It is summertime in Grenoble. Yesterday reached 24 (!!!) degrees celsius and today it's about 20 or so. We took advantage of this weather (despite my currently poor ability to walk due to ankle issues) by strolling around the city centre, eating lunch, drinking coffee, reading in the Place Victor Hugo (or writing! if you were Sandi), etc. We were hoping to go to Annecy today but since we decided at the last minute all of the hostels and cheap hotels were booked already and we need to save our money since right now we only have one income and we need to pay our first rent, the deposit (a month's rent) and an agency fee that is almost a month's rent for when we get our apartment this Wednesday... Anyways, so we didn't go but we'll go soon hopefully -- maybe for our birthdays or something if it's still nice out. Oh ya, in addition to it being so warm it's also been completely sunny with no clouds to speak of for weeks. It's rained just once since we've been here (more than 3 weeks) and that was like a sprinkle around 2 weeks ago. Anyways, instead of going to Annecy (we could have still gone by taking the train at 7 in the morning and then taking the last train back which is at 7:30 pm but that didn't seem like a GREAT idea because it's not that much time there and it's kind of dinner time that the train leaves for home and in addition to being really nice in the day it's supposed to be quite the place at night) we decided to take it easy here (see above).
There's this rad iPhone app called Instagram (http://instagr.am/). You take photos on your iPhone and then you can choose one of about 10 or so filters to apply and then you it automatically shares the photo (if you choose to participate) with the Instagram community and you can also automatically have it posted to Facebook or Twitter or some other crazy young-person sites. But -- thankfully -- you can also just save it. So it seems that you can end up with some pretty cool pictures. Directly below is the place we ate lunch -- some tasty sandwiches. Delicious. Really. In fact, I wish I was re-eating my sandwich right now (but a different one of course because the original one is probably like pretty gross right now and re-eating THAT one would be disgusting. But if I were a cow I would do that all the time. But they mainly eat grass and already-eaten grass is probably better than already-eaten French sandwich even though the first time around the sandwich is probably better. So the grass has more staying power -- if you will -- but the sandwich is better the first time around. But actually I don't even know that for sure because I've never actually tried already-eaten grass.. I'm just imagining here). So they put your sandwich on a baguette (natch).1 Then, you get to choose what to put on it. So far this sounds a lot like Subway, for example, but it's pretty much a whole different category of food. But anyways you choose stuff but their stuff is not like "white or orange" plastic cheese like at Subway, but like huge thick slices of fresh goat cheese or blue cheese or camembert or whatever. And so we had these sandwiches and they were good. Got it?
After eating lunch, we continued walking around a bit. We went in Les Galleries Lafayette to look for some cool stuff but we didn't find much. We ALSO went in a book store and I bought three French (language) books. One is Une fantaisie du doctor Ox by Jules Verne, one is Gatsby le magnifique by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and one is La Légende de now pères by Sorj Chalandon. The first one is quite short so I figured it would be a good one for me to start doing some French reading. The second one is of course the Great Gatsby translated and thought it would also be good because I know the book and won't be lost while reading it if I don't understand some stuff, and the third one is another actual French book (a new one) and it was in the section where the staff or whoever suggests some books and I think it one some prize for young French authors so I thought that one would be good. Below is a picture of some statue in a square in the city centre.
After some more walking my ank was bothering me so we decided to sit down in the Place Victor Hugo. There is where Sandi wrote in her journal and I started reading my Jules Verne book. After a while we were a bit tired since we stayed up late-ish last night and woke up early because I guess now that I'm a worker my body is used to getting up early so we had to go for coffee. There's this awesome thing in France called Café Gourmand that pretty much any restaurant has where you get a coffee with three random mini desserts. Maybe I've mentioned this before. Or maybe you know this already. In any case, we got those and sat outside in the sun and they were pretty darn(ed -- ?) good. In the pictures below it kind of looks like we have two coffees each but the second cup is actually just Chocolate Mousse. And the randomness came in where Sandi got some tiramisu-like dessert and I got an apple pie but it was actually pear I think but I said apple pie first cause then you'd have a better idea of what it was. The first picture below is Victor Hugo and you can just almost see the Bastille in the background on the Chartreuse mountain.
This is quite the long post, eh? If you've made it this far I'm quite impressed. So after that we made our way back home for a siesta which was followed by (and is currently still being followed by) posting some of these pictures with some rambling commentary. On the way home (our last weekend in Adagio!) we walked a little bit in the park that will be right across from our new place that we move into on Wednesday! In this park there is a big tower -- the significance of which I'm not sure. But it looks like (as you can see in the bottom-left of the picture) they also have the cauldron or whatever you call it where they probably had the Olympic Flame back when Grenoble had the Olympics in the 60's. Anyways, it's a pretty sweet park and for this picture (as with the café gourmand pictures) I didn't use Instagram -- just the regular iPhone camera -- and you can therefore see how I'm totally telling the truth when I say it's full-on blue sky with no clouds. Also, I just looked at the weather page and the past two days Grenoble has hit the record highs! I looked this morning and I think before it was like 19.7 degrees in the 1970's or something and now I looked again and it says 20 in 2012 (obviously today). Cool I'd say. But it's supposed to start getting a little cooler next week and there's a 30% chance of rain on Monday! For our moving day (not that we have that much to move) it's supposed to be nice and sunny again though...
1. Naturally.
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