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I arrived back home this afternoon after a surprisingly comfortable 12 hour direct flight from CDG - SFO. We taxied by the frame of the Asiana aircraft that crashed a couple weeks ago. It was a little bit haunting to see it sitting there on the tarmac. When I got home, I did the worst thing possible and immediately fell asleep. Whoops. So now it is 1:00 am and I am wide awake. Whee!

Last day

I woke up feeling a lot better this morning and had a fairly productive final day at work. I decided to buy some of my favorite foods for dinner. I stopped by my favorite corner cafe and bought the plat du jour with a soufflé au fromage and a fromage blanc with apricot sauce. It was excellent as ever.

 The plat du jour was a chicken leg with a thin tomato sauce on top with a side of ratatouille (pronounced rhaut-ahh-tooo-yuh) and rice. The tomato sauce reminded me a little of a French version of BBQ sauce. It didn't have the same spices, but the effect was similar.

My plane leaves tomorrow around 10:00 am. In celebration of my last evening here, I thought it would be fun to put together a list of my favorite things here in Paris.

1. Soufflé au fromage.

2. Parc Montsouris

3. Warm summer nights

4. Polite public transit patrons

5. Pain au cocao

6. Quiche lorraine (Full disclosure -- this is actually an egg pie with mushrooms. I guess I never took a picture of a quiche lorraine.)

 7. Good croissants

8. This list is very food oriented. 

Anyway, there are other things that I will remember and miss. Sleeping with my windows open, the screeching of purple martins as I drift off to sleep, attempting to say "Merci" with the French gutteral r. Who knows. 

I don't feel too comfortable blogging details of my work/research, but I think the most interesting work related thing I learned during my time here is that some electronic devices will not function under Argon. Good to know. 

Au revoir!

Feeling ill

Today I'm feeling ill again. It must be a Thursday thing. Anyway, I'm going to go to bed early to try to fight it.

Goodnight!

Chocolate bread

I saw these two bookstores today:

I also had a very good lunch today. I bought a quiche lorraine from a bakery on Rue Mouffetard, a small roll of chocolate bread, and a fresh peach. I've never had chocolate bread before, but this stuff is great. It is just like regular bread (think of a short, floury baguette) with some cocoa powder mixed in the dough with a few small chunks of chocolate. It is hardly sweet at all, and very delicious. I will add this to the list of French foods I want to learn to cook when I get home. So far my list is:

1. Soufflé au fromage

2. The flaky quiche crust they make here -- It involves rolling out the dough, coating it with butter, folding it over on itself, rolling it out again, etc. until you get a multilayered, buttery, delicious dough.

3. Chocolate bread 

We shall see how much success I have with these endeavors. 

Glode

At lunch today one of my group members looked at me and said, "Kathereeeen, you really like sandwiches." I didn't know how to respond to that, so I said, "I do like sandwiches," with a sortof confused look on my face. Then he asked me if I like normal food too. I looked around at the other people at the table, most of whom were eating sandwiches and asked, "What is normal food?" He responded by saying chicken and rice, or basically some meat + rice + vegetables thing. I told him that I do like that kind of food too, but it takes a long time to prepare. He then told me that I could buy already prepared normal food dishes at the cafe on the corner. 

I've been to this cafe many times, but for some reason I had always looked over their normal food section. So, I decided that I should try i for dinner tonight. I bought a meat + rice + vegetables dish and ate it with a fromage frais (French for yogurt -- sortof) for dessert. The meal itself was very good and incredibly filling. I can still feel it sitting in my stomach slowly digesting away. The vegetables were great. The yellow sauce tasted like a mustard-cream concoction and went well with the chunks of pork. The fromage frais though, it was fantastic! It was a little lighter than yogurt I'm used to in the US - it almost had a souffle-esque whipped texture. It came unsweetened, and was actually very delicious plain. However, I wanted to add some of the apricot sauce that came with it. The sauce was a little thinner than a marmalade and also had a very low level of sweetness. Together they made a heavenly dessert experience.

Quite tasty for a microwaved dinner.

After dinner I felt like a nice walk in the park. It has been very warm here for the last week and a half, and I love the warm evenings. In Berkeley, it is never warm at night. That is the biggest drawback of the place. The park across the street is a fantastic place to soak up the summer warmth. I took my kindle with me out to the park and sat by the pond reading the 3rd book in the Game of Thrones series while watching the ducks clean themselves.

A pretty duck giving himself a thorough cleaning.

I think I even spotted a blue heron up in the trees on the other side of the pond. She/he so elegantly glided down through the trees and then decided to hang out on top of a big bush that overlooked the pond.  He probably had a nice view from there.

Do you see him sitting on top of that bush on the left?

I also just learned that the past tense of glide used to be glode, until it morphed into glided or glid. I think I prefer glode. It sounds more elegant than glided. Glided reminds me of slided, and that makes me think of screaming children flinging themselves down slides. I also like that glode and glowed are homophones.

Salade de gésiers

Well, I guess the consensus is that those creatures are not bats. I recorded a video of the creatures flying around outside my balcony so you can hear their screech and see how they fly. Let's see if this uploads:

Anyway, we will see if that works. 

This evening I decided to go by the corner bakery to buy a dinner of very typical French foods. I bought a salade de gésiers, which is apparently very typical to this part of France (or at least that's what they tell me). Okay, these screechy things are going nuts outside! They must be so happy to get to feast on all the juicy July bugs out there. Anyway, it is a salad with chicken gizzards on top. The one I had tonight wasn't nearly as good as the one I had for lunch during our visit to Amiens, but it wasn't bad. It would be hard to compete with that meal.

Speaking of, I don't think I ever discussed that meal. I briefly mentioned that I went to visit the lab of a very respected researcher in our field last Wednesday. I went along with my adviser who gave a seminar there. It was a very fun day of talking about science and attempting to follow along with inorganic chemistry speak. Anyway, my adviser, our host at ESPCI, and our hosts at the university in Amiens all went out to lunch at this little French cafe near the school. First, I ate a salade de gésiers. That was enough to fill me up. I noticed that I ate much, much slower than everyone else at the table even though I wasn't talking nearly as much as they were and I felt like I was stuffing my face. I thought the French were supposed to eat slowly? I guess not. I will always be plagued with being the slowest eater at the table. After the salade, which was excellent, I had a white fish of some sort served on rice with carrots, potatoes, and onions scattered about on the plate. There were even a couple of pieces of chorizo mixed in there. The fish was tender and the vegetables and rice were well seasoned, but I would have enjoyed eating it more slowly. After that, they brought us desserts of a rice pudding type concoction. That was less awesome. It wasn't bad, but I think I'm not much of a dessert type person, so unless it is phenomenal, I would probably have preferred to skip it. I like warm, low-viscosity rice pudding with minimal sugar and other additives. This one was cold and covered with whipped cream and some raspberry sauce that was a bit too sweet for my liking. Anyway, it was very pretty, but when I remember the meal, I will focus on the salad and the fish.

Anyway, back to dinner tonight. So I bought this salade de gésiers from the corner bakery along with a soufflé au fromage and a little pear tart. The cheese soufflé was phenomenal, as always. Oh my goodness, if those turn out to be easy to bake, I'm doomed. The pear tart is one of those little dessert type things that I always see around in window displays, so I thought I ought to try it. It was pretty good actually. It had a nice custardy base and wasn't too sweet. The crust was a little powdery for my liking though. Anyway, it felt like an appropriately French dinner so I was satisfied. 

Wow, that video still isn't uploaded. I wish it would give me some indication for how far along it is. Anyway, I'll go ahead and overburden my connection by uploading a picture of my dinner too.

Dinner

The flying creatures are multiplying! There's a flock of 30 or so outside now. I do appreciate their culling of the bugs, but I wish they did it with more pleasant voices.

Bats?

Today is Bastille Day, a celebration of modern France as separate from the King Louis the XIV, XV, XVI reigns. I heard a bunch of fireworks last night and I'm guessing there will be many more tonight.

A pack of flying creatures that shriek like banshees day and night have appeared outside my window. I think they are probably bats, based on how they fly, but they certainly don't seem nocturnal. They are hard to catch on camera because they fly so fast, but here is my best shot:

A bat?

There are about five of them that fly around in circles in our courtyard. I've become accustomed to sleeping with my windows open, but recently I've been shutting them for fear of bat bites. 

Any ideas on what these might be?

This weekend has been refreshingly slow. Yesterday, I went grocery shopping and read a bunch. Today I worked on a little programming project for work. I enjoy the excuse to do some programming here and there. I plan to go to sleep early tonight so I can have lots of energy to finish up what I need to at work during my last week here. 

While grocery shopping yesterday, I couldn't help but daydream about being back in my own kitchen in Berkeley. All of the kitchen utensils here disappeared on July 1, so I'm left with only plastic knives and plastic plates. No pots, pans, or real knives. I stared longingly at the onions dreaming of making a delicious ratatouille. I then rented and watched the movie Ratatouille. What a great movie!

Vendredi

I worked up a serious sleep debt over the last week that culminated in a horrible day yesterday where I felt very sick and hardly made it into bed when I got home from work around 7:30pm. I'm happy I packed some ibuprofen and tylenol. Not having to search for pain killers in some French pharmacy while feeling horrible is a big plus. I took an ibuprofen and fell into bed right when I got home. I woke up briefly to eat a slice of pizza I bought from a bakery near my work and then went back to sleep. 

When I woke up this morning I felt orders of magnitude better. Work has been very full -- we've been working on this experiment for some time and we are making progress, but it is slow going. Today I learned that many of the capacitors that we take for granted in our electronic devices (controllers and the like) require an atmosphere that contains oxygen to function correctly. Since we work with battery materials, all of our work is done in argon. The dielectric constant of air and argon is very different and this difference is enough to cause serious quirkiness in electrical devices' functionality inside of an argon glovebox. Live and learn.

Nonetheless, we were able to make some good measurements today, and we will continue on next week. I plan to have a very quiet weekend filled with reading in the park and doing my laundry. It will be a much needed break from the intensity of the last few weeks.

Today I had an excellent lunch at this little tea room off of Rue Mouffetard. I ate some zuchinni soup with an excellent grainy bread -- it tasted like it was just baked, I'm not sure I've ever tasted such good bread at a restaurant. After the soup I had a mushroom and herb quiche (although anything that isn't quiche lorraine is not technically considered quiche. It is just an egg pie.) The quiche came with a side salad that was too salty for my tastes, but the quiche itself was great. My host Jennifer and I then both had a piece of cheesecake. I'm not a fan of cheesecake in the US, but apparently it is quite different here. The one we had was different from that in the states, but not too different. Jennifer was a little disappointed with it and said that she thinks they used a US recipe :) Oh well, someday I will taste a real French cheesecake. Anyway, it was a good lunch.

I just read that another Dreamliner caught on fire. Hm. Also, there was apparently a train that derailed just south of Paris. So don't worry, I wasn't on it. That's too bad though. 

Amiens

Today was wonderful, but I am very sleepy so this post will be short. My adviser gave a seminar at a university in Amiens, France today, so the two of us and our host from Paris spent the day there. The seminar was for a group that is very well known in my field, so it was fun to meet the people there and tour their facilities. Amiens is also quite pretty. They have a very big cathedral.

Anyway, my bed is calling. Good night!

Art

Today was a full workday. I didn't take any pictures, but I have plenty from the weekend and thought I'd show some of my favorite art pieces from the Pompidou Center.

I like this because it is fun to see how the colored glass affects the colors painted on the walls behind it. Also, COLOR!

The one is a room filled with aluminum foil shrouded ghosts. I like it because you walk into the room from behind the figures as if you are walking into a worship service of some sort. It made me feel a little reverent upon entry, but also amused by how space-aged they look.

Again, color! Something about this neon orange made the glass look like it glowed. I was drawn like a mosquito to a zapper.

I actually didn't notice that the guy in the center of the painting was holding a severed head. I think I was drawn to the colors (surprise!) and the overlay of a dotty-type print on a painted background.

This was a cool cave-like thing that we had a fun time crawling around in. Much of the work at the Pompidou center involves really neat materials and textures, but you aren't allowed to touch any of it. It was nice to get to touch something, and even step on it!

This exhibit gave nice respite for my super sore feet. All those little pieces on the table are mounted on spinning disks so the shadows are constantly changing on the walls. Some shadows looked like people alternatively dancing then fighting. They arranged the light in such a way that some of the shadows would stay in approximately the same place on the wall, while others would move across the whole length of the wall and back. It was fun to watch - especially because there was a couch to sit on.

I like this one because of the depth that it creates. Also, all that white stuff is actually a very fine netting. I'm not sure how the artist managed to create such intricate shapes with it. A laser cutter maybe?

These were just hanging there and we weren't even allowed to run through them! A crime.

Welp, I've got to wake up early tomorrow to head over to Amiens where my adviser is giving a seminar. Should be fun!

Tourism continued

I left off at the gardens of Versailles. The highly manicured gardens were Louis XIV way of showing his godliness by his ability to control nature. There is even an orange grove -- think, orange trees in cold and cloudy Paris -- but he (his talented gardeners anyway) made it happen. The gardens are gigantic, spanning 800 hectacres of countryside. In the center of the garden is a mile long, man-made pond in the shape of a cross.

The gardens at Versaille.

There are many small cafes in the gardens that sell reasonably priced sandwiches and ice cream cones. After eating a sandwich, I bought a delicious soft-serve chocolate and vanilla swirl ice cream cone. I was too busy enjoying it to take a picture, but it was one of the best ice cream experiences of recent memory.

We then walked out to the domain of Marie Antoinette to tour her country house. It was similar to the chateau, but with fewer murals and less gold. My feet hurt horribly by this point, so I didn't enjoy it that much, but there was one room that was a bright canary yellow that I absolutely loved.

A canary yellow room at the domaine de Marie-Antoinette.

At this point, I was pooped and we decided to head back to Paris. But, we were distracted by a beautiful fountain show that happens on the summer evenings. So we hung in there and watched the pretty fountains before heading back to the city for dinner.

Picture of people taking pictures of me taking pictures of the fountains.

Dinner was incredible. We took the train over to the Marais neighborhood and ate at a cute little cafe near the Pompidou Center. After dinner, we walked over to the Pompidou Center, snapped some photos, and headed home.

Photos from the evening.

We took the RER back home to an extra-bed-less room and spent another night squished on my tiny, probably not even twin-widthed bed. Oh well. It wasn't so bad really.

My advisor was supposed to fly out of SFO on Saturday afternoon and arrive in Paris on Sunday morning, but his flight was cancelled due to the plane crash at SFO. Fortunately, he was able to reschedule his flights and arrived this morning. Pretty amazing considering how chaotic it must have been to fly out of SFO that day.

That left our Sunday free for tourism as well. We started off with a nice breakfast at a cafe near my place. I had a cafe latte and a croissant filled with chocolate. Mmmm!

A typical Parisian breakfast.

We went for a stroll along the Seine and passed by many historic Parisian landmarks including Notre Dame, the Conciergerie, and the Louvre. Apparently, all major museums are free on the first Sunday of the month so the line at the Louvre was crazy! I'm glad we had no intentions of visiting it.

The Notre Dame cathedral on the shores of the Seine.

After our little walking tour we stopped for a sweltering lunch in a small cafe near the Seine. It was delicious, but we were sitting directly in the sun, so it was a somewhat unpleasant experience. We went from there to the Pompidou Center where the crowds were sparse and the art was fun. I like contemporary art. It makes me smile.

We got back home just in time for Tina to throw her stuff in her suitcase and run off to the airport, sealing off a successful weekend of tourism!

A weekend of tourism

This weekend was a whirlwind of tourism. Tina and I made for very good tourists in my opinion and hit almost all of the major Paris sites in one, fast-paced (but not stressful), weekend. She arrived from Hamburg on Friday around noon where I met up with her at the airport. CDG is a much bigger airport than I realized when I arrived here. It is also teeming with military personnel holding very large guns. It seemed unnecessary to me and left me feeling uncomfortable. Regardless, Tina's plane arrived on time and we were quickly on our way back to my place to drop her stuff off.

When we got to my place, I went to see about getting an extra bed for my room. I had requested, and paid for, an extra bed two days before she arrived. However, the lovely Etats-Unis administration did not get around to getting me a bed. So, I met with them again on Friday and they assured us that a bed would be in my room by the time we got home in the evening. 

We left for the Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre where we spent the afternoon. The Sacré-Coeur is a stunning, gypsum-laced cathedral built in the early 1900s on one of the tallest hills in Paris. It was built after the Prussian army laid seige to the city as a way to petition for mercy and forgiveness from God for the sins that he was evidently punishing them for. Apparently, since its completion in 1919, there has continuously been at least one person in the church praying for "Christ to be understanding of the world's sins" (Rick Steve's guidebook).

The Sacré-Coeur on a beautiful, clear day.

The cathedral was built in a somewhat seedy part of town that produced several famous artists including Salvador Dali, Maurice Utrillo, Picasso, Renoir, and others. It is also home to Cabaret and the Moulin Rouge. Both my coworkers and my guidebook warned me to avoid a nearby area called Barbès. However, Tina and I immediately found ourselves there after accidentally passing the road we were supposed to turn on. I actually didn't feel uncomfortable there at all. It was much less seedy than parts of San Francisco. I mean, I certainly wouldn't go around flashing a Rolex or an iphone, but it seemed like a fine place to go if you want to buy really cheap clothes or shoes.

We couldn't have asked for better weather. It was hot and very clear. The view from the Sacré-Coeur was phenomenal. 

View from the Sacré-Coeur.

There are many neat little places up by the Sacré-Coeur where famous artists used to live and where present-day, unheard of artists sell their wares. It's a quaint, and hilly area that makes for a nice walk.

After that tourism success, we stopped into a grocery store and bought fruit, cheese, and wine for a picnic. We stopped by a bakery to get a croissant and a baguette to go along with it, then we headed off to the Eiffel Tower for a romantic sunset picnic.

Picnic by the Eiffel Tower.

 We had a lovely picnic and waited for the sun to go down so we could watch the tower sparkle. It doesn't sparkle until the sky is dark and only for 5 minutes at the top of the hour. Since we are in the heart of summer, the sun doesn't set until after 10pm, so the tower didn't sparkle until 11:00. Although we were getting a bit chilly as we waited for the show, we both thought that it was worth it. Beautiful!

Sparkly!

We then went back to my place and found that they still hadn't brought an extra bed. The guy at the front desk assured us that we would have an extra bed the next day. We were unconvinced, but nodded and suffered through a cramped night in my tiny twin-sized bed. 

On Saturday, we woke up early, like the dutiful tourists we are, to go to Versailles. Versailles began as a hunting lodge and a Royal escape from the bustle of Parisian life. King Louis XIV loved the place and decided to turn it into a Palace during his reign. The people of France loved King Louis XIV and it seemed that the King also quite loved King Louis XIV. He thought of himself as the Sun King and likened himself to Apollo, the god of the Sun. The palace looks like it was dipped in a vat of gold. The glistening facade gives the impression that you are walking toward the sun - especially on a hot summer day. 

Versailles!

We knew that the Chateau would be packed since it was a warm Saturday in July, so we amused ourselves in the terrifyingly long security line by reading the guide book. I love my guide book. It is awesome. Thanks again Rick Steves!

The interior is as ornate as I could imagine. Evidently, the King was a big proponent of living in the public. He thought it was his duty to show the French how one should be properly French. He was always hosting parties and events, and the Chateau was open to everyone, including peasants. At this point, France was a cultural powerhouse in Europe and everyone looked to them to learn how to dress, eat, and party - and the French looked to the Sun King.  

Opulent interior of the chateau.

We also visited the gardens and the houses of Marie Antoinette. Oh my goodness it is after midnight and I've only reached the gardens of Versailles. I'm going to stop here and spread out the weekend events over the next few posts. I'll pick up here tomorrow.

For now, goodnight!

Versailles

Tina and I had another successful day of tourism. We went to Versailles and then had a great dinner near the Pompidou Center. It was delicious. I'll go into the details of the awesome weekend tomorrow. But for now, here's a pretty picture from today:

Tina and I in the Hall of Mirrors.

Tourism

Tina is visiting from Hamburg this weekend and we had a full day of tourism yesterday and will continue with our tourist duties today. Yesterday, we visited the Sacre Coeur/Montmartre part of town and also had a wonderful picnic at the base of the Eiffel Tower. Today we are heading out to Versailles. The weather is gorgeous so I think it will be a wonderful day.

4th of July

We had another barbeque at work today. I chose to not partake in the champagne this time since I wanted to stay awake for the afternoon. However, I did partake in the amazing lemon cake/pie thing they served for dessert. It was a pretty good work day. I got to wade through mounds of data which I enjoy doing. Rheology measurements are fun because they give you so much information to work with. 

There were few signs that today was the 4th of July apart from this gigantic US flag they hung up outside of the Fondation des Etats-Unis.

Independence Day

 It was a dreary day, but the clouds rolled away late in the evening revealing a blue sky that is supposed to last for the weekend. Here's hoping!

The clouds rolling away

Soldes

Last night, a group of students arrived at the cité universitaire and stayed up all night talking and laughing in the echo-prone halls. I feel like such a grinch, but 2:00am is not the time to have loud conversations in the hallway about Monster's University. Even after I put earplugs in, I couldn't block out their voices. Eventually someone down the hall came out and told them to quiet down, which they did for the most part. Unfortunately, the girl in the room next to me started having a conversation with her parents back in the US over video chat shortly after it had quieted down in the halls. I could hear every word of her conversation. It was ridiculous. I didn't think the conversation would go on that long, but they just kept talking and talking. I could even clearly hear her parents on the other end. Anyway, after over an hour of this, I crawled out of bed and asked her to quiet down a little, which she did.

This meant that I got barely any sleep last night, so I woke up in a grumpy mood. I went in to work and started my rheology measurements and then didn't have much else to do except read and write. After staring at the computer screen for two hours having read several articles without retaining any information from them, I decided to take the afternoon off. 

Pretty dress

I came home and took a nap then went back to the Luxembourg Garden area in Paris. It is very beautiful over there. Also, July is the month of "soldes" in France, which means all of the stores are having big sales. Most of the items are at least 50% off. This is the first things the girls in my lab told me when I arrived in Paris. "Oh, you will be here in July? This is such a good month. It is the month of the soldes!" I bought a cute flowy dress and a belt and then spent some time in the garden.

The garden was more enjoyable today than the last time I went. I think it's because it was a little drizzly, so there weren't too many people hanging around. Also, I could walk around with my eyes open since the sun was not shining with its full brilliance.

I also stopped by this cute bookstore that had a beautiful selection of old French books and illustrated children's books. You would have loved it mom. I plan to go back there soon. I bought a children's book that has a poem to help learn the numbers 0 - 10. The illustrations are very beautiful and I hope to understand the words someday too! I've got to start somewhere.

Beautiful flowers and monuments at the Jardin du Luxembourg

The children's book I bought on numbers

Fromage

 I spent the day doing rheology measurements on my polymer samples and discovering a glaring mistake in a calculation I made several months ago. Fortunately, I caught it before submitting anything to a journal, but I still feel bad about it. I checked the calculation several times, but still managed to miss it. *grumble* 

Yesterday, I bought a piece of heart shaped cheese. 

Heart shaped cheese

 The French have this thing where you are supposed to maintain the shape of a piece of cheese when you cut it. For instance, if you have a wedge of cheese, you should slice it so that it remains a wedge of cheese. So, I thought about how I could cut this heart shaped cheese and maintain its shape. I decided the easiest way was to cut it in half and slice equivalently sized slices from the center. Then, I would shave off a little piece at the top to make it look heart-shaped again when I put the two halves back together. 

It didn't work very well. But, it was delicious! 

After eating the cheese on a delicious bagel, I did the 7 minute workout of NYTimes lore. I probably should have rethought the order of those actions.