Quick update from France:

I've been staying with various friends over the past few weeks, now I'm staying in the room of a friend which is located halfway up to the Bastille in old barracks (I guess) but it looks kind of like a castle. Anyway, it's really old and only has french toilets (i.e. squat over a hole in the floor)...so between that and the walk home in the evening, my legs are going to be stronger than a T-Rex's.
The view is breathtaking out the window, and it's so quiet up here above the city, crickets and wind. It's nice. Too bad I haven't had much time to enjoy it since I have been at the lab working in front of the computer all day for the past few weeks :(

Though my weekend was quite wonderful, on Friday night I joined in on a barbecue with some Italian friends and it followed an extreme Italian schedule...I was ready at 6, expecting an American style bbq, but we didn't even leave until 11pm, and we started eating at midnight and I left for home at 2am.

Saturday I went on a hike with one of my french friends, she took me to climb up the Dent de Crolles (Tooth of Crolles because it looks like a tooth) in the only mountain range around Grenoble I hadn't been in yet. The views were amazing and the air was dotted literally by hundreds of hanggliders (who like to take advantage of the steep cliffs in the Chartreuse mountains for launch points). The hike was wonderful and I remembered what I had been missing living in the Po Plains of Italy. At some points the trail involves climbing down through crevasses or up cliffs using cables. There is even a cave where you can walk all the way through to the other side of the Dent de Crolles but we didn't, we just used it as air conditioning and for crystal scavenging.

Then the next day, I went with some more french friends to a lake not far from Grenoble for swimming. It was chilly and crowded, but refreshing and if you swam out far enough there was no one around but the strange diving ducks and their ducklings and the mountains all around. It was the perfect spot, but unfortunately the french section of my brain was having a vacation, so I felt anti-social because for some reason I couldn't speak or understand french. It made me wish I had had more of an immersion experience, because after seven months in France I should be relatively fluent, but I still have a long way to go and speaking english all the time did not help improve things.

So that's my quick update. Now I've been working long hours on the computer to try to finish up my project and make up for being lazy last week and all weekend. I have to present my results next tuesday...but I'm going to London for four days in between now and then...and I'm not even close to done...so as you can see, I'm under a bit of pressure. It's too bad because I want to ride my bike around more and go sit at outdoor tables of cafe's in the center since it's not so easy to do such things back home, but I'm stuck working on this stupid project that will probably not bring anything all that interesting into the world. Well, who knows...maybe I can make something of it.

Okay, that's all for now. Back to Matlab.