I have recently been asking myself where all my time goes. I don`t have a lot of commitments but I never seem to have time to write blogs. At least not this past week. This is also going to be a shorter post. On Friday it was one of my friends birthday`s today and we held a party for him in my residence. So I had about 50 balloons in my room at one point. Because I don`t have near the lung capacity to blow up 50 balloons I enlisted the help of my friends who distracting me from the blog post I meant to write..
On Friday I was also looking around Grenoble for streamers (called serpentins ie small snakes) I could not find any anywhere. I went to the 2 euro store, a grocery store and even checked out a specialty party store. They just don`t seem to have them. At least not in the 3 stores I went into, which granted is quite a small sample to generalize to an entire country. My guardian angel must have been watching over me though, because this afternoon while picking a parcel from the post office I forgot my wallet and helmet in the library. They are next door to one another so it wasn`t a huge distance to backtrack. However, the fact remains that I left my wallet unattended for about 10minutes. I returned and it was in exactly the same place, relief. I think it helped that it was inside my helmet and not immediately visible. People in France don`t seem to value helmets all that much. I would say less than 15% of people wear helmets. Of that 15% most of the people are older than 40. Apparently it takes a while for people to realize the value of helmets, it's a pretty frequent sight to see entire families with young children not wearing helmets. Quite shocking frankly.
Yesterday I went to Lyon for the day (100km's away) with the international student association. It was fun but not what I had expected. It was interesting and I saw lots of nice things but it somehow didn't live up to my expectation. I think it was the size of the city and all the people. Depending on who you ask, Lyon is the 2nd largest city in France and there were lots of people everywhere. It kind of detracted from some of the attractions if you ask me. It could have also been that I only had time for a surface visit. Since I was only there for the day I didn't have the chance to visit any of the museums which are apparently very nice. Lyon's claim to fame is apparently the textile industry. In the city there are a ton of passageways the run within the buildings so that the merchants could carry their cloth without getting it muddy (when streets were just dirt) and protect it from the rain. The textile museum also sounded amazing, they had a permanent display of cloths throughout history, even including samples of Egyptian dresses. I doubt that I will be returning though, there wasn't enough stuff to make me want to return when I still want to visit Geneva and Turin which are about the same price and distance away.
This morning I rode around Grenoble on my bike with a friend. We went to the market under the train tracks and generally explored Grenoble's streets. It was really calm on the streets (usually you have to weave between many slow moving pedestrian) and very enjoyable. Grenoble also has tonnes of flowering trees which are just starting to come out, so some of the once brown streets are starting to look like areas of oak bay (huge flowering trees that border the street for those of you not from Victoria).
That is however all the time I have for today. I am trying to get work done in anticipation of my 10 day easter trip. I will try to get in a couple of updates in, and hopefully even some photos in before Friday but that might be a little too optimistic.
Its quite a tradeoff, the more awesome things I do, the less time I have to tell you all about them.
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