the Wild West in Fontanil?

I was unpacking things in the office when I looked out the window and saw the bank guys loading up the ATM with money. A closer look reveals that the dude had his gun out!

Get Zoe out of Mommy's Hair Day

Zoe and I went to Place aux Herbes to pick up some fruits (pears, figs), veggies (zucchini, shallots, carrots) and a chicken from the Rotimobile. I almost bought some nice Comte, but figured that with the move on tuesday that I wouldn't have time to eat it. There was a flea market on the Quai, which was fun. It was mostly junk though, except for this stuffed Chamois, which is awesome

I also saw some kayakers on the Isere! I don't think I had ever seen any boat on this section except for the po-po.


After stopping back at home to drop off our booty, Zoe and I headed to the Chateau de Vizille. The friggin GPS tried to get me to drive through bus only lanes and various other hijinx, but we eventually made it there. Along the way, I saw a Velodrome! Zoe had just awoken, so she was unfortunately in no mood to walk. She was however in the mood for a gaufre au chocolat.

A few pics from our outing:





Once we got home, Zoe insisted on stroking the baby. She is actually really gentle with Alex and seems to be quite interested in him. As long as she gets enough parent time and Alex doesn't eat her chocolate things, I think she will tolerate him!

slow day

Brought AAZN to the hotspital to do a blood test for jaundice. Not much doing besides that

Zoe meets Alex

I picked CZ and AAZN up from the hospital today and then drove to pick up ZZN in St. Egreve from the nanny. I had been looking forward to seeing how Zoe reacted to her freshly minted brother all day. I loaded her into the car seat and she immediately noticed something was different: another little human was in the back seat with her! Zoe turned to look at Alex for a few seconds, contemplated him with a slightly disinterested expression, and then looked back at me and said "CROISSANT!".

Once we got him home, though, she really seemed to take an interest:

food

In all the chaos of our re-introduction to france, it's not often that I get to enjoy the benefits of being back. Occasionally, however, I do get to smell the roses. It's always small things of course, since it's not like I'm going to be going to Ceuse or Annot anytime soon. Today for example I was buying Chloe and I lunch at an Ile Verte boulangerie. This place had all kinds of beautiful tartes, delicious sandwiches on bread right out of their gigantic brick oven, pain au chocolat in dark AND milk chocolate, walnut breads, perfect croissants and many other things. The truly amazing part is that boulangerie/patisseries like this are not even that uncommon here. As much as I love the bay area, there really isn't a single place that I can think of that does proper viennoiserie. Even places that come close, but charge an arm and a leg like Tartine are swimming in such a pool full of turds that they seem like the best thing in the world. In Grenoble (not a culinary capitol really!), Tartine would not even rate. For a pastry and bread aficionado like myself, that's pretty good news.

here we are, a day later

Alex Arrives

After the very surprise labor last night, this morning I dropped CZ off at the hospital (no one under 15 allowed in the hospital so I needed to drop ZZ off). She had been up all night with contractions which were very painful but not frequent or long lasting enough to merit a trip to the hospital in the middle of the night. I drove like a madman to St Egreve to drop ZZN off with the nanny, then back again to La Tronche, where there is NO GODDAM PARKING. Seriously, a hospital without a parking structure next to the baby building? I had to park 20 minutes away on foot. There did not turn out to be a huge hurry, since we were in for a long wait. After some initial questions, they escorted us to the birthing room, which was really nice-- Chartreuse views! I had to wear little booties, a gown and a hair net the whole time, but hey, at least I wasn't giving birth, right? We requested the epidural immediately, and they examined chloe who was now at 5 cm.


Chloe and I exchanged nervous glances, since that was how things started out with Zoe, and that was a loooong and painful story. A little later, after getting pumped full of epidural drugs, chloe was feeling better, but still at 5 cm. This was not looking good. Then the epidural stopped working, and the anesthesiologist very begrudgingly gave CZ another dose, to no avail. She even checked Chloe's drug port to make sure it was going in and not just running out over her back. I'm not sure if they thought chloe's screams of pain were a show for us, or perhaps she was a junkie in search of a fix or what, but it took a long time before they switched drugs. The problem with no working drugs was that Chloe was pushing before she was supposed to (because of the pain). The baby hadn't descended enough, so that was not a good thing. The good news was that she was at 10 cm now. After switching drugs, the baby's heart rate started slowing a bit, so all of a sudden I found myself in a very familiar situation: wife wheeled out of the birthing room, with me told to "restez la, monsieur" in an empty room hoping someone would remember to come get me. In a few minutes a nurse returned with scrubs for me to don (those things are comfy! I want to wear them all the time), and summoned me to the C-section room. "C-section room -- uh oh!!" Thankfully, drug #2 had kicked in and chloe was by now feeling pretty happy. It was 6 pm and they were going to give the baby another 40 minutes to descend. However, 20 minutes into the wait, the heart rate was not looking fantastic and they decided to try a vacuum extraction. I won't go into the details of this, but it was a pretty incredible thing to watch. They attach a vacuum cap to the head of the baby, and then pull like crazy while Chloe pushes. This is not a delicate maneuver -- the doctor looked like he was starting a two stroke engine. After four cycles of this and a little cutting (agh!), Alex was out and very cone headed. Chloe had been pushing like a champ and looked like she was about to pass out, but assured me that she was in no pain: her 8.5 month plan to get a drug fix had succeeded! They cleaned the baby off while chloe had to push the placenta out. The placenta is kind of disgusting looking and gigantic, to be perfectly honest. I have a nice picture of it for those of you that think that eating them is a cool custom. Next came 40 minutes of holding chloe's hand while they sewed her back up.

Hooray for Chloe! Alex was a little upset at being prodded, but otherwise quite happy.


Big thanks to Franck for offering to pick up ZZ, and for Lolo and Vero for picking her up and bringing her to their place. I didn't make it to St Egreve until 10 pm or so and they even put me up for the night so I didn't have to drive all the way across town.

labor!

on the way to the hospital.

plateau d'Emparis

We did a quick Carrefour run this morning, and then geared up for hiking in the Ecrins. After a little vacillation, we decided to try something new rather than le Lavey and chose a trail past some alpine lakes near the Col Saint-Georges. This also gave me a chance to shake down our new civic, and it definitely didn't disappoint: plenty of power to pass even going uphill, and it handles great. The ergonomics are very good too. Even with some pretty spirited driving (a little to the dismay of Chloe, probably), we averaged 35 mpg, which is very good in the mountains, I would say. The road to Bourg D'Oisans has been greatly improved since our last stay, with new wide roads and roundabouts where there used to be tiny roads that took you right through small towns. I'd be interested to hear about whether it has made much of a difference to the traffic going to the big ski resorts or not. Anyway, we didn't read the description of the trailhead access very carefully and missed the part about a 14km long "piste pastorale", which turned out to be a pretty goddamn scary narrow dirt road with a few thousand feet worth of cliff right off your bumper. No stress at all. Here's one of the less steep parts:


And here's our sexy new ride in the parking lot, a little dusty from the road up


The hike itself was beautiful. It passed through rolling alpine hills and unbelievable views of glaciers and La Meije for almost the entire walk.
Le Lac Noir (2440 meters):


Le Lac Lerie

The trail back

I must be out of shape because it was a pretty tiring hike, despite being quite short, and with very little altitude gain. While I was slogging up one of the steeper parts right near the Lac Cristallin, I reflected on how much your perspective can change once you have a kid. Chloe and I used to argue about equitable load distribution in our packs ("I have the rope!","But I have all the quickdraws!"), which seems pretty silly these days. The thought of a 9 pound rope in a one pound pack seems positively sublime compared to a screaming and lurching 30 pound 23 month old strapped a few inches from my ears.

climbin

gym climbing at thew EV with Francois; it's great to be climbing with him again. We have big plans for some alpine routes: Meije, Le Tete du Rouget, Aiguille du midi. It's good to be back.

clemenciere with Franck

Rode col de la clemenciere during lunch today and was thinking that the location of ESRF/EMBL is hard to beat: tons of col that can be done during lunch; a dozn crags that you can *see* from the polygone... woo!

into town

in search of tartes aux noix


success!


Back to Haagen Dazs for "iceys" (Zoe's word for anything frozen and sweet)


and then to the Jardin. This fountain has a hypnotizing effect on ZZ: she stares at it and cackles maniacally for as long as we will let her.

Here we are sitting at the foot of one of the jardin's beautiful Sycamores.

I was saddened to learn that all of the old trees in the Place Verdun have been chopped down. I can't remember what kind of trees they were (Horse Chestnut?), but they were beautiful. If you haven't been to Place Verdun, it's the most stately of the Grenoble public squares in my opinion, even if it does house the dungeon of despair known as La Prefecture.

We had lunch at a fastish Lebanese food place and then window shopped for a while. I saw a sign for the world famous Lyon Tacos:
which offended my Bay Area Taco sensibilities. First of all, they look disgusting, and second: that doesn't look even remotely like a Taco.

place aux herbes

Skodaless, we tram
to the place aux herbes market
in search of veggies

Place aux herbes -- so nice.



and then on to the jardin de ville



and then to Haagen-Dazs (arch aux fruits was closed!)



I also bought some pants (EXCITING) with our new Carte Bancaire. Pants buying in france is a little different from the US in that the pants almost always need to be hemmed, but the hemming is included in the purchase price. Generally, the clothes I have bought over here seem to hold up a little better than their US counterparts... not sure why that is, since they are probably all made in China.

Thundershowers in the evening:

my commute

I normally dont ride very hard because its urban riding with cars and pedestrians everywhere. However, there are a few places where I can go fast.

ca roule

We had extended our Skoda dream ride rental twice, but I finally gave it back today, so no car for a while -- booo! In other news, we received official notification that we will be letting an apartment in le Fontanil with an Oct 13 move in date. I have a bank account with checks and a CB. We will hopefully be picking up our car next week. Chloe has found a temporary nanny. Things are moving along!

bike lanes

In the past week I have seen:
+people parking cars in the bike lane, forcing cyclists to veer out into traffic
+teenagers blocking the entire bike lane walking next to eachother and then having the gall to tell me to slow down (there was a sidewalk right next to them)
+Street sweeping machines turning bike lanes into filthy swamps

Grand Som, sorta

We got an earliesh start to try to hike up the Grand Som on a misty day. Unfortunately, we took a wrong turn and ended up doing a big loop around the monastery. Next time I'm going to at least look at a map beforehand

Car

In our search for cars we have so far test driven the fabulous Skoda, which has been the subject of previous posts, as well as the Mazda 3 (like many other cars, available in a torquey diesel engine unavailable in the US). The mazda felt pretty good, but was quite a bit more expensive than the special offer Honda that we had previously driven. I like the built in nav system, and the visibility out of the back was better than the honda. However, it felt a little anemic on the hills, but the next step up in engine was the 185 hp diesel, which is probably more power than we need (ok, never thought I would ever write those words!) at considerably more expense. During my test drive we stumbled upon a cycling event which was a time trial up to St. Nizier. There were many fancy bikes, mostly full carbon race machines, with very serious looking riders. I watched a few get started and they were *hammering* up the hill. Later I discovered that it was a 1000 meter hill climb for 15k, and the winner did it in an amazing 39 minutes. Crazy. After this, we headed to the Honda dealership, for CZ to test drive the car (she hadn't last time). As predicted, she loved it, and we signed on the dotted line to reserve the car. So assuming all of the paperwork works out, we should have a brand new eurospec Civic next week! I know it looks small, but it actually has more trunk space than a BMW 3 series wagon, Ford focus, Outback XT, WRX, or the GTI with the seats up. It also has blue mood lighting and an ipod dock, but those had nothing at all to do with our decision.

Later on, we took the tram downtown to let Zoe frolic in the Jardin de ville

and took her up on the Boules to the top of the Bastille. We walked back down with her and ran into some friends of ours that were running up the hill (like we used to, when we were in better shape). More importantly, we went to the new storefront of Les Alpages!



I bought some Comte de Montagne, some Camember au Calvados, a super dry Picodon and some Roquefort.