Going to a Concert

I had an opportunity to attend a concert at the Opera House located across the street from the Hotel de Ville.  I did not have a ticket, but decided to just show up at the door to see if I could get one.

When I arrived the front doors were locked and another couple was looking in the windows, looking forlorn.  They were an older couple and only spoke a few words of English.  We were able to convey the facts that we were both looking for the concert.  They had the advantage of being able to talk to others, so I told (more like showed) them there was a side door and then followed them.  This was the entrance we needed to use.  It was not a main entrance, but the door usually used by employees and artists.  Once inside, we needed to talk with the ticket manager, who had not yet arrived.  Once he did arrive, it was very informal. 

He had a list of "will-call" tickets and about 10 extra tickets.  He had us sit and wait while he passed out the paid tickets.  Then the manager just took our money and handed us a ticket.   I am proud of myself because I needed to communicate with all these people using French and I knew just enough to ask the correct questions and get a ticket. 

Once I had the ticket, we stood in line waiting for the elevator.  The lifts are very small in most of the buildings here.  There were two lifts being operated by attendants, but only 4-6 people could cram into each one.  The concert was being held on the top floor of the Opera complex.  The elevators only go up to the 10th floor and we needed to wind through the corridors and climb another floor to the very top.  This room is used on their brochure since it has a rounded glass roof and full length glass windows looking out over the city. It is a ballet studio with bars all around the outside and the back wall is all mirrors. They had protected the floor with a covering to accommodate the chairs and the audience.

 The view out the windows is fantastic. The Hotel de Ville is directly below and the square out in front on the other side is a great place to sit and watching people, with lots of cafes and outdoor seating.  To the left is an old nunnery that was converted into a museum.  The interior courtyard is free to visit and has several interesting statues.  I have visited both of these places to sketch. The view stretches out to the eastern hills of the city.

The program was Hummel and Schubert Musique de Chambre.  They consisted of a violon, alto, violoncelle, contrebasse, and piano.  They played a set from Hummel and retired off stage.  Then they returned to play the Schubert set.  The pianist was fantastic and these selections were mostly featuring the pianist.  I had taken a seat that allowed me to watch his hands.  I am always amazed to watch someone who is that accomplished.

I enjoyed the concert immensely.  I spent a lot of time listening to classical music the first semester of my PhD research. 

The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus is in Aurora, about 50 miles from Boulder.  In the first semester of the program, all the PhD research students take a class together. Unfortunately, the biologists like to get their classes done early so they can spend the rest of the day in the laboratory.  This mandatory class was from 8-10 am,  Monday-Friday.  As anyone who knows me will tell you, I am not a morning person and bear-ly a late morning. I have not woken up regularly before 9 am since I was a sophomore in high school.  It was not an option for me to commute each day since I would have needed to leave the house about 6:30 am because of traffic.  The best alternative was to take an apartment near the campus.  I rented a small apartment that was only a 10 minute walk, meaning I could wake up and stumble sleepily across the street and be at class in 15 minutes.  I spent most of the day after class trying to re-read enough to understand what had been presented during class that day, and then read about the class for the next day.  I brought the radio/CD player along with a selection of CDs from our collection.  This was a long winded way to say I found classical music was perfect for letting me read and concentrate without the outside sounds distracting me and Schubert was one of my favorites.

The week after this concert I wanted to continue my cultural refinement and attend the ballet Giselle.  I was late getting started and once again did not have a ticket.  I hustled through the city, needing to catch two metro lines to get to the Opera house again.  I made it right at the stroke of 8 pm when I thought the ballet started.  I approached the ticket desk, this time through the front doors.  In my best French I asked for a ticket and they just looked at me and said there was not a ballet there that evening.  The ballet was across town, just a kilometer (half mile) from where I started my mad dash. The person that spoke the most English told me "tickets fini", which I took to mean they were sold out.

C'est la vie! 

Lost in Translation

I have an email account with the ENS here in Lyon.  The problem is that 95% of all the emails are totally in French.  The others are usually for talks or seminars that have the introduction in French and the title and abstract of the talk in English.  I usually cut the text from the email and paste it into Google Translate.  Although it has trouble finding the correct English sentences, I get the general idea of the text.  I have used it for both French and German during my time here.

I should have used it for Dutch.

I have been getting letters from the US via snail mail.  Robyn, her mother and her sister have all sent me cards in the mail.  It is always unexpected to receive mail.  I do not have a mailbox, so they stick the letter in the door for me to find either on returning home or when I leave the apartment.

While I was in Belgium, I decided to send a note back to Pat, my mother-in-law, in Arizona.  I knew she would enjoy getting a card from there, but I did not want to just send a postcard.  But, being Easter Sunday and then the holiday on Monday, even the tourist shops were closed and I could not find a nice card.

On the way to the lab on Tuesday we stopped in a convenience store and they had some note cards in a circular wire rack display.  This is not the usual place you would find these cards and the packages were a bit old and dusty.  One set caught my eye, some beautiful water colors of flowers (tulips, roses, other flowers) and a simple phrase below the image.  I thought they looked nice, so I decided to buy them.

The proprietor did not even know how much to charge because they had been there so long.  They were very inexpensive and I happily went on my way.  I wrote a quick note on the back and addressed the letter before mailing it at the airport.  I figured that sending it from the airport might get it there quicker.

When I got home and unpacked all my stuff from the trip, I came across the note cards and decided to look up the phrase on them.  "Innige deelneming"  was the Dutch phrase and it translates via Google to "condolences." 

Needless to say, I have not told Pat the meaning of the phrase and I hope she did not look it up before reading this entry.  I know that she will see the humor of it all.  From now on I will use Google Translate before blindly buying cards with unknown phrases.

Visit to Leuven Belguim

Another trip to another lab in another country.  I have been visiting labs to see where in Europe I might spend two years after I get my PhD, gaining training and experience in science.  I was able to arrange a trip to visit the university town of Leuven, Belgium.

I arrived on Saturday, and after walking what seemed like an hour through the Brussels airport, I finally got to the baggage area. I never realized how big their airport was, but they have NATO and the European Union headquartered here.  Walking from Terminal A took at least fifteen minutes and then I still waited another twenty minutes before my luggage showed up.  There is only one train per hour on the weekends that goes to Leuven. When I got down to the basement to catch the train, I missed the previous one by only 10 minutes and I sat on the platform for another 45 minutes before the next train arrived.  Twenty-five minutes later I was in Leuven.  Once I was out of the train station the area was full of character and color.


Aaron, a New Englander and a grad student from the lab I was visiting, met me outside the train station and we walked down the main street (Bondgenotenlaan) from there towards the church in the middle of town.  Aaron had originally arranged for me to stay in his room, but instead I got to stay at his girlfriend's apartment on the 4th floor (top floor) near the center of town while she was away on a skiing holiday.  The living room and kitchen area of the apartment was about twice the size of my whole apartment in Lyon.  There was a separate bedroom about the size of my apartment and a nice bathroom three times the size of mine.  It was like being in a 4 star hotel.


Aaron showed me around the town and we got a late lunch at a bar along the "Longest bar in  Europe", or at least in Belgium. It is a set of bars all right next to each other (at least 15) around the old market place.  The center of the square is filled with outdoor seating and is even filled on sunny days in the winter. We talked about science for a couple hours and I called it a day.

Argh.  Daylight saving time started in Europe on Sunday.  Lost an hour.  It was already 11:00 when I got up.  I was going to go into Brussels to visit a museum, but I decided to just wander through Leuven a bit.  I tried to stop and sketch, but it was near 0 Celsius, so my hand froze and I could not draw.  I took pictures instead and will be able to draw them later. 

Aaron and I went to a little Dutch restaurant for dinner.  We had Draadjesvlees, a traditional Dutch slow-braised beef stew.  It was like a delicious pot roast with small spring onions in a rich beef broth.  It came with a salad and fries.  Belgium is known for french fries, and almost everywhere you go in the city, fries are unlimited.  Bad thing for me because I love fries.

Later that night, John, another American from New Hampshire, came over to practice his dissertation talk.  He was defending his thesis on Friday and he wanted to try out his talk on a few friends.  So, Aaron, another friend of theirs, and I listened to his talk and gave him lots of feedback. Hopefully he will ignore most of it.

The Monday after Easter is a holiday throughout most of Europe.  School and many of the shops were closed in town and Aaron decided he wanted to take me to Ghent.  It is about half an hour by train on the other side of Brussels from Leuven.  Ghent also has a large University, but the population is about twice that of Leuven.  Ghent is the quintessential Dutch town.  Yes, I know that it is not in the Netherlands, but this part of Belgium (Flanders) speaks Dutch. The town has a castle (right out of the knights of the round table) and canals with barges.  Very touristy, but it was nice to walk around and much more lively than Leuven.

That evening Kevin, whose lab I was visiting at K.U. Leuven, took Aaron and me out to dinner at a very nice restaurant.  I had a quail salad with toasted pine nuts and foie gras as the starter, sea bass as the main course, and a different wine with each course, of course.  For dessert: we had banana slices with Iced Cream (whip cream that is frozen around an ice cream) and brown sugar crumble on top.  Very delicious.  We talked about science for the two hours and I headed back to the room to finish preparing my talk for the next day.

Tuesday morning I ran my suitcase down to the train station and put it in a locker so I wouldn't need to drag it around town.  It was a gloriously sunny day.  I met up with Aaron to walk the 25 minutes across town to the lab.  I met with a couple people before my talk and then gave a short talk over lunch.  The talk went okay, and I met more people in the lab after lunch.  I also discussed funding possibilities with Kevin and I now have another post-doc opportunity to be explored when I graduate.

Aaron gave me a parting gift.  He had something imported from the US that I have been craving.  He had three bottles of cayenne pepper.  One of the bottles was almost empty so he asked me to take it.  He is almost through his PhD and will be heading back to the US for a visit in a couple months and he will restock his supplies at that time.  I am so excited.  I can't wait to make some pasta and have something to spice it up.

Oblivion is where this movie should be sent.

Akis, ME, Theresa, Thorsten, Matilde, David, Jeremie

A group of students and post-docs were going out on Friday night.  Dinner and a movie.  I joined them to go see the film Oblivion.  Mainly because it is opening here in Europe before opening in the US.  I have always wanted to be the first to see a movie, but I hate crowds and so I usually wait until a movie has been out a few weeks and then see it at a matinee.



We decided to have dinner first and go to the movie at 21:50 (9:50pm).  We ate at a nice restaurant which had a sampler plate that was piled high with 12 different items.  Three of us ordered the sampler and it came with enough for three servings of each.  Dinner took a while to eat and we did not leave the restaurant until nearly 22:00, but we only missed the commercials and most of the previews. The movie actually started twenty minutes after the posted time and other people besides us were still entering the a quarter full theater. Friday night on an opening weekend and only a quarter full. Maybe it is because this is a VO (Voice Original) english version, or maybe the other people know something else.

If anyone wants to see the movie Oblivion, it is more spoiled than the spoilers below, but I do talk about the plot.

OMG. That was the best filmed, crappy movie I have ever seen.  It was really bad. No, really, really, bad.

The director should never be allowed to film a movie again. Ultimately he is responsible for the whole movie, and the story sucked, there was no drama, there were no surprises, it was a complete rip off of other films.  People acting stupid (and stupidly), machines not acting in a logical or consistent manner.  Split screen with two human clones facing each other, supposedly pointing guns at each other, but one of the clones was looking somewhere besides where the other one was looking. The scenes were not connected, they looked like they were all made-for-TV video clips that were strung together into one continuous stream.  All of us agreed that the only thing we liked about going to the movies last night was the dinner.

Tom Cruise has the acting range of wilted cabbage.  The girl of his dreams (literally) tells him that she is his wife and he just looks at her?  At least he could have shown some emotion, like surprise, denial, laughing it off, or "Yes. I knew it", but, no, the actor and director just have him sit there with a stupid look on his face.  What was that suppose to mean?  If he had just completely ignored it and asked her what job she had before the war, it would have been better.  This director was only concerned with making nice special effects, into which he created some nice integrated live action and computer graphics, but so what.  The plot was so slow and sophomoric that it lost any credibility.  Tom had a nice souped up helicopter/jet and was trying to find a crashed aircraft.  After flying a little bit, he decided the only way to find it was by riding a dirt bike. Really?

I am not even sure that the actors were necessary for the story line.  Just needed lots of animated characters with a pretty CG "clone" machine running human integrated circuits.  Why even have humans?  The enemy had thousands of war clones waiting to kill off the heroes.  If the enemy had already blown up the moon, was scavenging the earth's oceans for their nuclear reactors, and had the technology to build these fantastic flying machines and weapons, why not just send them all down to the surface and shoot anything that moves on the surface?  They could have destroyed all the people and then got on with their business without any interference.  But then, how would they fleece you from hard earned money?

The women (or men) who like Tom Cruise will enjoy the multiple scenes where we had to watch him taking a shower or swimming in the pool.  Why do we need three scenes of him taking his shirt off and getting wet?

The scenes of him hanging on a wire, trying to act like he was weightless, seemed pretty bad. There were rip offs of the Star Wars scenes of flying in a narrow canyon and fighting off the bad guys.  Why would anyone go down into a canyon when they could stay above and just wait for the shot?.  It is just illogical, but makes for a pretty movie.

There was also a scene of human incubators, again, right out of the movies like The Matrix. The dramatic final Tom scene felt like a rip off from every sci-fi film - the tiny space craft enters a gigantic mother ship in orbit, such as Will Smith and Jeff Goldbloom in Independence Day.  Then, a meet-your-machine-that-thinks- it-is-a-god rip off from many other sci-fi films.

Morgan Freeman has about three scenes, which of course I liked, but they were not enough to even make this worth watching on video.

Oblivion is where this movie should be sent.

The problem with writing a blog

Besides wanting to share my adventures, writing a blog is a good way for me to vent my frustrations and anxieties by trying to see the humor in those situations.  Also, when it goes down on paper, er screen,  the large problems begin to look trivial and easily solvable.  I enjoy the lonesome hours of sitting and wondering what to say, how to say it, and I have lots of those hours to fill.

The problem is that I always feel that the next entry must be better than the last.  I must make it more funny, more poignant, more thought provoking than anything else I have produced before.  Of course this would be great if I eventually win a Pulitzer prize for my writing and then a Nobel prize for my research.  Although I believe that anything is possible with hard work, I know that I am lazy when it comes to writing.  I just enjoy telling a story about my day and some days are just more interesting than others.

I think my story telling is inherited.  My grandfather was known to tell tales.  My aunt and my mother collected his stories in the years before he died so we would be able to pass them on to yet another generation.  As I remember, unlike me, his stories would stay the same each time I heard them, but I would catch some part that I had missed before.

My stories are always works of art, a performance, getting changed slightly to fit the audience or location.  My wife is always amazed to hear these stories and sits there wondering if we were really at the same events that I describe.  But like all movies BASED on a true story, having the elements of drama, suspense, and humor make a better story. Therefore the teller of the tale must enhance it or add it if it wasn't there.


Here is the difference:

Another average day, gray sky, raining, nothing really happened.  Got up in the morning worked on my project, went for a run, went to lunch, went to the office, talked politics and philosophy.  Went home, worked, made some dinner, worked, wrote a blog entry, worked, went to bed.

But as a story I can pick out one thing and enhance it:

Dragged my self out of bed this morning to another dull grey sky and the sound of rain hitting the window.   Plopping down in the chair in front of my computer after a grueling two step walk, I started the daily hard-labor task of beating my project into submission.  After two hours of a losing battle, I retreat to formulate a new plan of attack.  But, the rain has stopped, this is France, and it is nearly lunchtime, so I take a two hour break. Throwing on my running gear, I head out to the river. I always run up river first so when I turn around it is an easy cruise downhill.  There are a few other hardy people out and I try to smile and acknowledge them, but, if we start to make eye contact, they quickly look the other way. I know that if someone returns my smile that they are definitely foreigners, probably American.

I think I may know why the locals don't look at other people - they walk their dogs down along the path.  Here in the city, the dogs can't distinguish between the earth and cement.  Seems it is all the same to them and the owners don't see or don't care to clean up after them.  So you can see that it is important to constantly watch where you are stepping.

Seems much more interesting, well at least I hope so.

Half Way

Hard to believe that I have already been in Lyon for over two months.  It is moving fast and Robyn will be here in about six weeks.  I have made progress on my projects and I have been able to travel to new places and meet new people.  But it also makes me think about the amount of work I still need to achieve in the remaining two months.

The experience is one I will never forget.  I have never been this alone for this long in my life.  Here I am responsible for everything, and at the same time, responsible to no one.  My time is my own.  But then my own company has proved to be boring and I long to have someone to talk with, to argue with, and to explore with.

I have discovered that I do not like being all alone all the time.  I need my partner with me to share in my adventures.  I don't mind being alone, together.   If it wasn't for Skype, I would have been lost, alone, and lonely.

I have been able to visit three countries - France, Germany, and Belgium, or four if you count the time spent waiting at Heathrow Airport in London.  Robyn will join me in about 40 more days and we will get to visit one more country during our vacation in Italy.

I have discovered that I will not pick up a new language unless I can completely immerse myself in speaking only that language. I have also discovered the image other countries and cultures have of the US and how our culture is grossly misrepresented by its portrayal in TV and movies.  I have also found a new hobby in sketching that only requires time, dedication, and a scene to draw.

My goals for the rest of my time here are to concentrate on finishing the projects I have started thus far, focusing my free time on these projects, and enjoying myself on a real holiday with Robyn in Rome, Florence and Paris.  I am still planning on graduating at the end of the year, which will require a dedicated and herculean effort to write papers and a dissertation by October.

Feeling very mortal

Feeling really sad.  Feeling very mortal.  I found out a few weeks ago that a college friend, Gary Smith, died last October.  He was a groomsman at our wedding and he drove out from Arizona at the last minute to attend our 25th wedding anniversary party in May of 2005.  We were very surprised and happy that he was able to attend.

He had reinvented/transformed himself more times than me. He continued on to receive his law degree from the University of Colorado Boulder after finishing his bachelor's.  He recently finished working on his PhD and was working in Virginia. 

I knew it would inevitably start to happen.  I have watched older people most of my life, observing, listening, and preparing for the time when what I thought was old is now the age I am.  I am going through the time, where all the body parts are starting to wear out.  I have had an artificial hip joint installed, both knees have been cleaned out, and recently I needed shoulder surgery to repair injuries from the past 40 years of use.

This would be the next phase as we enter our 50's, friends will begin to leave us.  There is always a changing of the people in your life, but until this point, the deaths were either tragic or happened to generations older than me.  I have reached the age where friends and others that are close in age will no longer be walking among us.  The human body is only designed to work for such a short time and we toil and fight and love and start to grow old as we finally obtain some wisdom. 

I now feel that my time on earth is limited and I must finish this journey into academia.  At the moment it seems a frivolous adventure, but I know that I will make a small difference in the world.  And, if I am able to teach the things I have learned to the next generation of bright young minds, show them that anything is possible, and maybe even inspire one of them to reach for the impossible, I will have completed the ultimate journey that brings me joy: helping people to start their journeys to destinations unknown.

Gary Kevin Smith
July 29, 1959 – October 7, 2012