Hi all. So, my day yesterday was the most full day I've had in a while, really. After French early in the morning, I took the bus to the Polytech' where I went to class and had lunch. (I have my first test on Monday! That should be interesting...) I decided to stick around for the afternoon for a club meeting some of the other guys mentioned. (In the meantime, I was completely shown up in "baby-foot" which is what the French call foosball. They have a million different rules, and some of them can do things like launch the ball into the goal from their defense side.) The club was actually for a competition in the Shell Eco-Marathon, where you have to build a car that runs on hydrogen. It was pretty cool, and I was actually able to give some relevant advice on the car's electrical system. I'm hopefully going to work with some guys from my class to come up with some sort of voltage step up circuit to power the car's main motor. Sadly, the competition is near the end of May, and I'm supposed to have left by then. I stuck around a little bit afterwards to watch some of the MechE's completely dismantle this really old European car. One guy also drove me around in another car that they've outfitted to drive across Europe.

I met up with some of the same guys that evening to go out to a restaurant. I had choucroute, which is a popular Alsatian dish with sauerkraut and sausages. They were all fascinated when I noticed that I had a couple dollar bills left in my wallet. I let a couple of them "buy" a dollar from me in exchange for a euro. I think I came out a couple cents ahead in that deal! Afterward, we went to play billiards, so a fun night.

Last week, we were on vacation, so I took the opportunity to see a little bit of Europe. I went to Bruxelles (Brussels), Strasbourg (a city in the Alsace region of France), and Genève (Geneva). Lots of picture here.

As far as highlights go, Brussels had a big square called the Grand Place next to my hotel. There was also this structure called the Atomium that I went to see.


Strasbourg is a really nice city - the city center is completely surrounded by rivers, and it has an older section of town called la Petite France:


Here's a spot where the river splits to go around the city. You can see what used to be a covered bridge and the cathedral (which was pretty impressive) in the background.


In Geneva, I went on a Tour of the Patek Philippe watch museum, which was pretty interesting (no pictures allowed though). I also took a boat on Lake Geneva, and of course saw the Jet d'Eau and flower clock. Here's a view of the city from the top of the cathedral:


That's all I for now, enjoy the pictures!

I can hardly believe it's already been a month here!

This weekend, Alix, Augustin's twin sister, flew in from the US, where she had spent 3 months. Right from the beginning, her dad jokingly pestered her to speak English to me. So now the entire family is here. This makes for quite the ambiance at the dinner table, with multiple conversations flying back and fourth. Needless to say, I don't always know what's going on.

The youngest boy, Paul, does the French equivalent of boy scouts, which the French call les scouts (pronounced "scoot"). Here's a picture of him in his uniform before he left to go camping this weekend:


The weather was pretty nice on Saturday, so I took a walk to check out le marché aux fleurs, which is an open-air flower market in the middle of one of the main streets. It stretches on for a respectable distance, and changes over to clothing and other vendors at some point. Regrettably, I didn't have my camera.

The family also showed me their country house this weekend, which is about a half an hour away by car. (As a side note, it's really interesting that once you leave the city, the French avoid traffic lights by using les rond-points (traffic circles). They have them everywhere, so that you can't really drive in a straight line for very long - to stay on the same road, you have to drive around half a circle every so often!) The family and many relatives live on the same plot of land. Apparently the beef I had for lunch was from an uncle who raises cattle there.

Seeing as it was one of those rare occasions on which the whole family was around, I was designated photographer. Here's a picture of the de Baudreuil family:

(in the back: Paul, Arnaud, Alix, Augustin; in the front: Marine, Camille)

And me with all the kids:


Today I went to my first engineering class at the Polytech'. It went well... The class is starting off with things that are review for me (binary, hexadecimal...) so that's kind of nice. But I was able to understand the professor. The thing that's going to mess with my head, now that I'm actually working with numbers, is that the French use commas instead of decimal points. Afterward, I had lunch with a couple French students I met in the class.

Now for a random fact that I find quite amusing: there's this one local radio station with the jingle "Nostalgieeeee." I guess that's the French version of "oldies" but it cracks me up every time I hear it.

À plus tard!