Thursday, September 3, 2009, 03:26 - General
After a somewhat grueling 16 hour journey carrying all my shit to Cologne on a 1st class train (actually, 3 trains and 2 regional railway lines) and then flying to Israel (which involved paying 80 euros in overweight charges), I've ceased living in Europe and am back with Galia in Tel Aviv for a week. It's great to be here, and will also be fantastic to be back in New York on the 8th.Had quite the weekend in the mountains at Stephane's parents' chalet with Job and this German girl whom Lewis and I met at the fondue restaurant and spent 2 nights at Job's new place in Geneva, but I'll write more about that later.
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( 2.9 / 71 )Monday, August 24, 2009, 08:51 - General
Last week is a bit of a blur. I worked late the first three days, played some guitar. I've got around 30 minutes of completed song material (well, the guitar parts anyway), so I hope to be able to hit the ground running when I get back to New York and start polishing it off with Arthur and Sal.Thursday evening I left around 8:30 (I guess that's sitll pretty late) to meet Stephane at The Great Escape for some drinks. We had 3 beers and I had a plate of french fries and we chilled for like 3 hours overlooking Place de la Riponne. Was nice. He invited me to come up to his parents' cottage in the mountains in Valais this weekend, and it's very tempting, but might be too much of a pain to fit into moving out of my apartment and over to Job's for a night or two.
Friday I had to leave the office by 6 in order to be able to do laundy before I left for Paris the next morning. Galia wisely suggested I only do one load and save the rest for when I'm in Israel next week, as it's so expensive here. While the stuff was washing I tried to pick up my French train ticket for Sunday but couldn't, and then had a beer at the cool punk bar she and I'd discovered while she was here. The evening ended with some more guitar and an early bedtime.
I got up at 7 on Saturday and took the metro at 8:15 to Renens to meet the group. Tali rented a car to drive up to Germany to visit her dad for the week and was stopping in Paris for the day, so I, this German/Hungarian girl Julia, and the American couple of Martin and Steph joined for a road trip. Luckily Tali's request of a compact was upgraded to a small SUV so we weren't falling all over each other. The ride was somewhat uneventful, with the highlights being me showing the others via my mp3 player a bit of what I meant by "experimental rock" and Tali's insistence on relying wholly on her GPS for directions even though we were on the highway and there were signs for Paris all over the place, which took us on a few small detours into little French towns.
We arrived in Paris at around 3, and we dropped off the car in a suburb just outside the city limits but still connected by subway to the center as that's where Tali and Julia's couchsurfing host lives. Tali and Julia split off from the rest of us at that point, and we took the subway into the city, me splitting off again as Martin and Steph had a hotel into which to check and I was off to meet Alison, the really cool girl with whom I surfed in Berkeley. I was supposed to meet her at Camille's place (a French Parisian whom she knows from him coming to Berkeley for a couple months a while back) as that's where we were going to end up staying. It took me a little longer than I thought to get there, and somehow this lined up so that they were just stepping out of the apartment as I was arriving. I said hello to her, Camille, and Jasmine, Alison's friend who's a senior in painting at Hunter College and lives in Bushwick Brooklyn, and was asked whether I wanted to go to a museum. I said sure, and was taken to a photography museum which was showing an exhibition by Henri Cartier-Bresson of black and white photos from around Europe in the 20s-50s. It was really nice actually, even though photography is not usually my thing. After a while there I was hungry so Camille took us over to the Jewish Quarter where Alison and I each got a falafel and I got to sound out some Hebrew signs. After this we went back to Camille's apartment and chilled in his kitchen for a while drinking beer and rum and having fun, and then he took us to a somewhat relaxed bar where we sat in the back and had a beer. Alison was sort of accosted by some guy to forcefully kissed her while she was waiting for the bathroom and there were other somewhat awkward moments as well, but overall we were just really tired and so the conversation, while having been very lively before, was sort of melting into inanities. Jasmine really wanted to stay and party even though it would mean an expensive cab ride (the subway stops running at like 1:30 in Paris, blech) and she had to catch a train to the south at 8am the next morning, but we ended up just parting ways as we were too sleepy to maintain the hang.
The next day Alison and I got up at around 10:30 and were both rather surprised by how late it was. The two of us, Camille, and Camille's roommate Gerie went to the market and got some cheese and baguettes, etc., and had some food and tea back in the kitchen until maybe 2 or so when Alison and I left and met Simon, a dutch friend of mine whom I know from Amsterdam and now lives in Paris, downstairs. We all went to this alternatively-decorated bar/cafe on the canalside that he knew and had a great but short time over a couple coffees. We finally got ahold of Tali at this point, about which we'd been getting sort of worried, as she was supposed to give Alison a ride back to Brussels where she's an au pair. We left, took the metro up to Montmartre, and met Tali and Julia and walked up to the Sacre Coeur and snapped a couple photos. From there we walked back down the hill and took the metro to Gare de Lyon as that's where me, Julia, Martin, and Steph were going to take the train back to Lausanne. We said goodbye, as I won't see Alison until whenever and Tali until maybe November in Israel, and Julia and I got on the train.
I found Martin and Steph in the next car a bit after we'd departed, but they were in their own world and didn't join Julia and me. For around the first half of the 4 hour highspeed ride, this 4 year old girl and I played together, slapping hands and giving airplane rides and pretending she was a market vendor selling me carrots. It was adorable, and I'm really glad I speak French so I can have such experiences. I also chatted a bit with the mom who seemed pretty relieved to have her off her hands as she also had a 4 month old with her. The girl, Annelle, asked me as they were about to get off the train whether I would help carry the baby carriage and suitcase out, and I obliged. I then walked back home, chatted with Galia, and ate some muesli before passing out.
Back in the office now. Great trip, I love Paris still, and hope to be able to live there someday.
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( 2.9 / 75 )Monday, August 17, 2009, 08:07 - General
Wednesday through Friday were mostly just work days. I played some guitar which hadn't happened much in the previous month. Thursday I was in the office until around 21:30 trying to debug my use of my parallel STM library in STMBench7 to no avail, and Friday morning I was told the problem was very likely not my code's fault which was both good (not my fault) and bad (getting it to work will take some real effort). Friday evening I went out to Les Brasseurs in Flon with Brammert where we had dinner and I had a half liter of beer, then we walked to Bourg Plage and sat with some Swiss people and had some more beers til it closed at 12.Saturday I came into my office but ended up not working on much, spending a little time trying to profile the performance of my Python webcrawler of concert info but I think I'll just give up on that implementation (very sadly though) and switch to C++. It's just way too slow. I also talked to Galia on the phone for like 2 hours and my parents for an hour. I ended the evening with lots of travel planning and drinking a fair amount of wine in my apartment.
Sunday I went to Geneva around noon to go frisbee golfing with Job at this park on the outskirts of the city. It's a real 18 hole course with gravel marked tees and baskets, but the holes run through the park and we had to skip 1 hole cuz we would have killed some little kids. We rented a driver and a putter each for 4 francs apiece, but the discs were very knicked and I felt quite handicapped from it. The worst part though was that my tennis elbow (as I assume it is) again flared up immediately. It extraordinarily painful and occurs whenever I throw anything these days, so disc golf is rather difficult. I think I'll have that looked at. I honestly expect surgery to be the proper course of action, but we'll see. Regardless, being crippled at such an early age is... sad. We did however have a really good time nonetheless, walking through the park on a great sunny warm day topless, eating bread and brie and peaches and having half liter Heineken's (ugh) at the cafe there before heading back to the city. There we met a Spanish friend of Job's from the ILO and had dinner together at this Japanese restaurant in the red light district before I caught my train home and fell asleep around 22:45 - I was très fatigué.
This morning I got up at 8:30 nonetheless, and rather than getting a super early start to the work day I finally booked all my transportation. Here are my plans coming up:
- Sat. Aug 22 Ride with Tali in a rental car to Paris
- Sun. Aug 23 Ride back with a friend of Tali's via highspeed train to Lausanne
- Sun. Aug 30 Move out of my apartment and crash at Job's place in Geneva
- Tue. Sep 1 Train from Geneva to Cologne, then fly from Cologne to Tel Aviv to visit Galia et al
- Tue. Sep 8 Fly from Tel Aviv via London to New York
- Tue. Sep 29 Galia arrives in New York
- Thu. Oct 1 Galia and I fly to Minneapolis
- Week of Oct 1-7 - hang with Galia in Rochester, Madison, and maybe up north Minnesota
- Wed. Oct 7 - Galia and I fly to New York
- Thu. Oct 15 Galia flies back to Tel Aviv
- Thu. Nov 5 I fly to Tel Aviv
- Wed. Nov 18 I fly back to New York
All of that is pretty much finalized with tickets purchased, too.
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( 2.9 / 63 )Wednesday, August 12, 2009, 08:41 - General
Monday we came to my office together, and then went home and ate dinner and watched Storytelling which we'd both seen but both wanted to see again. A low-key last evening together in Lausanne. The next morning we also went to the office, leaving a bit after 3 so we could take the subway to the car rental place and pick up our little 1.2L VW Polo which we then drove for 5 hours to Memmingen, Germany, where she was to fly back to Israel the next day. We got a room at the second place we tried in the center of Memmingen, and simply checked in and watched some dubbed German TV before going to sleep. We woke up at 6, packed up, drove to the airport, had a couple coffees, and said goodbye. It was fantastic to have her here, and sad to have her go, but so is it for us for now. I drove back to Lausanne, topping the little Polo out at 170km/h (105mph) on the Autobahn and dropping down to a cool 130km/h (80mph) once I was in Austria and Switzerland. I got back to the office before 1pm. Back to work then.[ add comment ] | permalink |
( 3.1 / 52 )Monday, August 10, 2009, 10:37 - General
Tuesday evening I went over to Tali's for dinner, she making me pasta with sweet potato and cream sauce and hang out, inevitably discussing the Israeli Palestinian conflict. It was fun and I got to see her area of the city and bike home a new way. I then stayed up way too late watching a movie that I'm rather embarrassed about having watched even though I'd been hoping to get to the office quite early the next day.Getting to the office early ended up not materializing as I slept way too late, so I decided to meet Lewis at the train station when his train pulled in at 12 and discuss what the plans were for him. He'd been planning on meeting this girl Layi whom he knows and who's living in Geneva, but it turned out that she was sick and just didn't show up, so it was very fortunate that I happened to be there. I took him up to my apartment to drop off his stuff and then we went to a grocery store to buy food and another to buy beer and then walked up into Bois de Sauvabelin to eat a big picnic and then head up to the top of the wooden observation tower that's there. After this we went to an outdoor restaurant near my place and played Tichu (which I won), and then back to my place before heading out for a drink at The Great Escape. After this was fondue at the restaurant for it recommended to me by Stephane. We split a bottle of wine and a big pot of cheese fondue in the fancy backyard, eventually having 3 German girls sit next to us at the big table and impressing them with our language skills. I even exchanged numbers with one of them so we could hang out later, and she was rather upset that she couldn't join Lewis on his planned mimicry of Galia's and my bike ride of the previous week around the lake. From there we went to Bar Au Château for a drink and then Bleu Lézard for 2 more, the last of which was quite unnecessary.
The next day I went to the office, walking with Lewis to Flon so I could show him where to check out the bikes. Layi decided to join him for the bike ride while I worked during the day. It took them quite a long time as she was somewhat slow though a good sport about it. I met them back at my apartment at around 8:45 or something and she was dead tired. We all went out for falafel/kabob, and then Lewis walked her to the train station while I played guitar for the first time in like 3 weeks. He came back, we settled his stuff up for his outward journey at 5:30am the next morning (he was flying from Geneva to Rome to go to a wedding), and then I went to sleep on the mattress on the floor while he slept on my box spring. A short visit, but nice to see him of course.
The morning he left was Friday, and I went to the office after I woke up and finally finished a big milestone in the transactional memory library I'm augmenting. My officemates and I celebrated by drinking cans of nonalcoholic beer in the lounge before I got on a train to Geneva to fly to Amsterdam for the weekend. Galia picked me up in her parents' car at the airport and we went back to her place for a bit and then biked to De Zotte for a drink where I coincidentally ran into Michiel, my old officemate in Amsterdam. He was there with 2 other dudes and Galia and I joined them for a while before her friends Katja, Milena, and Kiki picked us up and we biked to another bar where there were some more of their friends hanging out. We had plenty of drinks and it was pretty fun, and also nice to finally meet these people whom I've heard so much about. Her parents' apartment, which they own and visit a few times a year, is really beautiful and sunny with wooden floors and is in Oud Zuid in case you know where that is.
Saturday morning we sort of lazed around on the back balcony before taking a walk northward and through some of Vondelpark. At that point Ansten called me and we decided to walk back and then take the car to his apartment - my old apartment - to hang out with him and then pick up my amp which is still there cuz he's moving to Montreal in the fall to start his PhD and thus I figured it's not the best to have it stored there (I should really sell it one of these days). We had tea on the balcony and talked about old times and then snagged the amp and some books I'd left there and drove back. Katja joined us for shopping, as the dinner party to which I'd been invited had turned into me cooking a huge vegetarian meal for 8 people. We filled a big rolling cart with veggies and tofu and I spent like 3 or so hours cooking a big pot of lentil soup and a big stir fry with tofu and peanut sauce and rice and noodles. We made it a two course meal and drank plenty of wine, and Ansten joined us at around 8:45 or so I think when I was serving the soup. It was really fun actually, and the last of the guests to leave was Galia's friend Mila at something like 1 in the morning I think. At this point Galia abruptly got really sick unfortunately, but she felt better the next morning.
We got up around 9:30, and I had a huge headache and was feeling quite annoyed that I'd finished the night with that Bacardi and coke. We spent the next couple hours cleaning the whole apartment cuz it was going to be empty til October so it needed to be spotless to avoid mold. This was a bit difficult for me in my state, but we pulled it off and hopped a tram to the central station at 12, then flew to Geneva at 3, and were home in my apartment around 6 or so I think. We were both very tired and in very silly moods which I'm sure must have annoyed lots of the people next to whom we were traveling, but I didn't really care. We spent a couple hours in the apartment, took a walk at dusk, and split most of a bottle of wine before falling asleep around 1 or so.
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( 2.9 / 35 )Tuesday, August 4, 2009, 05:41 - General
So Friday night after working in my office Galia and I went to this Ethiopian restaurant around the corner from my apartment which I'd been told was good. It was indeed quite ok and we got thoroughly stuffed on vegetarian dishes. After that we had a drink at The Great Escape and then another at Au Château before taking the party back to my apartment and staying up later than was probably a good idea since we were getting up at 8:30 to go fetch the rental car.Saturday morning we did nevertheless get up and out the door by a bit past 9 and were pleasantly surprised to find that our compact car turned out to be a 4-door diesel VW Golf station wagon. We took the car up to my apartment, loaded it with our gear, very embarrassingly spent 5 minutes trying to figure out how to put it into reverse (press the stick down was the answer), and were off east around the lake via the route we'd biked a few days before. There's something about a road trip which is just fun even if you're not doing anything. We stopped to pee and get some groceries before too long and then continued through Martigny and then through the Grand St-Bernard tunnel (which we unexpectedly had to pay like 35CHF to pass through) into Italy. The scenery went from lake+alps to farmlands to just amazing Alpine views, all of which was amazing. We stopped for a moment to hang in a field near Aosta, then had lunch (nice and cheap and good) in Aosta itself at a little restaurant on the main pedestrian street. After Aosta we took a "wrong turn" (when we had no real destination anyway) and ended up driving straight up a mountain for around 45 minutes on a tiny curving road that went through "towns" which had around 3-5 houses each but names and signs nonetheless. One amusing thing was that we kept seeing signs for this town called Fenis. It was around 4:30 and we decided that we wanted to stay up on this mountainside so we started looking for a place of lodging but found basically nothing at all but a few houses, even though we went through a town of maybe 100 people in which I had a standoff on a steep hill versus a truck on a barely-one-lane road, he eventually backing up to let us pass. We eventually saw a big building which had a restaurant and some tables out front. I went in and asked whether the very nice 30ish man with long hair pulled back and a beard whether he spoke English but he didn't so we had to settle on French which was nice as it meant I got to play translator. I asked him whether there were any hotels in the area, and he said he wasn't sure, but maybe they had a room in the building and he went to ask and came back to say they did for 40 euros a night including breakfast. Very cheap and nice, we agreed, and then drove further up the mountain to wander around for an hour or two in the forest. We came back when Galia was cold and bought a glass of wine each and then just split a bottle (deciding on what we'd just had a glass of after the guy very kindly explained to me in French all the details of the 5 white wine choices) and ended up drinking that and talking over a mountain view for something like 3 hours. After this we had dinner, which for her was a salad and for me was a big plate of various cheeses and a main course of these fried corn patties which were tasty and a local dish. All the people were so overtly friendly and dressed just as one would expect people to be dressed in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and we really enjoyed it. Around 10 or 11 we got in bed and passed out.
In the morning we were greeted to some mountainside rain, and since the restaurant didn't open until 10:30 and it was only 10:15, we decided to try and rectify the lack of euros situation in which we found ourselves (they of course had no means to take credit cards at the guesthouse). We drove all the way down the mountain, eventually deciding that Fenis seemed to be our best bet for a cash machine, but didn't find one and eventually got to this town called Nus where I asked an old woman whether she spoke French (skipping the English question entirely now), and she did and was very energetic about showing me the way to the flow. We drove all the way back up, having been gone well over an hour, and got out breakfast and paid our way. The guy asked where we were from and I told him, and made sure to reiterate how nice we'd found it, and we drove off.
We again had no real destination, but I figured we'd try to hit up a town on the coast of Lago d'Orta or some such so we headed in that direction. We went in circles a fair amount because the map we had was of the entirety of Italy and we covered maybe something like 1% of it, including seemingly not being able to escape this town called Biella. Eventually we did escape and found a little town called Borgosesia in which we first stopped for delicious gelato and then at this American-sized huge grocery store (man, I wish I had one of those in Lausanne) for provisions and then had a picnic in the middle of nowhere on the banks of a river. After trying really hard to find the tiny road the map said would take us to the lake, we settled on another road heading straight up into the mountains and stopped at a nice little guesthouse in a town called Campertogno (which was much bigger - maybe 200 people). We checked in to our ok room, which smelled rather musty and had a pretty nasty bathroom which was clean enough but clearly added onto the room as an afterthought and looked like a tumorous outhouse growth on the wall. We took a walk around the area, first trying to go up to a castle which overlooked where we were staying but it was proprieta privata, so we walked through the town which ended up being way better, with brick streets and narrow alleys and cool stone bridges. Sadly, I'd forgotten my camera in the car, so no pics. We got some cards on a whim from the bartender downstairs, had them open a bottle of wine for us, and I taught her some card games, first on the balcony and then in the room. The deck had only 40 cards so the games were a bit worse, but fun was had nonetheless. We again fell asleep quite early. Driving is tiring I guess.
We got on the road pretty early (10) as we weren't sure exactly when Galia's flight out of Geneva to Amsterdam left, though we were both fairly sure that it was at 20:30. We again had trouble going east to the lake, but eventually just went southeast and then northeast on the bigger roads and found our way to the highway which led north into Switzerland. It was another rainy, foggy day, and the scenery was again amazing - tunnels through mountains, cliffsides, rivers, lakes. We got to Brig and stopped for a brief lunch at a Coop, got stuck in a traffic jam for a while, and then eventually ended up on the highway where I could go 130km/hr (78mph). We got to the airport around 5, checked her in for the flight which was indeed at 8:30, and then drove into Geneva where I took her both to the bar on a little island in the river and L'Ursine (places Job had showed me) before we got back in the car and I dropped her off for her flight. It's a bit sad that this part of the trip is over, but I'll see her again in 4 days which is quite nice of course. My bed in Lausanne is also very small. I drove back to Lausanne and stopped to fill up the car and drop it off. When I went to pay with my credit card the guy at the counter asked me whether I was American and I was like wtf, how can he tell so easily? He explained that he's Swiss from the area but had lived in Brooklyn for the past 15 years and is married to an American woman and had had the same Citibank credit card before. We ended up talking for like half an hour, and while he's 35 and clearly very different from me, we still bonded over common history and exchanged numbers and agreed to have a beer at some point. Very random but pleasantly welcome. I then drove the car back to the rental place, walked up the hill home, and passed out after reading maybe 2 pages of my French novel.
I've recently discovered a few bands I quite like but are broken up already (Gaston and Arkansaw Man for starters). Bittersweet.
Back in the office. I plan to work until I can't think this week, except Lewis is spending tomorrow night and the next night with me as part of his summer Europe trip. I guess he'll be sleeping on the floor...
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( 2.8 / 27 )Friday, July 31, 2009, 09:07 - General
My camera miraculously still works after being dropped in a lake. I let it dry out before turning it on and at first the lens seemed to have water in it, but now it's fine. Thus there may be Italy pics from this coming weekend after all.I think I'll use that savings of $200 or so as an excuse for me having booked a ticket to fly to Amsterdam next weekend to hang with Galia at her parents' apartment there. I fly out late Friday and get back late Sunday, us flying together on KLM. Pretty cheap flight too.
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( 2.8 / 18 )Thursday, July 30, 2009, 06:42 - General
Monday and Tuesday Galia and I came into the office together. She really likes working with me here, which is rather convenient. Monday evening we went out, first trying to hit up the squat but the information I'd gotten that it's open on Mondays didn't pan out that particular Monday, so we went to Bar au Château and had a couple drinks. Tuesday night we had a little party together in my apartment and ended up staying up until sunrise, with some rather precarious periods of sitting with one leg out on the ledge out my 5th (or 6th for Americans) floor apartment windows. The moon was amazing that night, a really huge half-moon lit up all yellow and casting a spotlight of light on the lake before it disappeared very quickly behind a mountain.Tuesday morning we got up at a bit past 10 after not even 3 hours of sleep to head down to Flon and get Galia a bike for the day for free from Lausanne Roule, a branch of this cool Swiss initiative to encourage biking. We then biked down to the lakeside at Ouchy and took a steamboat with our bikes in tow across the lake to St. Gingolph, sitting outside and enjoying the view for the hour-long ride. From there we got on our bikes and biked all the way back to Lausanne, which was about 30 miles or so. We went through this really nice area of farm fields and marshes with bike paths and no cars at first, biked past the Château de Chillon, an 11th century castle on the lake, and had a huge picnic just past Montreux (which was a rather hideous and gaudy and very rich resort city). After a siesta on the grass we continued on, biking under terraced vineyards with a mountain/lake view on the left. At some point we stopped for water and I dropped my camera into the lake. At this point it only turns on and then shuts off - it may be dead. When we finally reached Lausanne after around 6 hours of biking (including the 1.5 hours of picnic), the hills started to get us, though we'd been very pleasantly surprised by how flat the route had been up until that point. Thus we hopped on the subway up to Flon with the bikes, returned hers to Roule, walked up to my apartment, and called it an early evening and went to sleep by 10 or so.
Today's another day for us both in my office. I reserved a car for the weekend (I get a sweet discount as an EPFL employee and can rent a car for around $40/day) and we're planning on making a trip through rural northern Italy before she flies to Amsterdam for a week on Monday evening.
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