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.