Faire la Cuisine

Work has been a little slow of late, since I finished doing my background research and am now waiting to actually perform tests on patients with multiple sclerosis. I had a wonderful dinner yesterday though, with Melissa, Ian and Ian's older sister, Rachel, who is visiting him for 10 days. After work, I stopped by my apartment and then took the metro across town to meet up with Ian and Melissa. They had just come from the supermarket and we were about to make shrimp and pasta. They had decided to buy shrimp fresh and with the heads on and the messy sight didn't stop amusing us even as we finished up our dinner. Ian directed the efforts of cooking, and though if I had any experience cooking, I may have resented his simpistic instructions, I found them extremely comforting and helpful. We were also trying out the local recommended beer and the Lillean cheese which smelled pungently of stinky feet. We had two kitchens (Melissa's and Ian's) to cook, but unfortunately no table at which to eat, so we had a picnic on Melissa's floor. We schemed about how we could make friends with the French guys next door who had their door open, were playing French music, and amusing themselves by throwing balls at each others' heads before deciding we would start by asking them to take a picture of the four of us. That was all it took, as 10 minutes later, they came by our room again to ask us to join them for drinks. At this point, we were crowded around Ian in his kitchen; he did the dishes and we made ourselves useful by generously eating his chocolate nutella. We went next door to meet the French boys and Ian joined us soon after. We spoke very good Frenglish and had a great time, though unfortunately I had to leave early because the subway shut down at midnight. Ian walked me to the subway where I noticed 984,687,321 missed calls and texts from my adorable and extremely worried mother. After assuring her I had been neither abducted by aliens, nor kidnapped by French pirateers or something like that, I returned home and also found emails from Ian and Melissa telling me to call my mother, as they had just received emails from her as well. Note to all back home-I'm ok and i'm pretty much always ok, so stop worrying!. . . unless you really want to in which case I guess that's ok too. I love you guys. :-)

Paris+Versailles: Great Expectations

Paris. The city of light had a difficult task ahead of itself if it was going to try to surpass or even match my sky high expectations: expectations that had been shaped by years of waiting and wishing to go. And to be truthful, it failed. But only because after one cab ride through the city on Friday night and then a quick tour by car the next morning, my visual senses were so swamped with beauty and grandeur that I think the part of my brain that was supposed to respond to such stimuli just shut off. I got into Versailles where I was staying with Will for the weekend without much trouble(though as I've come to learn, the high speed TGV trains generally run 15-30 minutes late) and did nothing that evening other than meet Will's lovely parents.

The next morning, Will's mother gave us a driving tour of Paris on our way to Musee d'Orsay where I saw the Arc de Triomphe, Invalides, Le Grand Palais, Le Louvre, Le Tour Eiffel, and lots of other wonderful buildings whose names I cannot recall. The weather wasn't nice at all but it takes much more than a few rainclouds to hide Paris' charm and elegance. Will and I enjoyed thoroughly confusing the people we saw at the info desks; he would first speak perfect French while wearing his MIT sweatshirt, and then turn to me and speak English, so people who saw us never knew what language to speak to us or where we were from. Le Musee d'Orsay was as amazing as I envisioned it would be and I felt like I had jumped into the pages of one of my impressionist art books that had been my favorite when I was little. The building the museum was in, a building originally intended as a railroad station, also made the visit more than worthwhile.





After the museum, Will and I made our way, somewhat lazily, towards the Notre Dame Cathedral. We stopped to people watch along the Seine and in le Paradis des Fruits for some fruit smoothies. The Cathedral, when we finally reached it, was breathtaking, despite being overrun by tourists. It was not its size that made it stand out; the beauty and elegance of the architecture and stained glass windows in the cathedral were what justified its place as the most famous cathedral in the world. We stayed in the area for a while longer that day, watching some fun street performers and also following the crowd that was trying to see Obama in Paris. Half of Paris seemed to be closed down for him, and the police were very unhelpful telling us whether we would get to see him or not. There were lots of Americans and English speaking people there who seemed sure they would get to see Obama as he entered Notre Dame and that he would be there soon, but when Will asked the police in French what was going to happen, they said flatly that the whole courtyard would be evecuated and that Obama wouldn't be arriving for another few hours. We left soon after.

After unsuccessfully trying to find a subway, we took a cab to Le Champs-Elysées for dinner with Will's parents and cousin. We got into a very political discussion with the cab driver who apparently worked in some secret government organization (or at least he wouldn't tell us). He and Will disagreed. A lot. To put it mildly. But the discussion was very fun and good-spirited and though unfortunately, my French wasn't quite enough to truly participate in their interruptions of each other, I understood everything they said :-). We ate dinner at Bistro Roman where the food was delicious and the portions were big. I, however spent most of the time regretting having just eaten a huge baguette before dinner as I was completely full before my main course even arrived which was quite a tragedy. The company was great though, and Will's family had a really nice and open dynamic amongst themselves. The play that we saw was fantastic for me because they spoke slowly and it also had an actor who was supposed to be playing an American and so spoke some English, though his real identity remained a mystery for us. I won't go into too much detail about this play about multigenerational love and affairs, but it was a small production with just 3 actors, (including Lina Renaud) all of whom were terrific.






Afterwards, we walked around Paris a bit and I saw the beautiful nightlit Tour Eiffel. We were home extremely late, so Sunday morning, the morning of mother's day, or la fete des mères, we slept in a bit. Then Will and his father adorably fussed around to make a beautiful lunch and get a beautiful cake as a surprise for the lady of the house. I tried to make myself helpful, but I ended up just watching as they arranged and rearranged the food on the plates and the plates on the table to make them just perfect. Lunch was outside and then dessert was moved inside as the cousins were coming over and it was getting chilly. Everyone I met was perfectly lovely and friendly and even though it was getting late, I felt in no rush to leave. We watched a few minutes of Roland Garros and then Will's mother and I sang a bit from the Sound of Music which was great fun.




The evening was reserved for Le Chateau de Versailles. The palace was huge and grandiose as was expected. My first thought upon seeing the inside of the palace was that now I can understand why there was such a violent French Revolution. Otherwise, it reminded me quite a bit of Peterghoff in St. Petersburg (not surprising since that palace was modelled after Versailles). It was opulent and big and a few rooms like the Hall of Mirrors and the Chapel were particularly beautiful. At one point I passed a Russian guided tour, and though I'm no expert on French history, I could tell within a minute that the guide was just amusing himself by making up lavish conspiracy theories and feeding them as history to the elderly Russians on his tour: what a familiar sight. After the inside of the chateau, we had a bit of time to roam the gardens, and then I was off to the train station where my train left 20 minutes late again.

La Recherche :-)

Today, when I found my way to work and finished berating myself for getting lost and showing up late, I realized that arrive between 8-9 actually means meander in with a cup of coffee between 10 and 11. In the mean time, I learned a very important life skill: the one professor who was already there taught Christabel and I how to make coffee, and yes I didn't know how to do that before. When Muriel arrived, I got into more detail about my work. I'm going to be helping to design a study on Multiple Sclerosis (Christabel is working on Age Linked Macular Degeneration) and vision (contrast sensitivity) that hopefully will lead to a new tool for early diagnosis. I am generally unable to be remotely useful if I don't understand practically everything about a topic however, and I have pretty much no real neuroscience background yet, so I've taken out the textbooks on Vision Neuroscience and clinical Neuropsychology and probably will not be going out into the city much for the next few days. I started by reading about the mechanism of disease in Multiple Sclerosis, and though at first I had to look up every other term I read, once I did, all the interconnections became so fascinating and the reading became really fun. I had just gotten into it when it was time for lunch, and though I was tempted to skip it, I knew that espresso coffee and no food were not a good mix. After lunch I only had a few minutes to continue reading before we went to see the opthamologist downtown in preparation for running clinical experiments. The slightly awkward little Vietnamese doctor introduced us to everyone in the office and it was a bit funny to notice that the petite, giggly woman whose phone kept going off was the boss of 6 abnormally tall, big male medical students and fellows. She kept trying to speak in English even though I had a much easier time understanding her French than her English and she also continuously spoke of us "practicing French" as she spoke English. Muriel and the opthamologist went through the procedures for the established experiments in detail and they told Christabel and me which days we should come in to the hospital. I was getting a bit of a sore throat at this point though, and was freaking out that I might be getting sick again, so I wasn't paying as much attention. One of the medical students (the one that Muriel and the opthamologist referred to as the handsomest and smartest one while smiling at Christabel and me) said that if my throat didn't get better soon, he would check it out, which is quite a relief because I have no intention of actually going to a doctor while I'm here. I came and home and fell asleep for 6 hours, but now I'm feeling a bit better, and hopefully I'll be fine. The weather is still perfect and my job is really fun, though it's quite amazing how inefficient I feel. Tomorrow I go to the hospital very early to do some control group experiments and get accustomed to working at a hospital and this weekend I'm off to Paris :-)

Day 1: Le Soir

My first evening was supposed to be boring, and I was quite OK with that. I had to go to the supermarket to get food, an activity that doesn't normally elicit much excitement from me. After asking for directions at least five times and walking through the biggest and best mall I've every seen, I got to the biggest and coolest supermarket I'd ever seen, Le Carrefour. There was a full aisle, about twice as long as one at Super Stop and Shop with just cheese. They had pretty much all the food that a normal supermarket has, but all around the periphery, there were fresh, market-type options. I walked around like a tourist for a few hours, going through each aisle looking at the rows of spices, sauces, spreads, breads, terrine, juices, and amazing wines. The only things that I could not find, were soy milk and cereal, the two items I had been determined to buy. I spent forever walking the milk aisle, stubbornly refusing to give up on having the same breakfast meal in France that I've had for years at home and then at college. I asked people, almost desperately if they knew where I could get soy milk, but since I didn't know how to say soy, and soy is not exactly the first vocabulary word the French seem to learn in English, the best responses I got pointed me at Organic "BioMilk". I finally gave up and moved on to get shampoo, but as I hard as I looked, I could not find shampoo in the area with all of the shower stuff. I was feeling awkward because I was standing in each area much longer than all of the hurried shoppers who knew their way around, so my automatic, American response was to say "sorry" or "desolez" every time I was a bit in someone's way. This habit strangely enough also ended up leading to a new acquaintance in France: A guy walked by me near where I thought the shampoos should be, and I subconsciously muttered "Desolez" even though he had plenty of room to walk around me. He stopped and immediately asked if I were English or American. I was surprised and asked whether he had guessed by my accent. He replied that he wouldn't have noticed an accent from one word, but that only an American or English person would apologize for having a person walk by them. The guy turned out to be an Italian from near Bologna doing his masters in Business in Lille; he also spoke close to fluent English and was living with some guys from Texas and some other international students. After five minutes of conversation, the friendly Italian asked for my number, and invited me to join him and his friends around Lille later in the month, so I'm excited for that :-). In the check out from the supermarket, I noticed that completely by chance, Christabel was in the lane next to me so we started to go back to the apartment together. In the subway, we were speaking English to each other and I saw some darker-skinned, Spanish looking guys looking at me. I felt a bit uneasy because I couldn't avert their gaze if I looked at all in their direction, but I think they were just trying to hear what language we were speaking in above all the din because they asked me if I were speaking Spanish. I replied that I unfortunately knew no Spanish and was speaking English; the guys turned out to be very friendly and they were French but had lived in Mallorca, Spain (the island I only knew because it's where Rafa Nadal was from). For some reason, they still wanted to speak Spanish to me and kept saying things I didn't understand...they were repeating a few words and laughing a bit when I didn't understand, so they repeated more slowly and deliberately: guapa, hermosa, chica bonita. I could hear the words perfectly and some sounded really familiar but I had no idea what they meant and I was getting frustrated as I kept trying to get them to speak French. They got off a few stops later and when I got home, I went and googled their Spanish words; in hindsight I think the whole incident was hilarious. I don't know why, but even though I found guys that randomly approached me "sketchy" in the states, I think they are just friendly when I'm in France: they immediately make clear what they are thinking, so I never feel threatened. Then there is also the fact that they speak French which I quite unreasonably assume is a language not spoken by sketchy people; in any case, I have a nice history of meeting wonderful people in very random ways, so I'm generally open to the idea. When I got home, I had what I felt to be a very lovely and very French dinner of baguette, cheese, tomatos, and pinot noir, before sitting down to work. It was then that I noticed that I had forgotten to close my windows when it got dark, and that my formerly pristine studio was covered in bugs that had been attracted to the light. In an earlier stage of my life, this would be the appropriate time to yell "Dad!!!" at the top of my lungs and run out of the room, and as much as I wanted to do that, this was unfortunately not an option. I had no vacuum cleaner, I knew none of my neighbors and the office was closed; I also knew that there was absolutely no way I could fall asleep knowing that there were tons of flies and mosquitos in my room. So it was war. For the next hour at least (this was around midnight) I roamed around the room armed with a flip flop and tissues killing the invaders and jumping around chairs and desks to get at the flies on the ceiling. Finally, it was done and I had never felt more grossed out. Anastasia: 1. Flies: 0. I then took a shower, and tried to climb into bed but could not figure out how to fold out my sofa into a bed. I was exhausted though, and sleeping on the couch was not really a terrible option. I fell asleep, half mumbling in French and rehearsing asking for directions-somehow the task that I had the most trouble with.

Day 1: Le Matin

Here are some pictures from touristy yesterday! Anyway, today was the day I was supposed to stop being just a tourist, and actually start to work. I woke up very early(that's when I wrote my last post), and had been packed and ready to go for hours when Muriel, the head researcher, was supposed to come to the hotel we (Christabel and I) were staying at and help us move into our permanent apartment. I met her in the parking lot: we both approached each other awkwardly, unsure if we were approaching the right person. I decided to go out on a limb and introduce myself, deciding the worst that could happen was that I introduced myself to a random person. It was a needless worry. Muriel, or Dr. Boucart, was not at all the way I imagined her but I immediately liked her very much: she had a homey and down to earth way about her, and after seeing her go to her office in her hiking shoes and some baggy trousers, I was not at all surprised to learn she hates cities and lived in "la campagne" with 2 dogs 20km from Lille, and that she disliked wine and cheese. She was refreshingly direct and honest and every bit the scientist. When we arrived at the apartment after hauling our luggage around the streets we had a lot of paperwork to fill out. The manager of the apartments is a bit comical with his well ordered, neat look at odds with his spacey and stressed out behavior, but he is very nice and helpful. The one thing that annoys me about the apartment is that the elevators hate me. They have weird buttons that don't respond to my fingers. I'm not kidding: when I first told the manager I couldn't use the elevator, he laughed, but when I showed him, he became puzzled. He then tried to take my finger with his hand and press the button, but it didn't work. Then he pressed the button on his own and it worked fine. The same thing happened when I was Christabel: it worked for her but not for me. The theory I've been given is that my fingers are to small, so now I just take the stairs to the fourth floor everyday. In any case, after being given a tour of the apartment and changing rooms after my first room has no internet, I settled into my studio room on the fourth floor. I just dropped off my bags and Christabel, Muriel, and I went to the laboratory to get a tour and learn about our job. We spent over an hour meeting everyone in the laboratory and then it was time for a terrific lunch at the Roger Salengro hospital with some of the researchers. Afterwards, Christabel and I stayed to do some background reading on vision and opthamology and then I went to a really cool optional talk given by a Belgian researcher on psychzophrenia and EEG (Electroencephalogram) use. It was all in French, so I sometimes had trouble understand the details (my limited neuroscience background didn't help either), but I was able to get the general ideas, the most interesting of which was that new techniques now allowed researchers to combine MRI and PET techniques to get temporal and spatial data at the same time, something that had been long considered impossible. After leaving the laboratory with 5 scientific articles to read that night, I came home to finish unpacking before my adventures for the evening began. :-)

Discovering Lille :-)

First of all, I would like to post an addendum to my last post, that may or may not be directed at my mother :-) : despite what it may have sounded like, I was perfectly capable of traveling safely and independently and not losing my stuff. I promise. In any case, when I got to Lille, Ian picked me up at the train station, and if you don't know who he is, he's the guy who will be in most of my pictures from Lille this summer. When I saw him, I felt suddenly like nothing at all had changed since last week when I was at MIT and he was helping me load some bags to go home: he was wearing the same shirt and was again helping me with that same suitcase (though to be honest I wouldn't have noticed the shirt if he hadn't pointed it out). I had no idea where I was going, and it was lovely not to need to figure it out for once. We got to my hotel without much excitement, and the girl I was rooming with for the night, Christabel, was already there and had told the front desk that I would be coming. I was exhausted because I had only slept a few hours in the plane and had been traveling for the whole day, but Ian had been here for days and by local time it was only around 3 PM, so I dropped off my bags and immediately went to go explore the city with him and Christabel. First of all, I have to say that the subways in Lille are absolutely gorgeous, so we were already off to a good start. Then we got off at the Republique des Beaux Arts and the first square we see already seems to be more beautiful and grand than anything we've seen in Boston. It's a national holiday and there are lots of young people on the street and everyone seems to have some cold bear, a cigarette, or a cone of ice cream in their hands (mostly ice cream). There are wide boulevards of just pedestrians and music and treats everywhere. It's around 75 degrees, sunny, and breezy, and as we wander aimlessly, we wander into pretty much every beautiful square and building that we should have seen were we planning out a detailed tour. Christabel left us pretty early because she was tired (she got in today as well) and from then Ian and I would just walk aimlessly and if either one of us wanted to go down a street or in a courtyard, we would. I had ice cream and then for dinner, after being wildly indecisive, Ian and I ate at a fun bistro in a central square of Lille, Unfortunately, I've come to realize that since middle school when I learned it, I have forgotten most of the practical phrases pertaining to traveling, ordering food, and first meeting French people and also that being able to speak about French poetry doesn't get me very far at a restaurant. I'll get better though: Ian and I established that the first day is for making a fool of yourself and getting ripped off, and we actually didn't get ripped off so we overcompensated with our foolishness. Anyway, the city is amazing: it feels like a grown up amusement park with all the slushies, ice cream, patisseries and chocolateries, and beautiful buildings. The place I live feels very distant and is almost like a suburb, but it is safe and exactly ten minutes to the center of the city by subway so I couldn't be happier. Christabel and I live at the other end of the subway line from Melissa and Ian, but the subways are so fast that it still only takes us around 15 minutes to get from one end to the other. So far, France has been terrific and today I get to start work!! I only hope that I'll be more or less presentable since I'm typing this super early in the morning/ in the middle of the night because I'm still jet lagged. :-/

Mission Accomplished

I made it to Lille!! And shockingly, at least for me, I managed to get here without losing my passport, tickets, cellphone, money, list of important numbers in case I lose stuff, my entire wardrobe for the summer...or other important and similarly losable items. I met some really interesting people during my almost 24 hour trip, and without their help, I would have had a much more difficult time, for sure. After arriving in Amsterdam from New York, I first met a lovely elderly Belgian lady who told me all about her children and children-in-law and how they lived in pretty much every city I was visiting. Standing near us was a man who kept glancing over at us and smiling and whom I could most accurately describe as a hippified, Belgian fusion of my grandfather and my favorite high school math teacher. He could clearly hear every bit of our conversation and was smiling at parts of it, but somehow he never quite entered the conversation. Then, he ended up sitting right next to me in the plane, so we ended up talking, in Fringlish, all 20 minutes of the flight from Amsterdam to Brussels. He had crazy, curly graying hair and was wearing birkenstocks and a t-shirt to a conference that he was organizing about psychosomatics. His education was in quantum physics, and if any of you are unfamiliar with my grandfather or Mr. McCord, I could just as easily say this man looked like Albert Einstein. After quantum physics, he became interested in health and the interaction of mind and body and has written a few books on the topic. His name was Jean-Jacques Crevecoeur, directly translated into English as Jean-Jacques the Heartbreaker, which I imagine may have once been a supremely apt name. He was originally Belgian but had moved to Montreal to study and had three daughters a little older than me. His first wife, a mathematician, was in Belgium and his current wife was a neuroscience Phd and researcher; his three daughters were studying theatre, dance, and music, which he seemed to find quite amusing. When we got to Brussels, Heartbreaker helped me find my luggage and the passageway to the trains, both of which I would not have found on my own for only one reason: I kept on looking for some sort of security check or customs and was continuously feeling like I was doing something wrong since I couldn't find it. I later realized that waving my passport at a slightly dazed security officer in Amsterdam was all the security there was to gain entrance to the EU. In general, I had a lovely time in Brussels because I found myself pretty much in an overdeveloped Tower of Babel. People around me spoke a thorough mixture of Flemish (Dutch), French, English, and German, resulting in a standard greeting of Hello, -insert language(s) that you speak or Hello in those languages-. One then had a few second long negotiation of sorts in which it was decided which language would be optimal for speaking with the approached person. Everyone seemed quite accustomed to having informative and interesting conversations in broken speech, though I was also surprised at how well most people did speak English considering it wasn't an official language. A nice Flemish-speaking boy who was studying at a conservatory in Lausanne, Switzerland (and who had learned Spanish from scratch when he got a Spanish girlfriend) was my next train neighbor. Our conversations vaguely resembled charades in that if one of us couldn't think of or understand a word in English or French, we would start to act it out and the other would try to fill in the missing word. After talking about our summer jobs and plans, flemish boy, whose name I never actually got, realized that I should, at least theoretically, know something about vision since that's what I was working on, and tried to get me to diagnose some weird eye condition that he had. He was a very fun, friendly guy and he also helped me load my stuff on and off the train which would have otherwise been near impossible considering how many people there were and how fast the stops were. Those two were my most memorable travel buddies, but I did also meet a couple of friendly American backpackers who somehow already seemed stoned at the airport in Amsterdam, a French punk, and a some nice British folk. People were generally very friendly, and unfortunately for my French, were perfectly willing to speak English as soon as they realized that might be easier for me. My major lessons from this trip were: a) if you act confused and can't carry your luggage you make lots of male friends b) Speaking the same language as the person you're talking to is overrated c) sandwiches are better in Europe d) coffee is better in Europe, though unfortunately not any more effective at keeping me functioning e) stuff costs a lot in Europe and that if you want to enjoy yourself, you should resist trying to convert everything into prices in dollars because its just upsetting f) French girls are super stylish but the boys try too hard. That's all for my journey to Lille!