First Couple of Weeks (Sept. 11, 2000)

Last week was quite amazing. Opening ceremonies (me in a suit :) were interesting, especially because they were attended by some consuls, and our 6 resident faculty. The rest of the week was composed of introductions to and history of space, our school, the profs, etc. The last lecture of the week was best, because the lecturer, an anthropologist from Hawaii, gave us context and reasons for manned space flight (basically he proposed that we are all overgrown kids, and learning/science, etc. is just a continuation of our play instinct, or, as the chancellor of ISU (Arthur C. Clarke) put it "playing with spaceships). Every night involved going out to the pub and drinking, which even some of the profs attended.

This weekend was equally interesting. Last weekend we took a trip to the Vosges, some mountains just south of town with castles and monastaries on the top of each and beautiful views. So, in order not to let this weekend be outdone by last weekend's success, we went hard. Saturday was the day of a wine festival in town, so we had to go and sample the local wines (all whites, but quite good, and $2CDN/glass, $8/bottle). After finishing 3 bottles between four people, we decided to enter a contest which involved filling a keg by carrying water in a wooden backpack and clogs (which really suck to run in). As the winning team we won six bottles of wine, although we shared with the losers, who won another 3. And we finished all 9 bottles that night, split between 6 people. I was more drunk than I've been in a long while (iron ring night not withstanding). So, to make things worse, I woke up early the next morning to run a 10km race with a friend, and I managed to finish in 44 mins. (Tim - going out after the MCAT set a really bad precedent). Amendment - the following weekend I ran another race, also after another long night of drinking - thus MCAT set an INCREDIBLY BAD precedent.

The rest of Sunday was therefore a little more laid back. I biked to Germany with 2 other Canucks, and we gorged ourselves on the local cuisine. I'll definitely have to go back though, because there's ice cream shops every couple of feet, and because electronic stuff is really cheap. We then lazed about by a beautiful river in the sun, before returning to Strasbourg (we had to walk home, because my bike didn't make it, in keeping with the rest of the bike trouble I've had this summer).

This week started well, with some lectures on aerospace medicine by Oleg Atkoff - a cosmonaut who once held the record for longest time in space. The rest of the week looks equally fun, with a school sponsored Tartes Flambees night on Friday.

Jazz d'Or (Oct. - Nov, 2000)

OK, so I know that this is a little skimpy, but to be honest, Strasbourg is a small town. There’s really not all that much that happens in the town itself, hence the disappearing act most weekends. There are a couple of exceptions to this rule of course, and those exceptions are to be the content of the next couple of lines.

First off, France has a huge love of the arts, and thus subsidizes them heavily. For a student in university, that means that most shows and spectacles are very cheap (approx $7CDN). Unfortunately, Strasbourg is a small town, so its attracting power is kinda slim, but there’s gems everywhere.

One of the gems that I happened to see was at the Jazz d’Or Festival, a fairly typical jazz festival that took place from the end of October to the beginning of November. With the help of Anne Eschbach, I was privileged enough to be able to check out a couple of the shows. The first show was a pretty weird French band that played a mix of supremely esoteric crap and African/Balinese-type music. As a sucker for anything with a great beat, the latter part really clicked with me, making the concert a moderate success. A couple of nights later though, Anne took me to Schiltigheim, a small suburb of Strasbourg, to see a small Italian trio. The pianist was amazing. He played the kind of jazz that sucked the audience right into the concert and made it impossible to be a passive observer. The music was driving, and was really great to hear.
Strasbourg is known throughout Europe (supposedly) as the “Christmas Capitol of Europe.” Basically, the town capitalizes on the already exploited holiday to snag as many tourists as possible. Not that I’m complaining though, because they really do a good job of turning the town into a tourist trap. The centre of the festivities is the Marché Noël, a phenomenon that takes over a couple of the bigger squares in town, as well as some of the outlying streets. The market is composed of four types of little huts: 

1. Those that sell vin chaud, crépes, gauffres (waffles), hot orange juice with honey (a personal favourite), baguettes flambeés, and other assorted foods,
2. Tourist traps selling Santa’s hat with blinking lights, Christmas ornaments, and all sorts of miscellaneous, mass produced garbage,
3. Artisan’s shacks with Fimo, Africana, jewelled eggs, kitsch junk, dolls, marionettes, etc., and
4. Sugar shacks, with 1 metre (3 ft) long marshmallows, candy apples, chocolate covered fruit, cookies, and everything else you would expect to find in Hansel and Gretel’s Gingerbread House.

When you add in the millions upon millions of lights strung everywhere (including chandeliers in the middle of the street), the whole town becomes transformed into a “magical mystery land.” I have to admit, they really got it right with this one. It’s very hard not to just walk through it in a glossy-eyed daze. Add a little bit of snow (I can dream, can’t I?), and I won’t ever have to wake up in the mornings.

Kayassine (par Les Arts Sauts) (Nov. 31, 2000)

I’m not quite sure what it is that makes jumping off of semi-stable objects suspended 20m (65ft) in the air a form of entertainment, but who am I to complain. Anne, in her typical majesty, invited me to join her in watching Kayassine, a trapeze show near the European Parliament. Set to music performed by some wacky musicians suspended with the rest of the performers high above the crowd, the trapeze artists proceeded to swing, jump and throw themselves from one bar to another to a person hanging upside down 10ft away and back to the bar again. I’ve seen trapeze before, but I don’t think like this. Oh, and for the engineer in me, the show was performed in a huge inflatable dome, where they made the entire audience squeeze themselves between two inflated pillars in order to enter and exit.

Symposium, Presentations, and Baggersee Beach (May, 2001)

We're ba-ack!!! After a great few months in Boston, it's nice to be back in Strasbourg. The change of pace is startling - going from 17 hour days to having absolutely nothing to deliver takes a lot of adjusting, but I'm trying to do it with style. It's all nice and happy not to have anything to do now, although I'm slightly dreading this whole group project thing coming up.

Immediately on my return to Strasbourg, we were thrown into the middle of ISU's Small Satellites, Bigger Business? Symposium. Some of the speakers were incredibly interesting, and some weren't. Getting over jet-lag made some of the symposium unbearable, but the food at the lunches and dinners made everything acceptable again.

After the symposium, with nothing significant calling our attention away from the more important things, we decided to get into the whole R&R way of life. Many afternoons were spent playing frisbee, soccer, and basketball, or swimming, suntanning, biking, or similar pursuits. I ate a lot, played a lot, and drank a little. What a wonderful life.

Somewhere in all this reverie, we were asked to present our placement work. This was not really a significant request, and I'm proud to tell y'all that most of the class executed their presentations magnificently. One of these days I'll get around to putting some of my work up on the web... maybe. I skipped a couple of days of presentations because higher matters called (Shavuout). The second day of Shavuout was great though, because I was invited to the house of one of the rabbis, with his 8 kids.

Just as all this relaxation time started to get boring, the Moscow trip came along, and off we went again to explore the larger world. Now we're all back in Strasbourg again, and getting heavily into team project. Oh well, there's the end of innocence. Fortunately, there's a hell of a lot of laid back students around, and there's allways the Paris airshow, parabolic flights in Bordeaux, and all sorts of other things to look forwards to.