Tag Archives: Life

France 2005: the quest for greatness?

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It has now been a year and a half since I moved to France. I am not going to bore you with all the domestic challenges the move caused me, do not worry, but I need to mention this since I have only just begun to explore life in France. This post about France will therefore be rather impressionistic. Yet I am sure our esteemed guest poster Emmanuel, and hopefully our French readers, will chime in with corrections, elaborations and the like. I also need to mention that I live in the countryside of Brittany, which means there is some distance between me and whatever happens in Paris and the rest of France.

The first thing I noticed about France is that my day-to-day life has not changed much compared to my extended stay in Belgium. People basically talk about the same things: life is expensive, the weather is relatively mild for the time of the year, the bathroom needs painting, sports, etc. And naturally there has been some cultural talk, since I am a new kid on the block with a heavy foreign accent, mostly about culinary and linguistic differences. Every now and then the conversation turns to politics and society. Rarely so, but still.
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A Little Levity

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at the expense of the airlines. (Don’t miss the more serious Europe-stuff in the posts below.)

Mark A.R. Kleiman summarizes a recent experience flying the friendly skies:

In general, the performance of every United employee I dealt with today convinced me that the airline has identified its basic strategic problem as an excess of customers; I plan to do what I can to help solve that problem. (This after ten years of using United as my primary airline; I’m a “Premier Executive” frequent flyer, which means >50,000 actual air miles per year.)

Lufthansa treated me similarly on July 26. In fact, that experience was every Internet-enabled traveler’s nightmare: online e-ticket, check-in, boarding pass in hand, denied boarding at the gate for lack of a paper ticket. WTF does not begin to cover my reaction. I reached the same conclusion as Mark did about United, and I have been working to help Lufthansa solve their problem.

Not sentimental, and no France

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Until a couple of days ago, I was very nearly incommunicado for two weeks. We took the kids to Italy on holiday, you see, and found ourselves in a place with no television, no internets, not even mobile-phone reception. The tiny shop at the site doesn’t even stock English-language (or any other non-Italian) newspapers, and my Italian is, if that is possible, even viler and more vestigial than my Spanish. I found this isolation very pleasant altogether, and in some ways regret having to come back into the connected world.

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ESA and Russia: Together into space?

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Interesting news (via Randy McDonald) concerning a partnership between the European Space Agency and Russia to develop the Russians’ new Kliper reusable space shuttle.

It’s all but official?Russia and Europe will soon embark on a cooperative effort to build a next-generation manned space shuttle. Speaking at the Paris Air Show, in Le Bourget, France, in June, Russian space officials confirmed earlier reports from Moscow that their partners at the European Space Agency would join the Russian effort to build a new reusable orbiter, dubbed Kliper. After the cautious optimism they expressed at the beginning of 2005, Russians are now confident that their European partners will be on board for the largest, boldest Russian endeavor in spaceflight in more than a decade.

Interesting to note that, in one of those strange coincidences, the leading designer of the Kliper system is called Vladimir Taneev – the same name as one of the leading characters in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.

Google Tours Europe.

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I suppose it is only a matter of time until Google Earth will be banned both for its addictive potential and its contribution to a sharp decline in desktop productivity. But given that much of Europe – and afoe – is on holiday these days, I thought I present you, our gentle readers, with the opportunity of a Google Earth powered, lunchbreak-compatible flight over quite a lot of European capitals, most of which are already available in high resolution.

Actually, I did not programme the European Capitals Tour – it was created by a certain Ben at googletouring.com, where you can find and download the tour. Enjoy.

Killer Identities

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Sorting through some old books yesterday, I came across one from Amin Maaloof that I hadn’t looked at in years. So I dusted it off, and started thinking about this post.

The English title of the book is “In the Name of Identity“, but the French title “Les Identit?s meurtrieres” (Lethal Identities?) or the Catalan one ‘Indentitats que Maten’ (Killer Identities) are much more expressive and to the point.
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Life Expectancy in East and West Germany

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After so many days of posting topics related one way or another with death, perhaps it is better to get back to life. One good excuse for doing this could be the 25th International Population Conference organised by the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population and which opened yesterday in Tours, France.

You can find the full conference agenda here, and there are topics to suit all tastes for those who are interested.

Over the next few days I’ll post on one or two of the workshop topics which catch my eye, and today it’s a paper by German-based researcher Marc Luy, entitled “A new hypothesis for explaining the mortality gap between eastern and western Germany” (Only extended abstract available online at present).
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Too Hot For Blogging?

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“Southern Europe was on heat wave alert faced with baking temperatures and drought conditions…….”

“Despite refreshing morning rainfall in Madrid, much of southern and central Spain has been sweltering in temperatures reaching 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) for weeks, though the weekend did bring some respite.”

Unfortunately I’m in Barcelona. The temperatures aren’t much cooler, but there’s no sign of the rain here. Fires, and dehydration victims are going to be the main problems. And, of course, lethargic bloggers :).

Budget Airlines Go East

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AP writes from Bratislava about how budget airlines are allowing middle-aged villagers from Central and Eastern Europe to get on an airplane for the first time. Presumably they will also allow British stag parties to enjoy piss-up weekends someplace other than Prague (or Ljubljana or Tallinn) for a change.

“British tourists can now discover Poland and decide for themselves what Gdansk, Bydgoszcz, Szczecin and Rzeszow have to offer…”

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