Thanksgiving in France

Last Thursday was Thanksgiving, and although it is not celebrated in France, my fellow students from the United States organized a Thanksgiving at my residence, Le Rabot, with the resources we had. We don’t have ovens in our kitchens, only stovetops, so there was no turkey. But pretty much everything else was present, including many different types of desserts. Le Rabot is very culturally diverse, and everyone was invited, so there were some not-so-traditional dishes, too. All in all, I think it was very successful. I’m sure non-U.S. students were a little confused as to what we were actually celebrating, but we did our best to explain Thanksgiving to them.

As the semester comes closer to the end, you can be sure that final exams and projects are on everyone’s mind. I had my final exam today in Telecommunications. My Software Engineering, Operating Systems , and French exams will all be on 15 December. Just two more weeks, really! As I expected, the semester flew by much too quickly. I wish I had done more traveling throughout Europe, as the opportunity to do so will be much more difficult and expensive once I’m back home. I'm going to Berlin for a couple of days though right after my finals.

In the meantime, Grenoble has entered into the Christmas season. The weather is much colder now than in September, its usually around 50°F in the daytime and 20s-30s at night. It hasn’t snowed yet, and it’s actually been fairly dry, but I’m sure it will come in December. For the past week, stalls have been set up in the Victor Hugo Square for the Christmas markets. They are now open, and very popular on the weekends. They have many things for sale, including Christmas/holiday items, but also food, sweets, and Vin Chaud, which is wine served hot. It has spices, citrus, and sugar in it as well, and it is very popular here and throughout Europe this time of year. 

Classes, Traveling and the Holiday

Since I haven’t posted in a while, I’ll try to think back to the some of the things worth mentioning. My classes are going pretty well. Each class has time set aside for practical exercises (sometimes in addition to a lab), and I think this helps with the comprehension of the subject. For example, in my Software Engineering course, the professor organized a 3-hour session and broke us up into groups of about 4 or 5. One person was a client, and the others were the engineers who had to come up with the requirements for the project after a few hours of questioning. I was given the role of the client, so it was my job to answer the engineer’s questions and explain how I wanted the software to work. It was a very successful exercise, because it showed that writing requirements are not as easy as people think when learning about them. Each group left plenty of important things out, or wrote requirements that were vague/untestable, etc. 

We had a week-long break from classes from 24 October to 2 November, and with the break, I had the opportunity to travel to Barcelona. It is a very cool and unique city. It has traces of Roman architecture more than 2000 years old, traditional Spanish influences and influences unique to the Catalan region of Spain. Locals definitely identify themselves as Catalan, and not Spanish, but most people speak both languages and usually English as well. The city has a notorious problem with pick-pocketing, but I was with 6 other people and we were careful, so it was never a problem. Walking tours were given daily, organized by the hostel. I got to learn a lot of interesting things about Barcelona. 

The art school Pablo Picasso studied at when he was a child (now closed). 

City Hall Building

Also organized by the hostel was a Tapas and Flamenco tour, which is where you eat tapas and get to see flamenco music performed afterward. I can’t describe the music very well, so here’s a youtube video taken previously of the place we went to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqBSqYBGMqU.

Probably the most incredible sight to see in Barcelona is the Sagrada Familia, which is a cathedral designed by Antoni Gaudi over 100 years ago. The church still has not been finished! Its predicted to be completed in 2028, but the locals said it might take even longer. There are many things I learned about the Sagrada Familia, but I didn’t have a formal tour of the church/area. Here are a few pictures, but obviously there are many more online (Wikipedia has a picture with the construction digitally removed from the photograph). 

This was taken at the Roman Excavation Museum. Many ruins exist, buried by centuries of building layer upon layer on top of each other. Today's Barcelona is several meters higher than these remains.