Thursday, July 2, 2009, 04:36 - General
Tuesday evening I watched the film Les Rivières Pourpres which stars Vincent Cassel, the great actor from Irréversible. It was only ok, and had a very big-budget Hollywood flavor which I can't really stomach, but still not terrible and nonetheless good for my French. Even though there were many gruesome killings, it was far less disturbing than the film the previous night and I slept fine.Yesterday I attended a talk by a researcher from Sun who visited our group for the day and I worked until around 7. I then biked home, took a shower because I was a big pool of sweat (these hills really are insane, but I'm getting better slowly), and then walked maybe 5 minutes from my house to meet this couchsurfer guy Stephane who's as into post rock as I am. We had a couple beers at this bar The Great Escape which has a really nice outdoor area overlooking the main square Riponne near which I live, and then he showed me a couple more places including Le Lapin Vert which he described as a "teenager bar which plays rock music". We ended the evening around 12 at Le Bleu Lézard. Quite a nice guy.
This morning I woke up at 9 to the cleaning lady opening my apartment door and sort of scolding me in French about how I should wake up and how my place is a mess. I mean, wtf. I'm an adult, and clearly I can take care of myself enough to live in Switzerland, so this seems unnecessary. I'm not sure whether I've mentioned this, but every Thursday morning between 8:30 and 9:00 this pair of Portuguese women who don't speak any English knock on my door and then without warning unlock it and enter. They're there to clean (what exactly I'm not sure, but I know they at least sweep and mop my little kitchen) and give me TP and clean towels. It makes me wonder what kind of place I'm living in, what with the old guy without pants next door and the other neighbor smoking huge cigars while leaning out the window most evenings (very gross). In any case, she asked me when I was leaving, I said in an hour at 10, she said no that's too late for us, I said uh ok, she said 9:30, I said how about 9:45, and that was that. It got me out of the house faster than I otherwise would have left I suppose.
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( 2 / 1 )Tuesday, June 30, 2009, 15:25 - General
Yesterday evening I biked along the lake on the way home, which is the way I go to school in the mornings. In such a hilly city, it's important to plan your route when biking. The only issue with this new route was that, as Brammert warned me, the bugs near the lake can be insane. Apparently they're worse in the evenings and I ended up swallowing a bunch of gnats, getting a bunch in my eyes, and getting them all over my body. I'll be avoiding that path in the evenings from now on. After I got home I started what I plan to be a streak of watching French films in the evenings (with English subtitles for now of course) to bolster my listening ability. I started with Seul Contre Tout, directed by the same director who did Irréversible, and it was nearly just as gruesome. I enjoyed it but didn't end up sleeping well after that.This afternoon I had lunch with an Israeli girl named Tali whom I saw was at EPFL through couchsurfing. I'm trying to take a proactive approach to meeting people here since I'm here for such a short time. Was nice, hope to hang out again. I also saw a pretty interesting talk by Papadimitriou which involved both math/game theory as well as a mathematical explanation of the relative benefits of sexual versus asexual reproduction.
My office lately is unbearably warm. It's really tough to concentrate and I get headaches starting in the early afternoon. It is nice though that summer seems to finally be here.
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( 0 / 0 )Monday, June 29, 2009, 08:19 - General
I've now seen what appears to be a pet-shop-type lizard both in Luzern and in Lausanne just running around in some grass in the cities. I now find myself keeping an eye out all the time for them in the hopes of catching one for some unknown purpose much like I did when I was younger.[ add comment ] | permalink |
( 5 / 1 )Sunday, June 28, 2009, 14:47 - General
The rest of the work week was pretty uneventful - working in the office during the days, playing guitar in the evenings. I played from 21-23 both Wednesday and Thursday and no one complained which is a good first test of my being able to use the amp. It sounds really bad, but it's a solid-state practice amp so I can't really expect much. I'd forgotten just how bad such things sound, even if they are Orange.Friday I'd been planning to meet Brammert, this Dutch guy I know from the MoL in Amsterdam who's now doing his PhD in AI here, at the student campus bar at 18:30, but then it ended up being this guy in my lab Koosha's last day so he, Aleksandar, Dan, and I went there at 17:30 and Brammert joined later with a couple labmates. The place was amazingly cool actually - very nice interior, like 20 beers on tap including Karmeliet Tripel and Kwak, just really my kind of place. Too bad it's closing for the summer next week I hear... We drank a few and I got quite tipsy, eventually leaving the bar around 9 and then biking home which was an adventure (the hills are really steep going toward my place). Aleksandar and a bunch of Serbian friends of his were going to a bar near my place, and although I think I impressed them by knowing entrance and exit in Serbian, I was just too tired to go back out and passed out somewhat early.
Saturday I woke up and played some guitar in the morning and then I saw a post to the Lausanne couchsurfing website by this South African girl Christine that she was new to the city and wanted to have a coffee, so I joined her at the Bleu Lezard where I also had lunch. She's 18 and has dual Swiss and South African citizenship and while we spoke in English, there was a little Afrikaans and Dutch spoken as well since they're largely mutually intelligible which was fun. She left after an hour or so and I stayed and read this paper I'd printed out on philosophy of rationality which was quite interesting. I then decided to hit up the big Coop grocery store which was right there as nothing was going to be open the next day and I bought a bunch of stuff and dropped it off at my place and then walked down to Bar Tabac which I'd been meaning to check out. It's a great little cafe/bar (I like how in Europe places can be both), with good beer selection and a nice atmosphere and a reasonably mixed crowd. I finished the philosophy paper and read the draft of the upcoming Barrelfish SOSP paper before leaving around 21:30. I'd nearly walked all the way back home when I realized that I wanted to check out the squat Laiterrie and see whether it was finally open. I debated a bit with myself, but in the end decided I should really try cuz I need to take advantage of my time here. I'm really glad I did, as once I rounded the corner I saw this huge party of hippie types spewing out all over the street. It was some bi-annual squat dinner with vegetarian food and booze and music and it was really really cool. Reminds me of Amsterdam. Right away I met these 2 Swiss guys when I was asking how to buy a beer (honor system), and we got to talking about all sorts of stuff (mostly in English cuz my French isn't so hot yet, but it'll come...). They were both really cool, though it's a bit unfortunate that one is headed to China for 5 weeks next week cuz his wife is Chinese. They ended up taking me under their wing and we left the party for a bar underneath one of the big bridges that goes over Flon which was quite cool but closed at 12, and then we went down to Flon where there were 2 stages with music and tons of people and festival-type snacks for sale, etc. We had a couple drinks, I had some African mini-donut-style things, and then we walked up to the Bar du Chateau to which I'd gone with the couchsurfers 2 weeks ago for a couple last rounds. They told me they lived in Thailand for a total of 3 years, we exchanged numbers, good times were had. I went to bed maybe around 3.
I got up this morning and after an hour or so of sluggish preparation I made it down to Zinema for the final brunch of the summer season (this trend is annoying) where I was meeting Anna, the Russian couchsurfer I'd met 2 weeks prior. We ended up staying there for like 3.5 hours eating and talking - it seemed we both were a bit excited to have social contact (she moved here from Paris not too long ago). I got back to my flat around 16:30, played some guitar and chatted with Galia for a bit, and then went back outside as the sun was too nice to miss. (The weather's been horrible here lately.) I walked up into this park north of my place which stretches upward onto a big hill and took a bunch of pictures in the forest, of the amazing lake views, and stumbled upon a little lake with a farm around it and this huge wooden lookout tower that was free to climb. It was really nice and I'm glad that I'm doing stuff like that instead of sitting in front of the computer. I then came back and made a huge veggie stir-fry only to discover at the end that my coconut milk was moldy so I had to use soy. It was ok, but my kitchen is too small to properly cook. I'm sleepy.
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( 0 / 0 )Wednesday, June 24, 2009, 11:34 - General
Monday I spent some time going over some designs with this other PhD student Alexander. I think we're onto some good stuff and we're gonna work together - it's nice to have someone off of whom to bounce ideas. I biked to/from work for the second time. It was slightly cold - the weather's been very frenetic lately. Some days it's around 12C, others 25C, off and on raining. I studied a bunch of French and chatted a bunch with Galia in the evening.Tuesday morning I went to the post office to pay my rent (I guess having the post office be a place where one can take care of such things is pretty common, since I've seen it as well in NL and Israel), and then in the afternoon I went to lunch with the research group at a restaurant on campus in honor of some students who are leaving in a few days, all of whom happen to be Iranian. I'm not sure whether I've mentioned this, but EPFL/ETHZ tend to attract Iranian grad students as it's hard for them to get visas to study in the U.S. (ridiculous). The lunch lasted quite a while and we got some dessert and discussed the GRE and my vegetarianism. I thus didn't have all that much time to work before I had to leave again to catch a train to Zurich as I was seeing the Mars Volta there. The train journey somehow made me a little nauseated (not nauseous as people regularly and incorrectly say), perhaps from motion sickness as I was reading the crappy daily free paper (like the NY Post in NYC that you'd never ever read) only because it's good French practice. I'd picked up some exorbitantly priced juice and brought some chips and jelly donuts along for the journey, and the view of the mountains was of course pretty sweet. I got into the city at around 18h, greeted with a light drizzle and overcast sky. I wandered around in somehow very good spirits, and first made my way over to the Volkshaus which was the venue at which the concert was to be held. The doors opened at 19h, and Selina, the girl on whose couch I was to sleep that night, warned me I should make sure to get there at least a half hour before the concert was to start as the line should be long. I went next door to this bookstore for a bit as it was 10 mins before they closed at 18:30, and it turned out to be a really cool bookstore full of philosophy, lefty stuff, literature, all in German. I struggled for a bit resisting the urge to buy a book in German, thinking I should really concentrate on French now, but the store was just too cool not to support them so I bought Jenseits von Gut und Boese/Zur Genealogie der Moral and will likely spend far too much time reading them in their original.
From here I went further around the neighborhood and it was really quite cool there, with some chic-but-still-cool looking places and some more alternative places and just generally cozy and Amsterdam-feeling. I think the fact that I was speaking and hearing German helped me like it, as it's much easier for me than French still. I ended up back at the doors at 19h exactly so just went in with the initial rush, bought a beer, and planted myself on the right side of the stage against the barrier so that I would have a clear line of sight to Omar's left-handed fretboard. The show started at 20:15 and lasted over 2 hours straight, and it was much better than the previous 2 shows I'd seen of theirs. The sound was a bit quieter and much better mixed so you could actually hear what they were doing, and the crowd was quite mellow so I could enjoy the music without worrying about getting kicked in the head. The show was thus over around 10:30, so I texted Selina that I was heading over and showed up at her apartment maybe 15 mins later. She was very surprised to find me there so early, and I'd planned to ask her whether she wanted to head out for a drink since it was so early. Only the next morning did I realize I probably could have just taken a train home since it was so early, but oh well, I ended up having quite a good time.
She said sure, and we established explicitly that either of us could speak in either English or German whenever we wanted as we both understood both languages. I thus probably spoke at least half German during the night, which was a lot of fun. This summer has really boosted my German confidence, and I got a fair amount of compliments on my German too, which of course I love. She took me via tram back to near the Volkshaus, as it was the cool alternative area of the city (which I'd definitely noticed earlier). She gave me a little bit of a city tour in German, talking about the main square where demonstrations occur etc., and then led me down Langstrasse which is the main strip with cool bars. We went into this one which was very cool - dark atmosphere, with 100s of functional lightbulbs hanging from all areas of the ceiling at different heights with their wiring all exposed in a big tangle and nice cavities with booths for sitting. We got a beer and then another and ended up watching this group of 7 or so members of a theater production wastedly jump around and then launch themselves onto each others' laps, with 3-5 people sitting in a row catching the jumper. I really wanted to get in on that action. I then went to get another beer and was ignored by the bartender for at least 15 mins, during which time I struck up a conversation with a Swiss guy and girl and some young girl visiting from Kansas who was really shy. The Swiss complimented my German (score) and were very drunk and funny, and ended up ordered my beers so that I could finally get them. When I got back to the booth one of the theater guys was sitting next to Selina and we got talking to him and he was quite funny and cool and barefoot in the bar (yeah no shoes) and I mentioned how I wanted to jump onto the people and so he set it up and I did two jumps. Then the craziest loud theater girl talked with us for a while, we left and got pizza and ate it on the way home, and I got hooked up with a living room and blankets/sheets/pillow and slept quite well.
I woke up a bit late, maybe 9:15, and made myself a huge liter full of French press coffee (mmm) and drank a cup and ate a jelly roll on the balcony. Selina had told me the night before that there's this bookshop (called Buechenland) in the big enclosed courtyard area onto which her balcony looks and to which most famous people donate their huge book collections when they die. These are then sold, and so every Sunday when the store opens at 10, the people start queuing outside the courtyard entrance by 6am, then the entrance to the courtyard opens at 8, and then they queue inside for hours more. She thus gets to watch the crazy scene sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes. Sounds pretty sweet, both the store and the scene. One of Selina's roommates came out onto the balcony and was surprised to see me, so I introduced myself in German and we talked for a bit in German as well. Then the other roommate came out and the girl told him that I have a French accent in German, but he didn't agree. I've now been told I have a French accent in German, and a German accent in Hebrew. I packed up and left and caught a train straight away and then the subways back to the office where I found a pickup slip for my 15W Orange Crush that I'd ordered waiting for me so I grabbed that and now I'm resisting quite painfully the urge to go home and plug it in...
I hope to go back to Zurich and see more of it. I had a really good time, and Selina was so unbelievably nice.
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( 0 / 0 )Monday, June 22, 2009, 06:42 - General
Friday evening I was going to this outdoor short film festival in Flon, but it was raining so I decided against it. I left my bike in the office and took the subway home and then read some and fell asleep somewhat early.Saturday I slept in (til 9:30) and cleaned up my place some and then walked toward the train station, picking up provisions at Migros on the way, and then hopped the train to Geneva. I'm pretty glad I bought my discount train pass as it makes it much less of a big deal to just go hang out with Job. I found my way to his apartment and we hung out there for a couple hours watching Youtube videos of musicians we each like and then walked to this skate park where we met this American girl Alicia who's working with Job at the ILO for the summer. She's a law student in DC. We hung out in a park and drank beer and ate ice cream and watched some random music, as there was this big country-wide music festival going on across Switzerland where for the whole weekend each city had a bunch of free music going on all over the place. After that we went to this island in the middle of the river which has this pretty cool outdoor bar that seems quite makeshift to the point of likely illegality, with kids' toys and folding chairs and a little trailer from which you can buy quite decent beer. We had a couple drinks there, Alicia and I taking a pit stop to pee over at L'Ursine, this really awesome looking warehouse-come-bar/club. Various ILO people came and went, I told the Polo story about why he doesn't have a wife, and around 20:30 Alicia, Job, and I went in search of this good Ethiopian restaurant about which he'd heard. We found an Ethiopian place, but it was deserted and though we ate there anyway, it likely wasn't the right place cuz it wasn't so hot. By the time we were done it was past 11, and we decided to hit up another alternative/punk bar near the train station which was also quite cool. I wish these type of places existed in Lausanne. We had a beer outside cuz it was packed inside the bar area, and the adjoining stage area had a very loud metal band in which none of us were interested. It was somewhat cold, and eventually the metal band was swapped out for a male/female experimental duo of shouting, guitar, drum machine, and hitting a pot with a wooden mallet, so we went inside. Job bought me and him this disgusting cocktail which included whiskey and tobasco sauce so I had only one sip. Alicia went home after a while, then Job and I went over to the bar section as it had emptied out a bit and we got some seats. We went home around 2 or so I think and I crashed on his couch.
Sunday morning I got up before 10 and bummed on the internet for a bit before Job got up and we had breakfast and discussed the question "what does it mean to be rational." I realized through the discussion that I sort of agree with the economist from the panel discussion last week that rationality is at least quite fundamentally just consistency of one's subjective beliefs and representations of the facts in the objective world (let's leave aside the debate about things-in-themselves for now). Basically, when I reflect on what bothers me when I say someone isn't being rational, is that they aren't being honest with respect to the evidence available to them. They choose to ignore clear indications, or choose to shy away from simple inferences that can be made from said evidence, due to various psychological factors such as the evidence conflicting with something they hold dear (e.g. a religious conviction) or a desire not to admit that one is wrong (a huge flaw in humanity). In effect, I'm not even concerned with any normative framework as to what one should or should not do in this stage, but really just concerned with whether or not one is honest with respect to what information the world is giving them and how it fits together. Doing that would be a huge first step toward what I desire to see, and then from there we can take on the notions of what goals are the right ones and how one should organize one's actions so as to reach them. I'd like to read more about contemporary philosophical approaches to this question. We then caught a train to Lausanne together and walked to Zinema, this really cool makeshift indie cinema near my apartment which Kristine told me about and which has brunch on Sundays, and as Let's Make Money was just starting we bought tickets and watched it. The content was pretty fluffy as is often the case with such lefty documentaries, but I really enjoyed it mostly because it was in a combination of English, German, and French, and I was talking lots of Dutch with Job that day, so it was sort of a language explosion for me. After that we walked to my apartment to show it to him and look up the day's schedule of music and then walked to this film museum on the other side of Flon where we caught the conservatory students performing Beethoven's 8th (I love Beethoven's symphonies). We then ate a pizza en route to the conservatory itself where 4 drummers were performing a Steve Reich piece which was really cool and involved them all playing on a line of like 8 bongos with drum sticks and slowing down and speedup up their rhythms. The building itself was also nice. We then walked over to Cafe de Grancy which I'd been told by Jasper is cool, and sat outside and played a game of Scrabble in English in which I won but I guess that's not much of a feat considering it's my mother tongue. We then moved inside and had dinner there before he caught a train home at a bit past 10.
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( 0 / 0 )Friday, June 19, 2009, 05:24 - General
Monday I stopped by my apartment after working and showered quickly and then headed over to this Irish pub where the monthly couchsurfing meeting was to take place. It was actually very near my place, at most a 7 minute walk, though that includes some hills. At first I was a bit worried because there was some last-minute talk on the forum that the place was going to close at 8 (which wouldn't be at all surprising here), about when I was to arrive after getting a little lost (hills don't really appear on maps), but it turns out they'd recently changed their hours so that they're open til midnight Sundays and Mondays. It was actually a reasonable place, not like many Irish pubs which I just can't stand, and had some good beer on tap too. At first the big group of 25 or so people sat outside on the big terrace, and after a period of being slightly shy (largely due to everyone speaking in French), I chatted a bit with this Russian girl and a Swiss guy. The Russian kept making fun of me for being American, which somehow actually offended me somewhat, though I think that was mostly due to me being annoyed at constantly being called American. The guy is as much of a post rock nerd as I am which is amazing, though he doesn't play. It was good times, including this older Danish woman going around giving everyone chips all night, and when the place closed me, Russian, and Swiss went down the hill to this other bar which is open til 3-4, has reasonably priced food, and brews its own excellent beer - quite the find for me. We were there until maybe 1 I think.Tuesday during the day my nice officemate Maxime took me along while he purchased a tail light for his car so that he could bring me to a bigger grocery store which had a reasonable selection of beers. I thus stocked up.
Wednesday I left work a bit early (a bit past 6), getting a ride from Maxime home, in order to be able to do laundry before the laundromat that I'd found closed at 9. I bought some detergent from the little shop near my place but they have a minimum on credit card purchases so I had to run down the hill to get cash and come back up, but this meant I got into a bit of a chat with the nice Italian guy who runs the store. I then took my dirty clothes in my suitcase on the subway to south of the main station and then to the laundromat, having to buy both a falafel and a take-away beer from a bar (so cool that that's possible, and I just drank it in the laundromat like it's nothing too) in order to get enough change. The exchange rate is around $0.95 or so to the swiss franc right now, and so 1 franc per 4 minutes of dryer time is painful as is the 7 francs for a load of laundry. I guess my savings in rent is being offset by the high price of living here. I chatted some with an American girl in the laundromat who's here for the summer after having spent the semester in Rome and a Colombian PhD student in electronics at EPFL before going home to read Jules Verne.
Yesterday Kristine and Maxime took me over to the bike guy on campus to rent a bike. Apparently bike travel is starting to be heavily encouraged here, and so I could rent a bike for 30 francs a month (cheap for here). I was going to work late but my office was intolerably warm so I just bailed around 7:30 after talking to Galia for a while on Skype and biked home for the first time. I'll have to find the proper routes to deal with cars and hills, but it was rather enjoyable. I was really tired afterward from the heat and the hills (it's uphill the whole way toward my apartment, and downhill toward work which is definitely the direction one wants the hills to be) so I just sipped beer and ate some food and read my novel. I'm nearly finished with my first French novel, which I think is only something like the 5th or so novel I've read in a foreign language. French is easy to read once you have the basic words down cuz there are so many cognates that you can understand through context. Speaking will be more difficult to master...
Back in the office, having commuted by bicycle.
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( 0 / 0 )Sunday, June 14, 2009, 12:49 - General
Thursday evening I went with the research group, which comprised around 15 people in total, to the university sports fields and got roped into playing soccer in long pants and my 2 year old non-tennis-shoes. As I've not played soccer since I was maybe 14, I didn't do overly well, but I don't think I embarrassed myself overmuch either. After my team got thoroughly trounced, we moved over to a volleyball court and my team with Rachid and two other students won something like 8 games in a row before the others figured out how to beat us. I think we were there for something on the order of 3 hours, and the weather was great and the field was of course right on the lake with mountain views (what around here doesn't have mountain views?). It was also really nice to meet people.Friday morning I went back to the administration communale armed with some forms from the university that Kristine (Rachid's amazing secretary) gave me and that sorted things out. 150 francs poorer, I just have to wait something like a month for my residence card to arrive in the mail. On my way there I bought a belt to replace the one that met its demise to Galia's foot in Israel, and spent the day in the office working until something like 8pm. I'd made a huge amount of thai stir fry and brought it to school and had that for dinner and will do so again on Monday, as my home internet situation and the lack of anything open in the city past 7pm anyway means I imagine I'll be working late most days. When I got back I tried to hit up this squat bar I noticed a while back, but it was still closed (not sure whether it's ever open), so I drank some gin and tonic at home and went to bed early.
Saturday I got up around 8 and made lunch in preparation for heading to this music festival in Luzern where this band I love Aucan was going to play. I chatted a bit with Galia and then went to the train station and was told I needed a picture to buy a half-price card for the train (which costs 150 francs for a year, but I still think it will be worth it). I had some left over at home but had stupidly not brought them with me so I dropped another 8 francs on those and bought the thing cuz it saved me 30 francs on the return journey. The ride is spectacular with great mountain views and countryside, and I dropped in and out of sleep and reading Voyage au Centre de la Terre. I need to get my act together with studying French here. I guess I've just been sort of bummed about no internet at home and leaving Israel and needing to settle in, but I guess I'll get on track. I arrived in Luzern at 1 and wandered around the city for an hour taking photos before my couchsurfing host Johanne met me. We had a coffee at this cafe near her school where she is completing her master's in jazz guitar and I met quite a few musician friends of hers which felt great, and I quite liked the cafe as well. We then got gelato and walked over to the lake and ate it there (though I'd finished my cone by the time we got there) and chatted for a while. Next we walked to her apartment where I dropped off my bag and we looked up how to get to the festival and she gave me a bus ticket and I was off for the night.
I took the bus to a neighboring town called Kriens and then figured out how to walk to the cable car that took us up the side of a mountain to where the festival was held. This Swiss guy and German woman who'd come down from Berlin for the festival were happy I found the way, and we chatted in German while we were waiting for the cable car which was nice. In fact, I'd been talking in German with Johanne (who's Australian but speaks German fluently) and her friends already and it felt really nice cuz I can actually hold a conversation unlike in French. In due time though. It was the first of many times that night I'd tell someone I'm "from" New York and they responded both with what are you doing here, and why do you speak such good German. I got up to the top and got my wristband and took in the place. It was really cool, with lots of hip young people, a gorgeous view, and lots of attention to detail to make the place nice including tents with random games and paintings on all the tents, etc. There were two rock stages and a DJ tent, and this stoner rock band Beehover was playing when I got in. They were ok for being stoner, and I got a beer and settled in, then got some food and more beer, and wandered around. I was really only there to see Aucan and they went on at 10 (I got up there at 7), so I just killed some time. Eventually I met some Swiss girls who were pretty cool, and one of them happens to live in Zurich and offered to let me stay on her couch which was great because no couchsurfers seemed to be responding to my Zurich requests (I'm going there on the 23rd to see the Mars Volta). I left them though to get a beer and get up front for Aucan, who was really awesome. They're a 3-piece math rock band from Italy, with a drummer and two guys who play synths and guitars each at the same time (i.e., there're two synths and two guitars being played by two people) and they were really tight. They'd sold out of male size T-shirts unfortunately, but that makes sense cuz the crowd seemed to love them. I hung out until 12 after this cuz that's when the shuttle buses started running to take people down the hill, running into one of the other bands who'd played cuz they commented on my Pelican shirt cuz they're from Chicago. Turns out the guy's in Joan of Arc. I got to the bottom, waited 20 minutes for the next bus into town, and was at Johanne's by 1am. She let me in and we had a tea on her balcony and I admired how many stars you can see relative to New York and I went to sleep.
This morning I woke up around 10:30 and was about to leave Johanne's to go grab some grub in the city when she got up so we had breakfast and coffee together with her German roommate which was quite nice. I'd been sort of pining for some social contact and rather enjoyed just chatting over coffee for a while with some cool people. I left around 1:30 or 2 and walked over to the old city wall and scaled it and admired the scenery and snapped some pics before catching a 3 o'clock train back to Lausanne. I read my French novel the whole way and found where this beer bar which looks quite cool from the outside (closed on Sundays of course) in Lausanne which I'd been sort of trying to find. The walk back to my apartment from there is quite steep so I foresee some potential late night stumbles. Now I'm back in Lausanne and wishing there was a laundromat that I knew of nearby but I'm sure it would just be closed anyway so I guess I'll either have to stink tomorrow or do laundry in the morning. I'll post pics once I get to school and can actually upload them.
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