc thinks you might be carrying a few extra pounds, they send you to a nutritionist to help you get your diet right. If you are suffering from any work related illnesses, they can give you the time off to recoup.

I know I certainly tend to ignore problems until they become too difficult to ignore, so hopefully this will keep me informed on my current health.

Ma Lau Shan (馬騮山)

2009-03-26T15:28:00.000-07:00

When most people thing of Hong Kong, they think of this:

Which is, of course, Hong Kong. Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places in the world. Thousands of skyscrapers stacked 10 feet apart and half the streets are filled with street vendors. It sometimes seems that every single inch of the city is taken up by people or buildings. But Hong Kong is also extremely mountainous, so only about 25% of Hong Kong is actually developed, and nearly 50% is protected reserve or park. It was to this undeveloped wilderness that we ventured to the (in)famous Ma Lau Shan (monkey mountain).

That sign basically says "Don't feed the monkeys or they will kill you", or something like that (my chinese is a little rusty). There is a $10,000 fine for even thinking about feeding them. All of the people hiking here were traveling in big groups and carrying sticks or golf clubs or something to defend themselves from the horrible monkeys. Everyone was warning me against bringing food, anything that smells like food, anything that looks like it might contain food, and generally any shopping sacks or plastic bags of any kind, or the monkeys will murder me and take it. Some people were quite frightened, and George was scared the entire time we were there.

I'm sure this monkey murdered someone for that bottle of tea.

In reality the monkeys didn't seem all that dangerous. They mostly just did monkey things like swinging in the trees or lounging on the pathway eating bugs off each other. One of them stalked us for a bit, and made George nervous, but most of them just ignored us and went about their monkey ways. Maybe they recognized my beastly manliness and figured they better just leave us alone, but whatever their reasons, they didn't seem the brutal killing machines they had been hyped up to be.

Monkeys doing their monkey thing

Surprisingly the monkeys seem to stay on their monkey mountain and don't venture into the city to terrorize people. As mentioned above, Hong Kong is full of street stalls selling all kinds of yummy things, and it seems like all the outdoor markets would be easy pickings for these little agile killer monkeys. In fact they rarely even cross the road. There are no fences to keep them in and there is a large pedestrian overpass to protect them from getting squashed on Kong Kong's dangerous roads. I don't know, maybe they know that people in Hong Kong will eat just about anything, and if they start stealing food from the locals, the locals might turn them into food.

Monkeys are native to Hong Kong, by the way, but they are a smaller, less aggressive species, and they have mostly been displaced by habitat destruction and the introduction of the killer macaques mentioned above. Turns out that after the locals built a reservoir here back in 1913 they noticed that the area was home to a toxic species of plant that was contaminating the waters (probably something you should figure out before you build a reservoir). Macaques like to eat this toxic plant, so a few families were introduced to clean out the bad plants and keep the water clean. As monkeys tend to do, these guys were very successful at reproducing, and now there are thousands of them swinging in the trees near the water supply.

Humans have a consistently bad habit of releasing foreign species of plants or animals into an ecosystem to try and clear out undesirable species. This almost always results in the new species proliferating beyond control since there generally isn't a local predator for a totally foreign species. So far most of Hong Kong is okay with the monkeys, but the stories of monkey attacks and food stealing I mentioned above are not made up (just slightly exaggerated).

Monkey guarding the sign that tells you how to defend yourself against them. They do not want you to know their weaknesses.

Anyway, on your next trip to Hong Kong get out of the urban craziness for a bit. Take a trip out to the wilderness and see some monkeys. Take a hike up to the giant buddha on lantau island. Hop a short bus ride out to one of the sleepy fishing villages like Tai O, or even catch a boat out to one of the less populated smaller islands and escape the rat-race. There is more than just shopping, eating, and skyscraper browsing.

Long time no blog

2009-03-22T14:04:00.000-07:00

I don't like to travel with my computer. I travel light, and don't like the additional weight (physical and mental) of dragging a computer around with me, so it's been a couple weeks since I have had a chance to update my blog.

One of the best things about living in France is that you are so close to the rest of Europe, so many exotic (to an American) and famous world cities are just a train or short plane ride away. So for my first real vacation since moving here I went to Hong Kong!

Yeah, that Hong Kong. The one just about on the other side of the planet from me. The one that is about a 13 hour flight from Paris. My sister-in-law got married last week, so I dusted off my old suit (which I bought in Hong Kong for a previous wedding, and haven't worn since) and George put on her brand new fake converse (see picture below) and we took off for Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is a great city. George grew up there, and most of her family is there, so we go there quite a bit. I always eat too much, buy too much junk, and take thousands of crappy pictures of all the cool buildings. This trip was very family focused though so I mostly just ate too much, only bought a little bit of junk, and really didn't take that many pictures, although most are still crappy.

Hong Kong seems much greener than the last time I went. But maybe it is just because I was coming from one of the greenest cities on the planet, Seattle, and now I am coming from Lyon which prefers brown gravel and concrete to grass? Every road seems to have a nice green median with palm trees and tropical plants, every street is newly lined with trees. And there seems to be more parks.

Hong Kong seemed much cleaner too. The air and water quality still needs a lot of attention, but the streets were a lot cleaner, and there was less graffiti than I remember. There are also recycle bins all over the city now!

Hong Kong is cheap! An extra value meal at McDs in Lyon is about 6.5 Euros, an extra value meal in Hong Kong is about 2.5 Euros (too bad I don't like McDonalds :-(). The first night George and I stayed in Hong Kong we ate dinner at a small street vendor for less than 3 Euros--for two people! Basic electronics are really cheap too. I got a VGA cable to connect my notebook to my TV for 1.5 euros. They cost about 15 euros at the local FNAC. Rent will cost you about 3 times more than in Lyon, but as a tourist not worrying about things like rent, your money goes a long way.

Hong Kong is hot. It is still technically winter in Hong Kong, but it was about 25 degrees (nearly 80 degrees fahrenheit) on average every day we were there. It was 0 when my return flight landed in Lyon (32 degrees fahrenheit).

Not quite so crowded? Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated cities on the planet. Seattle, not so much so, but Lyon is quite dense too. On previous trips I always felt a bit cramped because of the crazy amount of people everywhere in Hong Kong, but now that I am used to the number of people in Lyon it doesn't seem quite so bad. It is still crazy crowded though.

Hong Kong is open late. In Lyon most stores close at 8. Bars and restaurants stay open later, and shops in the tourist area, but most things close early. In Hong Kong everything is open late, and many things are open 24 hours. I don't really need 24 hour shops anymore, but if the Carrefour or Casino by my house could stay open until 10 I would be ecstatic.

People in Hong Kong work a lot. The economic crisis has hit Hong Kong pretty hard too, and many people have been laid off and the ones that managed to keep their jobs are working extra to make up for it. Many of my relatives were working late nights and Saturdays, and most were not getting paid extra for it. "Just be happy you have a job" seems to be motivation enough, because unlike France Hong Kong has no unemployment benefits and no universal health care, so you are pretty much on your own when bad economic times make life a little tough.

All in all in was a great trip. It was really interesting to get a different prespective now that I am living in France.

Yummy, yummy mexican food

2009-02-24T13:22:00.001-08:00

I was born in Texas, grew up mostly in Texas, went to college in Texas, and most of my family still lives in Texas.

I have spent the last 9 years of my life, however, outside of Texas--mostly in Seattle, Los Angeles, and now France. In general, I didn't miss much of Texas. The mountains and all the snow (snowboarding), the ocean (surfing), the rain-forest (hiking), the lakes and rivers (kayaking)--the west had a lot to offer, and I had already spent about 20 years in Texas, so I was happy exploring and experiencing all the "new".

One thing I always missed though, was food. In particular mexican food, or at least the variety of mexican food we call Tex-Mex. Texas has awesome mexican food! Seattle had decent mexican food, Los Angeles had pretty good mexican food, and Lyon has a few restaurants with spanish words in their names that serve food with the same name as some of the mexican food you might be familiar with.

The kebab place across the street from my work has tacos. I was very excited when I first saw their menu on the storefront that advertised "Tacos: 4 Euros", so in I went to order me a taco. They asked me which kind of meat I wanted, kofke, kebab, escalope, steak, poulet. I knew poulet meant chicken, and I was pretty sure steak meant steak, but I didn't even know what the other meats were.
"Chicken" I said.
"What sauce?"
"Taco sauce" I replied.
Well, taco sauce wasn't an option, so they listed my choices. Burger, tartar, bbq, ketchup, mayonnaise--Mayonnaise! I was pretty sure after they said mayonnaise that whatever I ended up ordering would not be a taco. And to confirm that suspicion, they proceeded to stuff french fries in with the chicken, bbq sauce, lettuce and tomatoes they had rolled up in a tortilla, and stuffed it into a George Foreman grill for a couple minutes.

Strike one for mexican food in Lyon.

The shopping mall I walk by, or generally thru, on my way to work everyday has a restaurant named Suelta Verde that bills itself as a Tex-Mex restaurant. Yeah, I know mall food? But hey, it's supposed to be Tex-Mex. The quesadillas aren't bad, although they are made with french cheeses, so they are a bit strong, and quite a bit not quesadilla-tasting, but I actually enjoy them from time to time. Everything else in the restaurant is bad! The veggie burritos are basically ratatouille wrapped in a tortilla, the other burritos just add some type of meat, and even the tortilla chips were bad. And the restaurant didn't even have beans.

Strike two for mexican food in Lyon.

So time to ask for advice from the locals. Many people recommended a place near Place des Terreaux called El Sombrero. The restaurant looks okay from the outside, has branches in multiple French cities, and even has a website with pictures and animations and stuff (but no menu), so it could be promising. George and I were ready to give it a shot, when my co-worker Komi told me that Mexico Lindo in old Lyon was the best mexican place in Lyon. Komi lived in Austin for a while, so he might actually know what mexican food is supposed to taste like. El Sombrero will have to wait.

We rolled up to Mexico Lindo around 6:30, and the place was empty, no lights turned on, and no menu or even open hours on the door. hmmm... not looking good. We returned at 7, and now there was one light on, and a menu on the door, but we still had no idea when it opened. We returned at 7:30 and... the place was packed, and with no reservation, we had no shot at dinner.

Reservations are almost always needed at Mexico Lindo.

So we made our reservation and returned a week later and it was awesome. They had a good selection of dishes, and the dishes not only tasted like mexican food, they tasted like good mexican food. Some typical mexican ingredients are a bit hard to find in Lyon, so on some things they had to improvise but the result was good (refried beans don't exist here, so they had to make their own from red beans). In typical mexican restaurant fashion, the portion sizes are big enough to feed three people, and in typical french fashion, they do not have to-go boxes, so plan accordingly (skip lunch). I had a quesadilla appetizer that was big enough for a main meal (and the best quesadilla I have had in quite some time), and George had some grilled onions and mushrooms with tortillas, that was quite large too. Our main dishes were also big, and yummy, and came with the typical mexican sides of refried beans and rice. Overall it was quite delicious, and to top it off, they had pecan pie for dessert. Pecan Pie!

Turns out the guy that runs the restaurant is actually from Texas (born in Nuevo Loredo, but grew up in south Texas). That explains the pecan pie. If he could just get some Dr. Pepper, he'd have the best restaurant in all of France.

So if you need to satisfy your mexican food cravings in Lyon, head over to Mexico Lindo in old Lyon.

Vieux Lyon

2009-02-19T13:33:00.000-08:00

Vieux Lyon (Old Lyon) is one of the coolest parts of the city. It's the old (duh) part of the city sandwiched between the hill with the old roman ampitheatre and the Basilica Notre-Dame de Fourvière (The big church on the hill in one of the images below) and the Saône river. It is mostly cobblestone streets, plazas, really old buildings, and the occasional cool statue or fountain. It is also home to some of the best bars and restaurants in Lyon, and one of the few places where things are actually open on Sundays. When George and I start looking for a new apartment, we will look here.

I really like the architecture and style of old Lyon. The buildings are old, and occasionally in need of some repairs, but that is part of the charm I guess. Although there are actually roads running thru this part of the city, there are few cars on them, and the streets are very walkable and generally lined with small vendors.

The hills behind old Lyon are mostly park and green spaces, which is cool too. Lyon is a pretty dense, urban area, and is definitely lacking in grass and general greenery in my opinion. Although I do currently live just across the street from the largest park in Lyon (Parc Tête D'Or), my daily walk to work is mostly concrete.

Old Lyon is also home to some odd, and cool, and somewhat scary old pathways and traboules, that are quite fun to explore and photograph (and extremely crowded on the weekends). Many of these passages cut thru the buildings to allow you easy, and covered, access from one street to the next, and views into the awesome cool courtyards some of these builds have.

This weekend George and I will dine at Mexico Lindo in Old Lyon, and I have been assured by many that this is the best Mexican restaurant in all of France (or at least Lyon). I'll let you know how it goes.

I'm not the best rock band drummer in France

2009-02-15T11:27:00.000-08:00

The 2 best rock band drummers in France.

Arkane hosted an industry wide Rock band contest this week, with each team picking a song they want to play, and every team having to play their song and every other team's song. The team that scores the most points across all songs wins.

We had a pretty good team, but we didn't really practice or plan that much. If we really wanted to get the best score possible, we would analyze the songs, and find the best times to use star power, and blah blah blah. We just planned to go in to the competition and rock it, and let the points fall however they fall. Besides, we are awesome, and awesome people don't need to practice.

We played second. The first team did pretty good, but we knew we could do better, so we stepped up and played Give It Away by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Not that hardest song in Rock Band, but if played right, it is one of the top 5 for point scoring. We rocked a solid 1.5 million points, and I got 99% on the drums. Good start.

The next band up played Almost Easy by Avenged Seven Fold, prolly the hardest song of the night. They killed it. There drummer rocked an awesome 99%, and I think he missed like 3 notes. On our turn to play this song, I only scored a measly 96%.

Well that's okay. I mean they picked this song, so surely they are good at it. Let's see how he does on the next one. Surprise, Suprise--99%. This guy scored 99% on every song they played, prolly could have gotten 100% if the crappy toy drum set didn't miss a few notes here and there. This guy was a robot. He apparently played drums in a band or something, I don't know, I didn't even get his name.

The rest of his group was pretty good too, of course, and even though this was a group contest, I was competing against him. And getting my butt kicked.

We did outscore them on Give It Away (by less than 2,000 points, or just about 1/10th of a percent), and we beat them on one other song, but they scored the highest on the other 4 songs, and overall it wasn't that close.

So, turns out I am not the best Rock Band Drummer in France. Here's to you mystery drummer from Wide Screen Games.

Super Long Bowl

2009-02-02T12:52:00.000-08:00

American TV has way too many commercials! Especially sports.

I always hated the commercial interruptions on American TV, but thanks to Tivo (or other DVRs), I only really had to deal with commercials when watching sports, because sports have to be watched live. It's not really the commercials that I hate, it's the interruptions in the action.

French TV has very little commercials, and what commercials they do have are generally only between programs, not during them. We get 3 episodes of Friends in a row on one of the channels here with no commercials except for a channel identification between them. In fact, France has laws regulating when commercials can be shown, and starting this year commercials are not allowed on public TV at all during prime-time.

With the commercials cut out, all programs are obviously shorter. Sports programs are less than half their US broadcast time. Most of the NBA games shown here are shown tape-delayed, and are edited to remove all the commercials, timeouts, and halftime. This makes your average basketball game about an hour from start to finish.

Football, however usually comes on live, and of course really important games, like the Super Bowl, are shown live. I am a HUGE football fan (football, not soccer), so I had to watch the Super Bowl live. However, the 6:30 PM EST kick off time is 12:30 AM Lyon time, so the game didn't end until 4:30 AM (and I get up for work at 8:00 AM).

The late start, and end, didn't bother me much though. I knew it was coming, so I napped most of Sunday, and wasn't too tired at work the next day. What bothered me was just how little of the 4 hours was spent watching football. And because of the above mentioned law about commercials on public TV, I didn't even get funny, over-priced commercials. Instead, I had (not very good) commentary in French during most of the breaks (or maybe the commentary was awesome and my crappy french was not very good).

American football has a ridiculous amount of commercial breaks, especially in a game with lots of changes of possession (like in the first half). Each change of possession, most time-outs and challenges, between quarters, the 2-minute warning, after every score, half time, another set of challenges and time-outs, another 2-minute warning, booth reviews, injuries--it's ridiculous. Football is four 15 minute quarters, yet the average game is three and a half hours minimum.

I think this is one of the big reasons football isn't catching on here. The popular sports here have almost no commercial breaks, or any stoppage of play. Soccer, hand-ball, tennis, motor sports--except for breaks for half-time or between matches, none of these sports stop, and most have no, or little time-outs.

Of course, to raise money without commercials, you have to paint your players up like NASCAR.

Man, I want to strike again

2009-01-29T09:44:00.000-08:00

I know why the french like to strike so much. The strike today was like a parade. Thousand's of people marched down the street by my work, chanting and singing and dancing. There was even a marching band and a couple singers. Everyone had these big signs and banners, and even a couple people had costumes. According to the radio, 1.5 million people marched in protest across the streets of France today--40,000 in Lyon alone. I think it took 3 hours for all the people to walk past my work--it was a big ~~parade~~ strike!

Of course, I only pretended to strike for about 15 minutes during lunch break while I waited for my taco, then I went back to work. But next time, I'm bringing a sign.

Power to the people!

Grève générale

2009-01-28T14:46:00.000-08:00

(Those must be two important words, because I sure do see them alot. En grève means "On strike")

The French love to strike. Well, that's the stereotype anyway. When George and I came to France for vacation 1.5 years ago, our travel plans were interrupted by a transportation strike. The day before George arrived in France to stay, the pilots were on strike, and when I had to go to Berlin for work the trains were on strike (so we flew). Well tomorrow everyone is on strike.

People are not striking for better pay, or cheaper health care, or shorter hours, and the strikers are not holding out for any negotiations. People are just unhappy with the economic situation in general (and with President Nicolas Sarkozy) and want to make the government focus on creating jobs, reducing income inequality, and regulating banks more closely--things that just about every country in the world is concerned with now. I'd strike with them, but I am out of vacation days.

Strikes in the USA are different. In the US, we do not strike as often, but when we strike we are in it for the long haul. When I was in Seattle, the teacher's strike lasted 49 days, and would have lasted longer I think, except a local judge ordered them back to work. The NHL Player's union striked (struck?) for a whole year. In France, strikes tend to last a couple days at most, and I don't think any have lasted more than a week.

Strikes in the US seem to be more localized too. The Seattle teachers union, the American Airlines pilots, professional basketball players, etc. I don't think we have ever had everyone strike in the US. In fact, I don't think I have ever been personally affected by any strike in the US, other than having to listen to my dad--a member of one of America's most strike loving unions, the teamsters--complain about them (I love you dad!). Tomorrow's strike is supposed to throw the whole country into chaos. If you rely on public transit to get where you are going, you're screwed, and if your kids go to public school, i guess you are taking the day off to watch them since the school is on strike, and so is day-care.

I wonder if strikes are more successful in France than in the US?

(image stolen from www.lescarnets.net)

San Nin Faai Lok (新年快樂)

2009-01-24T05:25:00.000-08:00

Monday is Chinese New Year, one of the most important holidays here in France (that might be a bit of an exaggeration). This new year will be year 4707 by the Chinese calendar, and I believe that makes it the Year of the Ox. Unlike Western New Year, which is just one night of getting drunk and waiting for a big ball to drop so you can kiss that hot girl across the room, Chinese New Year is 15 whole days of drinking, eating, and giving money to people (or getting money if you are younger, but unfortunately that ship has sailed for me). George and I prepared for Chinese New Year by going to the Paris Store, which as its name implies, is the largest chinese grocery store in Lyon.

99% of the foods George grew up with in Hong Kong can be found in Seattle, and for that 1% that cannot, the largest population of Hong Kong-ers outside of Hong Kong can be found just a couple hours north of Seattle in Vancouver, Canada. Unfortunately, chinese products are not so easy to find in Lyon. Lyon has a few chinese, thai, vietnamese, etc. restaurants and groceries here, but for the most part the are all just generic asian food, wth mostly the same menu or choices of only the most common chinese items. They are lacking most of the items we like, and what they do have is quite expensive.

The Paris Store is on the south side of Lyon, and is US grocery store sized, and has many more choices, and more reasonable prices. We still couldn't find the things we really wanted, but maybe enough to hold us over until we go to Hong Kong in a couple months. My friend from work, Marco, gave us a ride, so since we did not have to worry about hauling everything back on the bus, we stocked up on sauces, drinks, and noodles. The store even had like 5 different kinds of peanut butter, which is unheard of in France! I didn't recognize any of the brands though, so I bought one of each, and we will see which is the best.

I'm starting to get used to the food here in Lyon, but I still find myself missing "American" food. Some french restaurants are, of course, amazing, but they are also kind of expensive and french fast food is pretty much pizza, sandwiches, McDonald's, or kebabs. I miss the variety that we had in Seattle--great thai food, great chinese food, good mexican food, better indian food, etc. And I miss the little things like Pop-Tarts, Mountain Dew, Starburst, Frosted Mini-Wheats, and Morning Star Farms breakfast patties. Also, not being much of a meat eater, my choices in Lyon are extremely limited.

Going to the Chinese grocery brings some more variety to my diet, and some of the "American" foods that I had become quite used to. I'd still kill for a good burrito or taco though.

Snowboarding in the Alps part 2

2009-01-18T11:41:00.001-08:00

This weekend we went to Areches Beaufort to play for a bit in the white stuff. Areches Beaufort is much closer to Lyon than the resort I blogged about below (Val Thorens), and much lower elevation. And unlike most of the resorts higher up in the Alps, Areches Beaufort has trees! Lots of em. I really like trees and tree runs (maybe not as much as my friend Dave Birchak who has an odd propensity for jumping into them), so I was very excited about going to this resort.

Clear skies and warm, and not at all crowded, the resort had a lot of promise. Unfortunately it hadn't snowed there in quite some time, and the snow was pretty hard and packed, so I had very few tree runs, and lots of sticking to the pistes, but if this place ever gets a good dumping, I am there the next day because I saw lots of awesome looking terrain.

Supposedly the place has a park, but I only saw one jump, and no rails or boxes or anything. Maybe they are waiting for more snow :-/

Oh, and this place had one of the worst types of lifts I have ever ridden. Resorts in the US, at least those that I have been to, only have 4 different kinds of lift. 2 for the big boys, chair lifts and gondolas, and 2 for the kiddies, rope pulls and magic carpets. Rope pulls kinda suck, but they are usually really short, and only on very slow inclines, so you deal with them when you have to (usually just when you are learning). So for the most part, you ride chairs or gondolas. This place, however, had one of these:

Yes that person is holding onto a metal pole that he has shoved up his crotch. That metal pole is attached to a lift line that pulls him up the mountain. By his crotch! Whoever invented this lift should be shot--In his crotch!

To ride this lift, you have to grab this metal pole with a small seat on the end as it swings by on the lift line. You then shove the pole between your legs quickly (because it is moving up the mountain), and clench your legs and hold on. The lift maybe makes sense for skiers, although all of the guys with me were skiers and they hated it too, but for snowboarders it is pain, exhaustion, and pain.

Fortunately most of the lifts at this resort were the normal sit in the chair ski lifts, but to get to the very top of the mountain, you had to ride this evil contraption. I only went to the top of the mountain once.

To see more pics of this place, cliquez ici.

I'm getting fat

2009-01-12T12:55:00.000-08:00

I don't know how the French are not fatter than the Americans. French food is very rich, full of carbohydrates, and the serving sizes are almost American sized. And every meal here comes with appetizer and dessert. And you probably drink some wine with it.

I eat lunches out much more frequently here than I did in Seattle. Work gives me 7 euros per day to eat on, and depending on where I eat that covers 50-100% of the cost of my lunch (fast food is generally around 6 or 7 euros, and nice restaurants are between 12 and 15). Plus, I am required to take an hour and a half for lunch, so might as well take that lunch with some coworkers and relax over too much food and wine.

When you order food at a French restaurant, you either get it to-go, or you take a seat and eat it at the restaurant. You do not change your mind later and ask for a to-go box or something if you cannot finish it, so instead you just finish it. Plus you have a long lunch break to fill, so just eat it slow and enjoy.

Most restaurants here have a daily special, which is usually an appetizer, a main dish, and a dessert. You can order something other than the special, but it probably costs the same amount, and who wants to pass up dessert? French people generally don't eat much for breakfast—just a croissant and a coffee or something, so maybe that allows them to enjoy this big lunch without packing on the pounds. I am hungry when I wake up, so I almost always eat breakfast. A bowl of cereal, some pancakes or eggs or something—definitely more than a croissant and coffee. I also eat a big dinner, but I think everyone else does too, so that's okay.

I try to convince myself that it is okay for me to eat this much because I walk or skateboard 3 miles to work everyday (round trip) instead of taking the subway, and I am still very active on the weekends, going snowboarding or trekking thru the parks or the city, but my growing gut is making it harder for me to keep believing my lies.

Oh, and did I mention my daily afternoon snack?

Today's picture is a picture of Île Flottante, which is what I had for dessert today.

(image comes from bostonchomps.blogspot.com).

My new place

2008-12-31T08:35:00.000-08:00

When we arrived in Lyon, my new company put us up in this long-stay hotel thing called appartcity. It had a small kitchenette, a nice sized bathroom, a couch that folded out into a bed, and a small flatscreen tv I could plug my xbox into. It wasn't bad, and not excessively expensive, but it was small. I arrived here two weeks before my wife did, and I thought the place was cozy, but livable until I found a more permanent place.

When my wife arrived and we started grocery shopping for two and suddenly had twice as much stuff--the apartment also suddenly became chokingly tight. As if the lack of space wasn't enough reason, we also found out from the french government that we needed a permanent address to progress our visa status (which originally expired January 4th, 2009), and with the Christmas and New Years holiday period coming up, we were suddenly tight on the apartment hunting time too.

Compared to the US, finding an apartment in Lyon sucks. I've never lived in US cities like New York or Chicago, where I hear it can be equally crazy, but here it is like buying a house in housing boom days in the States. As far as I can tell, there are no apartment complexes in France. All apartments are simply individually owned units that the owner rents out thru a management agency. Finding an apartment means searching the listings of the 5,000 different management agencies, or just cruising around town looking for "for rent" signs.

Once you find one you may like, then the real work begins. You have to call the agency to either setup an appointment, if they are willing to meet you there or have an open house planned (yes, the good apartments get open houses). Otherwise you have to go to the agency, pick up the key and security code, go to the apartment, check it out yourself (with nobody to ask questions), and return the key the agency. If you are lucky a single agency might have two apartments you wish to visit, so at least you can get two keys at once. Oh and agencies are only open monday-friday, something like 10-6 with at least an hour for lunch. Like most people, I work monday-friday 10-7ish (with at least 2 hours for lunch :-)), so this left most of the apartment hunting to George.

Unfurnished apartments in Lyon are really unfurnished--no stove, no refrigerator, no cabinets, and rarely any closets. Just a sink in the room that is supposed to be the kitchen and a coupe other rooms. The bathrooms, of course, are furnished with a tub, sink and toilet, and sometimes a bidet! We really didn't want to have to buy a fridge and stove, and all that so we wanted an apartment that at least had an "American Kitchen" (that's what they kitchens with appliance and cabinets in them here :-)).

The good apartments go fast. One was rented as soon as George got there to see it, and we saw another late one night, and by time we called the next morning, it was also gone. In the end time constraints and general laziness forced our hand, and we ended up in the ugliest apartment in France. It's not graffiti on the walls, bugs in the kitchen ugly. It's clean, and the neighborhood is awesome, and the layout is cool. It's just ugly.

If you are a fan of the 1950s, or wallpaper in general, you might like the place. You can see it here.

The best thing about our new place though, is it is right across the street from the biggest park in Lyon.

Parc de la tête d'or, park of the golden head, is on the north side of the city, with the Rhône river snaking past it towards the alps. The park is actually bigger than the picture above shows, off to the right of where the picture cuts off is a large zoo, and some playgrounds and sports courts. The zoo is free, and is not separated from the rest of the park by gates or anything, you just walk thru it like the rest of the park. It's quite odd to see rollerbladers, joggers, people walking dogs that are barking at the monkeys, and other things you would never seen in a zoo in the US, but this is France.

Oh, and our place came furnished. We bought a tv, a couple pillows, and some basic silverware and linens, but otherwise we can still fit pretty much everything we own into a few suitcases and a snowboard bag.

I really like our neighborhood as well. Lots of cool architecture, nice shops, wide, tree lined boulevards--it looks to me more like a french city should look than where we lived earlier, which was just plain, characterless apartment blocks next to a shopping mall :-) Our new 'hood is a bit pricey though. The chocolatier down the street had his chocolate on sale for the holidays for just $45 per pound.

Well, I'm off to see if I can find some fireworks or something. Happy New Year!

I have internet!

2008-12-27T13:14:00.000-08:00

I finally have working high speed internet, and phone, and 180 something channels of cable tv! Funny thing is, except for checking sports scores, and not being able to upload pictures for my blog, I didn't really miss the internet. George however, was going crazy. I'm not sure what she does on the internet, but she can sit for hours with the laptop in front of her browsing and typing.

Communication services (in some aspects) are quite advanced in France, compared to most offers in the US. We have high speed cable internet, cable tv with 180 something channels (including NASN the european ESPN with lots of AMERICAN football and ice hockey), and a land line that lets us call, for free, any land line in France and Europe, and any phone in about 45 other countries (including the USA and Hong Kong). Calling mobile phones in Europe, and calling countries not included in the list of free countries costs alot, but we'll just not do that.

All of the above services are just 50 euros per month, and we have one of the more expensive providers (because it is cable instead of ADSL). These services, of course, make use of VOIP and sometimes even TV over Internet to support such low prices. You can get these services in the US too, with vonage or skype or something, but the big companies don't really support them, and a similar package to what I have here would cost atleast 120 bucks per month in the US.

Mobile phone services, however, are retarded in France. Calling mobile phones always cost more than calling land lines, and calling numbers from mobiles phones can cost more than calling them from a land line, and its not always clear how much. I look forward to lots of surprises on my monthly cell phone bill.

Cell phones do have one positive over the US though. In Europe you only pay for calls you initiate, so other people can call you or text you or send you pictures, or whatever, and it will never cost you a thing.

Now that I have internet, I can upload some pics from around the new 'hood, and of my awesome (ly ugly) apartment. Update coming soon.

Oh, gotta go. V is on (and not V for Vendetta, but V the 1980's alien invasion mini series with Marc Singer). The French love old American TV. I watched Fall Guy the other day!

The fight for internet!

2008-12-23T11:08:00.000-08:00

I moved to a new (new to me, built and decorated a few centuries ago) apartment last week, and chose numericable as my internet/phone/cable tv provider. Most people in Lyon have ADSL for their internet, as cable is actually kinda new, and I am lucky enough to live in a part of Lyon that has cable. Cable is much faster than ADSL, and about the same price, so it seemed to be a good choice. And my apartment doesn't have a phone line, and they are quite expensive to install, so Cable I chose.

I had a friend at work help me call to setup my installation appointment and desired services, just to make sure my bad French didn't get me signed up for a bunch of crap I did not want. Everything seemed to go smooth and we had an appointment for Friday. Yay, I will have internet before the holidays. And a phone, so I can call the loved ones.

Friday came and went, and nobody showed up. I called customer service and they asked me for my customer number, which of course I do not have since I am not yet a customer, and so he couldn't help me. He was getting frustrated at my bad French, and I was just frustrated in general, so I gave up on the phone call and decided to visit their office the next day, which was just a few blocks away, and surprisingly open on a Saturday.

Office visit was super smooth. Guy even spoke a bit of English and was cracking jokes. I signed up for internet, phone, cable with the sports channel that shows american football, tivo, all good. Well almost. They were out of tivos, so I had to settle for a normal hd box, and then when they get some new tivos in I can exchange it. okay. We set an appointment for Tuesday.

Tuesday comes, and the guy is actually early. Awesome. Cable guy ran the cable into my house and gives me my cable box and modem. Turns out they were out of HD cable boxes too, so I have the old SD one. That sucks, but oh well. At least I have something.

Something.

I have a cable box and a modem now, but... still no internet or cable tv. Some customer services in France are ridiculously bad and unnecessarily complicated--cable is one of them. The technician shows up at your house, drops off the cable box and modem, and then asks if you would like to pay 50 bucks for him to hook it up. hooking up cable boxes and modems is dead simple, you just plug them in and they pretty much work, so I didn't want to pay him 50 bucks for this.

I almost did though, because in the back of my mind I knew that something would not work properly, and it would be best to have him here when it didn't work. but, I am cheap, so I said I would do it myself, and he left as quick as he could.

5 minutes later I had the modem hooked up, and... it didn't work. I hooked the cable box up too just to double check, and it reported the same 0% signal strength. after an hour on the phone (which I am sure they charged me for), we had no resolution, and they need to send the technician back. after the holidays.

Technical service sucks in the USA too, especially trying to resolve anything over the phone, but when a technician is sent to your house, they generally verify the thing they setup actually works. I am still surprised that the tech didn't at least hook the cable box up to make sure it worked--you just plug it in!

I guess its not all bad though. Having no internet forced me to go to the library to use their internet and I picked up a couple books while I was there, so I'll have some good reading over the holidays. Plus all this complaining over the phone has greatly improved my French! Once I get this month's bill, I'm sure I will improve my swear word vocabulary too.

Hope everyone has a great Christmas.

Joyeux Noël, Numericable!

La Fête des Lumières

2008-12-07T10:52:00.001-08:00

The Festival of Lights takes place every year in Lyon on the days leading up to December
8th--the day of the actual holiday. The residents of Lyon place candles in their windows on this day to express gratitude to the Virgin Mary for sparing them from the plague (or maybe it has something to do with good weather, I've heard different stories). Regardless of the original intent, like all good modern holidays, it has been elongated and enlarged to get more people to spend more money. And it was quite cool.

Normal Christmas type lights, and of course the lights in the windows, are common, but also in a few key areas of Lyon, really extravagant light shows are erected. Interesting decorations and lights around popular statues, beautiful light patterns projected on older buildings, and even "movies" projected across buildings. And I don't mean movies like Super Troopers or the Matrix, but cool animations that match the existing shape and contours of the building, and are quite amazing to watch. All of the decorations were cool.

Like all good festivals, there was also lots of good food and drink. Vin chaud, wine mixed with cinnamon and apples and heated, seems to be the preferred drink of the night. It was cold, so I definitely understand why this drink is so popular, and I had a few cups to warm the bones.

This festival is quite popular, and the place was packed. Compared to Seattle, Lyon generally seems overcrowded, but this was like Disney Land crowded. I brought my good camera and my tripod, so I could get good long exposure night shots, and every shot had about 150 people walking thru my picture and bumping my tripod. I got a few good shots though, so to see more pics click here.

Snowboarding in the Alps

2008-11-30T11:00:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again--cold in the air, leaves on the ground, and snow in the mountains. Lyon is about 160 kilometers (100 miles for you yanks) from the Alps, and just a little bit further to the nearest ski resorts. In fact there are like 15 ski resorts within a couple hours drive from Lyon, and probably more than 30 within 4 hours.

The picture above is from the top of Val Thorens, this week's feature destination.

I don't have a car. Driving in Europe scares me, so I'm not sure if I ever will. And if I did, I'm not sure I would want to take my chances getting up windy, snow-covered mountain roads. Luckily most people in Lyon are in the same boat I am, so we have good options for travel to the mountains. Bus was convienent, cheap, and way too early. I was joined by two friends from work at the bus stop at 5:30 in the morning for the 2.5 hour ride to the resort, but other than that the ride was good.

Val Thorens is a huge resort. The snow cover wasn't great, so we were restricted to just a few runs, but being the first day of the season, the snow was fresh and untouched. The sun was shining, the weather was right around 32 degrees farenheit, and I was getting my thing on.

My first day in the Alps was awesome (That's me in the picture above doing something cool).

At least it started out awesome. The first two hours were amazing. The views are big, for lack of a better word, and the snow was okay and there was hardly anyone there.

Then the wind came. At first it wasn't too bad. The main run was serviced by a teleferic (gondola), so we didn't have to deal with the usual cold, windy lift ride up. The mountain had lots of valleys to atleast get some riding out of the wind, so we kept riding and took a break for lunch around 1 pm.

Ski resort food is usually two things--bad and expensive. The food here was doubly expensive, but it was really good. I had Tartiflette, a potato and cheese casserole thing, that was awesome. And a diet coke to make up for the 5,000 calories and all the carbs that dish had.

After lunch, the hurricane came in. I got blown off the piste by a huge gust of wind, and the wind quickly turned all the runs to hard ice. The wind was so strong that the bus driver couldn't even open the door to the bus, we had to use the back door which was protected from the wind. So the day ended a little earlier than I would have liked, but the good beginning made up for it.

For more pictures of Val Thorens, see here. All the good photos were taken by Cedric. Thanks Cedric.

Oh, and George starts her intensive French lessons tomorrow. Wish her luck.

Baby Cow's Head

2008-11-22T10:13:00.000-08:00

Doesn't that look Yummy?

For George's second day in France, she and I went out with some friends for some traditional Lyonnaise cuisine. Typical French meals, ingredients-wise, are not all that different from American meals--a main meat, some potatoes, and some other common mixed veggies--the difference is generally in the sauces and the preperation. My coworker had a nice sausage caserole, his wife had a flank of lamb with potatoes and mixed veggies, and I had some duck with potatoes and ratatouille. None of these dishes would cause the average American any hesitation when ordering. (You guys know I am not a meat eater, so duck was quite a stretch for me).

Some french food, however, is quite "odd" by American standards. Frog legs seem pretty exotic, escargo (snails) is quite bizzarre, and organs (livers, kidneys, etc.) are more common here than in most parts of the US.

So George, being from Hong Kong where they eat just about anything, and things like Chicken's Feet are a local favorite, decided to try something new and exciting. And by new and exciting, of course, I mean crazy and weird. Tête de veau, probably the most exotic item on the menu, translates to english as Veal Head. Like her favorite dim sum mentioned above, Chicken's Feet, I am not quite sure what meat Veal Head consists of, but it was slightly translucent with the consistency of jello. Our friends felt bad for letting George order it, but the waitress was quite impressed and gave George 2 thumbs up when she cleaned her plate.

George, by the way, says it was good, so next time you guys see Tête de Veau on the menu you have my recommendation (and Chicken's Feet are quite good too). And that picture above is not the actual picture of what she ate. I didn't have my camera with me, so I had to fall back to google image search, and that was all I got. George's dish looked something like that, but somehow prettier (it was a fancy restaurant!).

After dinner we returned to our friends' house for some dessert and tea. I'm not much for chocolate or candy or cake or other typical desserts, but I LOVE me some fruit filled pastries. Lyon is a pretty good place to feed your pastry sweat tooth, and I struggle every time we pass a bakery to not pick up a few. Mmmmmm.... Buttery Calories.

Well, I am off to Berlin for a few days for work, so hopefully my next blog will contain pictures of me passed out over some sour kraut with one of those gigantic german beer mugs in my hand (Unfortunately my knowledge of Germany comes entirely from the movie Beerfest).

Auf Wiedersehen

The morning handshake ritual

2008-11-13T12:53:00.000-08:00

In the US, you tend to only shake someone's hand the first couple times you meet them, or maybe if you haven't seen them in a while, but the people you see everyday rarely warrant more than a “good morning” and a maybe slight nod of the head when you arrive at the office.

Not so in France. The morning handshake ritual, as my American compatriot Kain calls it, marks the beginning of every work day here. It doesn't matter if it is your first day, or your 1,000th day, after you take your coat off and drop your lunch off at your desk in the morning, you walk around the entire office and say bonjour, salut, ça va, good morning or something, and you shake hands.

So every morning when I get to work I shake hands with 35 other people. At first it was kinda weird, but now I quite like it. I am not the kind of person that seeks out affection, or needs emotional reinforcement on a daily basis, but starting your day off with 3 dozen smiling, friendly handshakes certainly helps get the day off to a good start. I think people in America should start their work day off by shaking everyone's hand.

With female coworkers, or close friends, you can opt for the kiss on each cheek thing instead of the handshake, but for now I am sticking with the handshake. Once I have been there for a while, I might try to throw a fist bump or something in for variety, but I'm not sure how that will work out.

Oh, and when you leave the office you say bye to people. At least to the people that sit close enough to you to see you leave.

Today's picture is my horrible attempt at creating a panorama of the view from our balcony out of a few separate images.

Explorin' my hood

2008-11-09T06:39:00.000-08:00

I slept until 2 pm on Saturday and it was AWESOME! I have been so jetlagged since I got here, I don't think I have slept more than 4 or 5 hours per night, and it was catching up with me. Saturday put a big dent in my sleep debt.

Sunday, however, I was up again before 7 (which is better than 4 or 5, which is when I had been waking up). The sun was shining, and my tummy was rumbling, so I decided Sunday would be a good day for an early breakfast and a stroll around town. I've been here before, almost exactly a year ago actually, but it is a totally different feeling to walk around a strange/exotic town and know that you live here--you are not just a tourist (Although I am totally still the stupid foreigner).

My hotel is just east of Vieux Lyon (Old Lyon), which, as its name implies, is the center of the original city of Lyon before it exploded into the sprawling urban area it is today. Lyon is old! Up the hil from the old lyon, is an ampitheatre built by the Romans before Jesus Christ was even born--and it is still used today. Old Lyon is not quite as old as that, but the architecture, plazas, fountains, etc. are quite old and quite beautiful. The picture above is one of my favorite fountains in Lyon. It is huge, and sits in the middle of a plaza surrounded by awesome buildings.

I could have taken an awesome picture at pretty much every corner of Vieux Lyon, and pretty much did, but I will not bog you down with my 200 photos of buidling and plazas, but some of them can be found here if you want to see more.

Ciao
--michael

I can see my work from here

2008-11-05T11:54:00.001-08:00

See that big pencilly shaped building on the left. I don't work there, I work about 5 blocks right of it. My temporary lodgings are half-way between the pencil and work, so everything is pretty close.

Today was the first day of work. Work's cool. Arkane has the top two floors of a 9 story building with a large deck on the top floor. On a clear day they say you can see the Alps, but today was not a clear day, so I'll have to get back to you on that one.

My day was about 75% English and 25% Français, and slightly less than 25% of me having no idea what was going on. Body language is universal though--A well placed shrug or nod and everything is golden.

If I understood correctly, Tuesday is a holiday. The French don't like to break up their work week (or more importantly, miss an opportunity for a long weekend), so instead of working that odd Mondy in the middle, they will faire la pont (make a bridge) and just go ahead and take Monday off too--paid of course. Its been a hard one day of work already, so I'm looking forward to my long weekend too. I'll get the good camera out and get some better pictures for future blogs.

à plus tard

--michael