French Administration Vs. Erik, 1- 0

People had told me before I came here that the French administration loves pictures of the people it processes. I thought I would be a smart kid and bring lots of pictures with me here to France so I printed out 30 pictures of myself on a sheet. No good. When I showed them today they were appearantly twice the size that they should be. Well, at least I got lots of pictures to give to my friends.

Right now I'm just waiting for school to begin on monday so I can begin meeting new people.

I looked through a guide to Grenoble and it seems to be quite a few nice night clubs, or boites, including ones that play house. Sweeeeeet...

This Sunday I will recieve Sara from Linköping and KTH (it's a long story) at the train station. There seems to be a TGV going directly to Grenoble (I just couldn't find it myself) and she'll arive with one in the evening. She doesn't have a place to stay the until the first of september so she'll stay with me for a couple of days.

This is a Smirnoff commercial but if you swing that way, it's quite funny.

Vocab fab: tuyeuteur - euse, someone who gives tips (e.g. to the police)

New address

If you wanna write me the address is:

Erik Werner
4 place VAUCANSON
38000 GRENOBLE
France

I just love the parks here, free Internet access everywhere...

So far so good

Salut tout le monde! Je suis à Grenoble! I've just found a park in this pretty little town with free internet and a fantastic view over one of the surrounding moutain tops. This particular hill top has a large fortress on it and there's cable car going to the top. I'm sure I'll go there later.

My journey down here went well. Funny thing was that it in a way ended up beeing funded by Air France. At the check-in they told me that the flight might be overbooked and asked if I in that case could take a flight leaving only 20 (!) minutes later. For this possible inconvenience they me gave a 150€ voucher (The cost of my flight was around 60€). In any case, the flight was never overbooked and the only trouble I had was a late check-in which resulted in a swift baggage pick-up in Paris where my bags were number three and four on the conveyor belt. Hopefully they'll continue to pay me for flying with them...

The rest of the journey went without problems. The TGV train to Lyon was quite uneventful, as was the bus ride to Grenoble. My land-lord welcomed me at the bus station. He was in a good mood and drove me to the house. I must ask how old it is because it just seems built quite long ago with thick brick walls. It's 5-storey (British spelling, mind you) apartment building and I think my landlord owns three apartments and lets two of them. To go to my room you have cross a yard, enter my landlords garage, open another door and go up a wooden staircase. The room is cosy with lots of spotlights and the small kitchen is quite well planned. Well, there's no real oven of course, which is a bit of a setback. There is some excuse for one which I guess can be used to grill sandwhiches and make cakes. I'll just have to go to restaurants a lot more... :) The futon-style bed and sofa is a bit on the shorter side with a colour from your most brown-yellow nightmares. I hope I can find something nice to cover it with. It is, however, nice to sleep in. The window has a view over the small yard and the house blocks direct sunlight most of the day, which is probably a blessing during the hotter months here.

I've another day on my own and then my friend Ylva from my French language course in Linköping will arrive. I suppose we will explore the city more together over the weekend. Language school starts this monday, and all the extra-curricular activities with it. A week later it's time for rollcall. What me worry? This is going to be challenge but I understand quite much of what people are saying already, even when they speak really fast.

As I'm sure I'll come to discover more and more, France is certainly not Sweden. They don't have proper plastic bags at the food stores and it seems like house music songs can be popular hits (”Call on me” was an exception). I also think that French kids are more in to chasing pigeons than Swedish kids are for some unknown reason. Some children (not the little girl on the picture though) really aim to hurt the little flying buggers but I haven't seen one succeed so far. I don't know if French kids are more aggressive or if there's just less pigeons accessible to maiming in Sweden.

From now on I'll try to update the blog at least once a week so I won't send you emails every time I do. Just check once a while.

Vocab fab:

caillou-x (m) , small stones. As in: ”Ne lance pas les cailloux!” which a lady said to her kid in the park . If there's one universal thing that kids all over the globe enjoy, I'd say it is throwing pebbles.

Sell Paris Hilton and buy God

Johannes recently directed me to a fairly new website. One could say it's a stock exchange game but instead of real stocks you buy and sell words, short phrases or names. The value of the words are based on how many times they're mentioned in articles from 3000 websites. For example"Kofi Annan" is so far today's best word. I've been sitting trying to find the next big word and work out patterns in the price movements. "Hurricane" has so far been a disappointment. I guess that's a good thing... It's quite fun. It's also a magnificent waste of time so I'll have to try to be careful and not get drawn in completely. There's also a French version of the game that I might check out later. Try it at your own risk...