A working life
Archive for November, 2008
BEAUJOLAIS VS. BEER OLYMPICS
Nov 20th
Beaujolais what? Beaujolais nouveau is the release of this year’s new Beaujolais wine! How to make this release a big thing? You make a huge party on the biggest party place in Toulouse in order to sell more.
You see, the “Beaujolais nouveau” was invented by wine makers some 32 years ago (and is therefore a commercial tradition), but it’s very popular among the French (and many Erasmus are going so it’s popular amongst us as well). I’m hoping I’ve already bought myself a good wine, I’m really excited!
The title of this post is Beaujolais vs. Beer Olympics, but I’m not going to put them up against each other. Beer Olympics? Yes. I guess it can be called drinking games put in system but it’s still Beer Olympics. To enter you need to qualify (by paying an entrance fee of 10€). This allows you to join up on all the games during the week-end. The Beer Olympics opening ceremony is Friday! Right before I bought my first bottle of Beaujolais wine we bought eighteen 24 packs of beer at Lidl. By backpack actually broke on the way out of the shop. It was a bit broken from earlier, but the beer killed it.
Now I’m off to celebrate Luisa’s birthday, more later!
The BEEr trip (18×24 beers on Lidl)
MULTITASKING
Nov 18th
Iceland is of course not full of terrorists! As far as I know, they are really intelligent (I’m supposed to get somewhere with this post, please read on).
Yesterday, before we went out to Bar Populaire in Toulouse we were at Cate’s and Geir impressed me (maybe all of us) with his superb multitasking skills (true multitasking is really hard). I’m using the picture above as proof of Geir’s intelligence. And since Geir is Icelandic – well – the proof MUST apply Icelandic people in general …
Let me explain the picture. You can see Geir is eating a fahjita (soft taco) and drinking a beer WHILE talking on Skype in a foreign language (he additionally had a conversation with us in the room if you’re still not impressed)! Also notice the napkin suggesting good manners.
I know this is a stupid post, but the point is that Icelandic people aren’t terrorists – but considering their mental capacities – I bet they could be if they wanted!
PS. This is my 16th post, now I have two pages! Wohoo …
JUST SOME RANDOM STUFF
Nov 16th
Yesterday I was invited by Malena for dinner. We were 8 people eating a delicious couscous meal followed up by Singstar. More joined after dinner. Some of us went to centre ville. It was really fun! Tiago, Geir and I got home around 5 this morning.
I was suppose to go with Norginsa and visit some French families, but I didn’t. I was too tired and I said I couldn’t make it. Lazy, but I really needed the sleep.
That’s why I’ve wasted my time. I woke up at midday and have since mainly been surfing the net. Everyone should check out Chrissie White’s photostream on Flickr, it’s amazing!
I did do a small function on my and FX’s project, but the piece of code I made doesn’t work really well.
Badminton between 5 and 7 and now I’m going to “do” Wikipedia and learn some more about WWII in Norway – a small project I started with after going to the World War museum in Paris (Musée des armées).
Yet another week-end is over, good luck in the next week everyone!
DINNER CLUB?
Nov 15th
Friday I had one hour of TD (Traveau dirigé) in Elecronique du solide before lunch. After lunch I met with FX (Francois-Xavier) and we started working on our multidisciplinary project, something we should have done a couple of weeks ago. We are going to make a program that can estimate the exact position of a star. It sounds kind of difficult, and really think it will be.
Panorama view from Bib’INSA. Taken when I had a break from the project
We worked until 17h30 when FX had to go. I stayed until 19h to to finish up my work. I made my new CV and I read through Jonathan’s to see if it had grammatical errors. It all took quite some time and I just managed to get home before I met the others at Faculté de Pharmacie (metro station) to go eat in centre ville.
The idea of going out to eat once a week was something I think Johannes and Kristian came up with last Saturday when we had dinner at “Goudien”. Last time we had trouble finding a table, so this time we had booked a table for nine. When 14 people showed up at the metro station we were a bit too many. But a short call to the restaurant and it was “all good” (as Johannes would say).
I had a superb starter, “Salade Terroir” followed by a huge Cassoulet before I had ice cream with prunes and alcohol (don’t remember which). A delicious dinner for 18€ included wine and appetizer.
I hope we can continue with this and that we now officially have a “dinner club”!
After dinner we headed for Place St. Pierre to have a beer or two, but we ended up buying some beer and wine in one of the “all nighter” shops and drinking it in the playground behind Capitol.
Today I woke up at 11h and I have two main goals for today. Format my computer and to do some more work on the project. Tomorrow I’m going to meet with French families as a part of an arrangement with the Norginsa program (I’m not in it, but was offered to go so I have to try!). I don’t really know what to expect, but I’ll update you all in a later post!
Have a nice week-end!
