In the land of red wine

Posted by Greg Durrett (INRIA–Bordeaux, France)

Hi everyone! For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Greg, a rising senior in CS (6-3) and math (18). I am participating in the MISTI-France program. My internship is at the INRIA Sud-Ouest research center in Bordeaux. INRIA is France’s national computer science research institute, affiliated with a number of different universities in different parts of France. This one is affiliated with the University of Bordeaux 1, so I’m actually working in the Institut de Mathématiques de Bordeaux (IMB) at the university. What I’m doing is essentially analogous to a UROP, and the academic setting in France is actually quite similar to that of America. My project is on using certain statistical methods to analyze the dynamics of disease propagation during epidemics. It’s really interesting stuff and I could go on all day about it, but I imagine that anyone reading this would rather I didn’t, so I’ll stop there…

There was a small conference my second week here, with our research group hosting an associated team from China working on similar problems. Most of the talks were way over my head (as they mostly over the heads of the masters and PhD students as well), so the main benefit to me was a series of free lunches and a final conference dinner at a fairly nice restaurant. The meal followed the French “prix fixe” model. You have three choices for your entrée (appetizer), plat (main dish), and dessert, all for a fixed price, and the restaurant changes all of these daily. Dinner starts with an apéritif (a before-dinner cocktail) and dessert is followed by coffee, so dinner is pretty protracted; the whole affair took around three hours. And, of course, no dinner in Bordeaux would be complete without one of the region’s world-famous red wines. Unfortunately, having no taste for fine red wine, I was more or less unable to drink it.

I’ve managed to find time to do a little traveling around the area as well. Last weekend, I went with some people from work to Arcachon, a beach resort about forty miles from Bordeaux or so. It’s not directly on the ocean, so the water is warm enough to swim in, and the beaches are pretty fantastic. The picture is of me and Peng, a friend from work who’s originally from China. We’re sitting on the Dune du Pilat, a gigantic natural sand dune a few miles from Arcachon. As you can see, the view of the basin that it overlooks is pretty spectacular.

A few random observations:

• Around the university, I have not seen men exchanging cheek kisses as a greeting, and I myself have so far only exchanged the cheek kisses with girls. However, around the city, I have seen male-male cheek kisses (including between two tough-looking kids in baggy clothes, which was somewhat striking).
• While I guess Mexicans take a siesta, the French prefer to deal with the post-lunch food coma a different way. Our lunch group typically goes to a café near the university to have coffee before heading back to work, and I gather that this is very common in France.
• Europe is very linguistically diverse. Our small conference included only the researchers from the IMB (including me) and the visiting Chinese researchers. French and Chinese were spoken within each group, and English was a sort of least common denominator for communication. However, my advisor is originally Spanish, so he and another girl spoke in Spanish, and another group of researchers spoke in Italian. So in the end, French and English only got me so far at the dinner table…
• Europeans like American media a lot. Cinemas play all of the big American movies, video game stores sell predominately American video games, and apparently American music has become so popular that radio stations are forced to play a certain amount of French music. Michael Jackson’s death was a huge front page headline in “Le Monde,” and everyone at work was talking about it the next day.

Like Emily in Toulouse, I have found myself essentially immersed in French, as I am the only MISTI-France person in Bordeaux, and I only briefly met one other native English speaker as he was leaving for summer vacation. I interact with my advisor in English, as he spent some time in the United States and his English is quite good, but I speak French to all of my friends at work and everyone else I talk with in day-to-day-life. I’ve found that talking with people for a long time in another language can be mentally exhausting, and it’s a bit harder to just “chill out” with friends when you’re struggling with a bit of a language barrier. But above all, it feels great to finally be putting six-and-a-half years of French education to good use!

Toulouse, MatLab and Furbies

Posted by Emily Conn (Laboratoire d’Analyse et d’Architecture des Systèmes–Toulouse, France)

Hey! I’m Emily, a rising junior in Course 2 (Mechanical Engineering) and am spending my summer working in Toulouse, France at the Laboratoire d’Analyse et d’Architecture des Systèmes (LAAS) where I’ll be for about two and a half months. I am staying with a family and it’s been about four weeks since I arrived.

Toulouse is a medium sized city – it’s known for being a lively university town (like Boston!) and I’m quite glad I chose to come. I was very set on staying with a host family, and the family I am with now has three kids – two girls (ages 6, 12) and one boy (9). They also had, up until a few days ago, when she returned home, a “jeune fille au pair” (a young girl au pair) who is my age, and cared for the children after school. The kids are a lot of fun – they are very accustomed to having these au pairs from different countries, and for this, I find them to be very welcoming. They are aware that my French isn’t perfect, and so they very willingly will speak slowly or explain words that I don’t know.

It was also a really great coincidence that Bente, the au pair, and I got along really well. For my first few weeks in Toulouse, she was more than willing to take me around, help me find my feet here, and explain things to me when I was confused.

Overall, I would say my experience here with the family has been great.

They also have a pool, which is a great way to beat the hot Toulousian heat.

 

That’s Bente – up in North Germany, where she’s from. It’s too cold to swim, so the area doesn’t have a lot of strong swimmers. Thus she is only comfortable in the water if she has her floatable arm bands on, despite being twenty years old.

I’m actually totally kidding. She swims perfectly fine, as do, I’m sure, the rest of the North Germans. We just thought it would be fun one day to have a picnic in the water, which is why there’s a bottle of lemonade with her also, and having a picnic in the water is hard if you don’t have some flotation aid. =)

There’s another picture, this one with some of the family’s kids. This is where I live – complete not only with a pool but also a bunch of horses!

This time, I’m only half-kidding. This is the family’s home in the countryside; isn’t it gorgeous? Their home in Toulouse is nice too, of course, but the countryside that they visit on the weekends (and take me along!) is stunning. You can see here Bente doing a handstand and all the kids “supporting” her. They were trying to push her over. Most of the kids in the photo don’t belong to “my” family; only the little girl and the big boy in the white shirt are here. The others are cousins.

And more countryside pictures.

As for the lab itself – it is located in the main science-y complex of Toulouse, where there are a whole cluster of labs and a university or two, including one of France’s famous Aero-Astro universities, Sup Aéro. I’m not really sure how many people there are that work in this lab, but within my group, I think we must have around 50 people, maybe more. I know at least that we have around 15 interns, but unlike me, all of them are doing a sort of senior thesis – so they all just finished the equivalent of their undergrad studies, and have about six to eight months to write a report.

Also, almost everyone here is a guy – in the entire lab group, I have seen four girls, and out of those four, I only see two here consistently. Maybe three, if I say that the other two count for a half each because I only see them here half the time. It’s definitely a change in environment, and the guys are all really nice and welcoming, but it does feel like engineering is a much more male-dominated sector here.

My work, specifically, is a little hard to describe. For starters, remember, I’m
Course 2. I came here to build robots. Well, I got here and learned that
actually, they don’t build robots. They program them, and the actual hardware/body of the robot comes from companies like Mitsubishi. Also, I don’t program at all, save for the weekly 2.003/2.004 Matlab portion of the pset. So for about two weeks, everyone was scrambling to figure out what to do with me, but last week, they finally managed to find a small subset of the group that works mainly with matlab on the robots, so I have been honing my matlab skills. While I wouldn’t exactly say it’s fascinating, I’m still becoming more comfortable at navigating through the murky interiors of Matlab, which is a plus. I rather miss the machine shop and SolidWorks, (they have a small machine shop next door to my lab, and every time I walk by, the familiar scent of the machine oil makes me envious) but I have the rest of my life to do that.

Finally – one of the most striking parts about being in Toulouse, or any other non-Paris city here, I imagine, is that I am completely alone. The majority of the MISTI France kids head over to Paris, and then a few of us take off for smaller towns. This may sound a bit intimidating, but I actually am pretty happy I chose to do this. For starters, I am speaking French constantly – from the moment I walk into lab to saying good night to the family – it’s all in French. For the first few days, I literally woke up, and in those moments where you blink sleep out of your eyes before rolling out of bed, I would think, “Oh man. Okay. I’m going to spend the entire day speaking French.” And that wasn’t only a goal – it was a necessity. My family knows a few words in English; my lab mates can hold a conversation in English but still speak in French. Then there are other non-French people with whom the only common language I have is my imperfect French, like Bente and Lisanna, another German jeune fille au pair I got to know. I’m hoping by the end of the summer, it will really have improved. (Bente was laughing when I was asking why there weren’t any more neckties in the salad, which stores sold rubber butter, and whether or not she had put on academic cream. I really meant shrimp, peanut butter, and sun screen.) At any rate, I have been chattering away, which is how my blog name came to mind: Bente affectionately called me a furby, when she overheard me saying nonsense phrases to myself, practicing the pronunciation and mimicking different people’s intonation, – couteau, mouton, bouteille, trop bien!, comme d’hab, pas de tout, un truc comme ca, douze euros, deux euros, au-dessous, au-dessus, tu vas prendre cher, petit hamster!…!

Me, Lisanna and Bente – my two first friends in Toulouse!

Death (and partial resuscitation) by MATLAB

Posted by Latifah Hamzah (Université catholique de Louvain–Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) 

So I’m not actually in France. I’m in Belgium. (It matters.) And in the midst of mussels-and-waffles-and-beer-and-fries-induced happiness, having been lulled into a false sense of security and contentment, I suddenly realised that I was being confronted with: DEATH by MATLAB.

Essentially, I’d been asked to find a way of tracking the free surface in an image from a dam break and producing a table with all the relevant coordinates. Not too bad, right? WRONG. To go through the last two weeks in fast forward: approximately 752 pages of MATLAB manuals, 11.5 different approaches, something that felt like a solution (until it turned out that the line had to be rectilinear for it to work, at which point I magically discovered that I could now swear in four different languages) but……no solution. :’(

(from left) me, Rui (who is really responsible for the dam-break madness but tries to blame it on me), Catherine and Gael, colleagues from the Civil and Environmental Engineering department

Late last week, thoroughly outfoxed by MATLAB, I decided that my state of mind then was best personified by Iago, my favourite parrot in Aladdin. After spending the next 10 minutes attempting to make a passable sketch of him, which is proudly displayed at the top of this post, (no laughing) I donated my notable piece of artwork to a colleague to commemorate the joyous occasion.

At the same time, being the proverbial ostrich, I decided the problem would obviously solve itself if I took a break and took photos of my colleagues instead.

Olivier (above) made the fatal mistake of actually trying to help me the first time I asked and is seen here caught in his uh-oh-I’m-getting-photographed-but-can’t-get-out-of-the-way-because-there’s-a-wall-behind-me-so-I-suppose-I-should-smile pose. Iago was initially donated to him, but subsequently had to be rescued from destitution when it was suggested that a trash can might make a better home. I’d threatened to pillory him here for that but I’m feeling nice, so, erm, ‘hi Oli!’ =D

Richard (left) and Jonathan thoughtfully perusing some code. I'm pretty glad it's not only my code that gets sworn at!

ANYWAY….three days later, I have a code that works. WORKS!!! Yesterday, I came in, stared at my code, bugged Oli and Rui some more, and whoosh! Something that ran without errors and looked more or less like what I wanted. *cue victory dance* Magic……… Man, I’ve never been so proud of a semi-wonky, supposedly-continuous-but-kinda-not line. =P

So now, moderately encouraged (if only partially resuscitated), I march onwards in search of total summer awesomeness. Next up? Numerical work……in MATLAB. Death #2, anyone?

Trip to Annecy

Posted by Olivier Chatot (France Telecom–Grenoble, France)

I spent last weekend in Annecy, a small city often called the Venice of the Alps. This city is famous for the various activities you can do: rock climbing, parapent, sailing, hiking, skying… I went there with people I met in Grenoble, where I work. We climbed to the top of nearby mountains during the day and watched movies at night — that weekend was the Festival of Animation. The picture above shows the view from the top of the second mountain, where we enjoyed a typical French picnic with salami, jam and cheese!

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