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.

yay!

Buggy bank+ nana sold our prius -- we can buy a car in france now!

rental car bye-bye

We have to return our beloved Skoda tomorrow, which I am sad about. My only complaints after living with it for a week are: spartan interior, weak turning radius and the steering feels a little loose now (the car only has 3k km on it). Other than that, it's great.

Zoe got ahold of a Sharpie yesterday and inked herself up quite dramatically. She looked like a Mission hipster with tribal tattoos by the time she was done! Here's a youtube video about it -- email me your youtube id to view it if you dont have access.

moving sucks

still trying to rent our place out, sell our car, buy a new car and find a new apartment. bleh.

Stuff

My contract begins tomorrow, but I went in to work today to get the wheels turning on getting a bank account, since that is a prerequisite for almost anything. Compared to US banking, the minuses are: account fees for online banking (what?) which are happily waived because of where I work, and you get charged a yearly fee for the use of a chip embedded bank card. The benefits seem to far outweigh the minuses, though: very strong antitheft and anti fraud protection, no fees for bank card usage anywhere in the EU, at any ATM and cap gains immune interest bearing savings accounts. Not bad!

From the bank, we drove to check out a car at the Honda dealership. The car in question was the Honda Civic Diesel, and I had already read a lot about it. Normally civics are fine cars, if a bit lacking in pizzazz. The euro version, however, is a different story. It looks really sleek and has a lot of awesome features. For example: fold flat seats which turn the boot into a gigantic pickup bed-esque space (more room than most cars in it's class), cool cockpit with glowing blue everywhere, triangles everywhere, and a kick ass motor. It has the unavailable-in-the-US 2.2Cdti diesel motor, which is smooooth. My only complaint is that you have to rev it a bit, but it's a Honda motor, after all, so I guess that's not a big surprise. Once it gets going, it pulls really hard, and handles very well. We took it on the first part of the road up to St. Niz, and it did great. I was actually surprised that the car guy lets us leave with it, with only a photocopy of my drivers license! Maybe car sales are so bad now that insurance from a car theft is a viable option? Anyway, back to the car: only 140 hp, but 251 foot pounds of torque! Add UK fuel efficiencies of 62 mpg on the highway and 42 in the city, and it's looking like a front runner. Granted those are imperial gallons and the UK efficiency ratings seem way far away from reality, but still! The last bit of good news is that the CO2 emissions are very low, so no supplemental charge for having a terr'rist financing machine like the Cayenne Turbo I saw pulling out onto Jean Jaures today. Talk about conspicuous consumption! those are 167,000$ here without options. I can't even imagine what the insurance is like, or paying for the gas since it gets 14 mpg. So yeah, I'm hoping we can get a euro civic.

Later on, Zoe and I went to the park 20 feet away from out temporary apartment:



And checked out the view from the balcony

Chartreuse Monastery

We got a late start and then headed to the Chartreuse Monastery. I was very pleasantly surprised by the pep in the Skoda 105 hp diesel motor (never thought I would write anything like that!) and after taking in the beauty of the roads leading up to the col de Porte and down through St. Pierre en Chartreuse, we parked at the Monastery lot. In retrospect, bringing Zoe to a place where you are asked to respect the monks' vows of silence was perhaps a little ill advised, but she was actually very well behaved.









We drove back through St. Laurent du Pont to Francks place, where we had another great meal with wine to match. I talked to Franck a little about the Hackintosh phenomenon and am thinking about trying to set one up myself at some point.

We went by the market in St. Egreve this morning; very nice!




Franck had bought croissants and other delicious things early in the morning, so we did not violate te first rule of the French Market: never shop while hungry! With Franck's help, we moved to our new temporary digs which is on the border of a somewhat scary (but nothing like East Oakland Scary) neighborhood. The apartment is great, though. On the car ride to the new place, Zoe pointed out the window at the Neron (A large outcrop of rock visible from most of Grenoble) and said "BIG.. ock!". I'm hoping that is an indication that she will be drawn to the magic of limestone. Ock=Rock, by the way -- she has trouble with leading consonants. Her first french word appears to be "Merci", but she doesn't quite know how to use it yet.

Carrefour

We accidentally slept sixteen hours today, waking up at the break of noon. After a quick walk


down to an unfortunately closed boulangerie, we had some lunch and then headed to Carrefour for some provisions. The first thing you see when you enter the store is the pitiful wine section:

pathetic!
The next thing we did was check out the TVs and then o to the cheese section, which Zoe greeted with shrieks of "CHEESE" and pointing at the cheese.

I managed a quick ride up past Proveysieux, which was kind of painful, and felt slow. I didn't realize it packed that much elevation in such a short distance. If trainingpeaks is right, its more than 2k feet in 3.5 or so miles, for an average grade of 11%. I was pinned the whole time, but barely moving.

I descended via the Route de Claix, which has a few scary turns on it. I saw a dude in a bandana channelling Pantani cranking his way up the bottom section.

Dinner was excellent as always at Franck's. He even cracked open a 1999 Pomerol!

Zoe at Franck's

Arrived in Grrrrrenoble!

Franck very kindly picked us up -- It would have been two trips without his help, I think. The plane flight was kind of painful, with Zoe in full mommy-cling mode. None of us got any sleep, there were no LCDs in the seat backs, and I dropped a cup of tomato juice on the ground, which fired an impressive spatter of juice all over my pants. As the cabin got brighter in the sunlight, I kept noticing new areas where the tomato juice had reached, including all the way up to the little air nozzley things! Impressive range on that juice.

Leaving SFO was very sad -- we'll all miss the parents a lot.

Setting off for france today

Last minute packing, etc etc!

ride with Howard

Rode up tunnel and grizzly with Howard and his new Pinarello Dogma DI2. I had good legs at the end, so I rode up Marin (had to put a foot down after almost falling over on one of the steep sections).

Here are power, cadence and speed for the Marin section

bike packing

I found aTeam Bike case on craigslist; here is my attempt to pack my beloved Merckx into it in a manner that will prevent the throwers from destroying it.

cow poo candy?

last sushi for a while

@kirala!

Last day at work

I can't believe we're moving to France!! Are we crazy?

today's ride

felt ok, but got passed by all manner of people -- even an old guy with down tube shifters.

breakfast

with my AM work buddies at the cable car cafe in south san. You always discover the cool places when you're about to leave!