Voilà, c'est fait..

Alors, c'est officiel. À partir de septembre 2013 (à peu près 3 mois d'ici), nous allons être des citoyens de la ville de Munich. Ce fut une décision difficile pour plusieurs raisons dont (1) c'est l'Allemagne et nous pensions que nous allions rester en France pour un peu; (2) nous ne parlons pas la langue (au moins pour maintenant); (3) nous serons absent du Canada pendant plus longtemps que nous avions initialement prévu; (4) c'est un travail très différent de ce que j'ai imaginé que je ferais (mais ça à l'air intéressant); etc... Néanmoins, nous sommes ravis. C'est une expérience unique et excitante, et ne vous inquiétez pas: nous serons de retour pour Noël juste comme l'an dernier. En plus d'un bon salaire et un boulot assez stimulant, j'ai six semaines de vacances par année alors rentrant en général ne doit pas être un grand problème.

Même si tout d'un coup il semble que nous n'avons pas beaucoup de temps qui reste içi, nous avons toujours plus que trois mois avant que nous allons déménager. Heureusement, ces trois mois se passent pendant l'été et nous avons des projets. En juin, on va participer dans l'Ekiden de Grenoble; c'est un marathon en relais qui est couru par équipe de six. Moi et Sandi sont des membres de l'équipe "speed" du club ASPA de Meylan (cf. ASPA Run). Le weekend prochain c'est la fête d'anniversaire de mon ami et collègue Guillaume alors on va passer le weekend à un chalet dans les montagnes Vercors. On va probablement consommer un bon montant de vin car le père de Guillaume est viticulteur. Sinon, nous allons aussi faire des randonnées et l'aquabranche (?).. La semaine prochaine c'est le BBQ annuel de Xerox.. c'est un moment excitant! Après ça, en juillet, on va avoir au moins un visiteur et nous allons passer une semaine à Nice pour visiter la plage et le festival de jazz de Nice où on ira au concert de Ben Harper. Le mois d'août est réglé pour être pleins aussi avec plusieurs visiteurs et peut etre quelques petits voyages dont un séjour à Munich (payé par mon nouvel employeur) pour choisir un appartement, apprendre des choses de la ville, etc. Finalement, si vous ne le savez pas: le mois d'août apportera également l'anniversaire de CINQ ans de mariage pour moi et ma femme! C'est dingue! Donc dans l'ensemble, ce  sera un été plein.. En outre, bien sûr que nous avons besoin de déménager à un point! Heureusement, on n'a pas trop de choses içi et le pire va probablement être -- comme toujours -- les vélos!!

Local Irish Pub

Barcelona

Barcelona is awesome. One of the best places I've ever been. We took the train:

and it included going through this area where you have the sea on one side and these salt water lakes on the other. You can see lots of flamingos and at times it feels like you're on a magic floating train because all you see on either side is water..

We lay in the grass:

Met up with Brittany:

The weather was good:

We visited Park Guell:

And La Sagrada Família (that is a very very big church that is not yet finished despite being under construction for 150 years or so):

We went biking of course:

And saw lots of fountains lit up at night:

Obligatory photo of food (vegetarian)*:

* we became vegetarians like 2 or 3 weeks ago.

Short Update

Difficult to find time these days it seems. I have a few pretty nice pictures from our trip to Barcelona that I will share hopefully this weekend but I'm at lunch at work and don't have my camera with me so hopefully soon. K/J arrived yesterday and unfortunately for them the weather here is total crap right now which sort of sucks but I guess c'est la vie.. The marathon was really really really really hard. I have this long-standing problem of not being able to properly sleep or sleep at all before things that I guess I'm nervous or something about so that definitely includes the marathon and things were difficult even before taking the first step because I slept maximum 2 and a half minutes the night before and therefore I was tired; like really tired. For both of our goal time-wise was 3h30m and I'm sure that if things had gone smoothly we could have done that. Nevertheless, things didn't go smoothly because I was ready to fall asleep on the start line and I was in pain just a few minutes into the race and things weren't exactly perfect for Sandi either because she had hurt herself a few weeks before and as such wasn't training at all in the final nearly month or so (though we did both do the Grenoble-Vizille 1/2 marathon 2 weeks prior to the marathon and it went very well and was fun). So, Sandi started out a bit faster and then I passed her at the half-way point with the large group of people running with the 330 pace bunny (although they don't call them pace bunnies in France). At around 30km I lost the 330 group and really started to feel pain and tiredness and started slowing down a lot. Just 2 km later I had been telling myself DO NOT STOP DO NOT STOP DO NOT STOP and then I stopped and walked for a tiny bit and this was pretty bad news because you still have 10 km to go and that's a pretty far way. Anyways, so I walked a bit and then started jogging again and the pain was pretty bad so I pulled over to the side of the road and started like self-massaging my legs and then Sandi caught up to me and was like "let's get going" and so I was like "ok fine" and then we ran together all the way to the end and finished in 3:36:00 for her and 3:36:01 for me even though as you can see in the video I cross the finish line a few seconds before her so there's something wonky there but essentially we finished exactly together which was pretty neat. Afterwards we were in a lot of pain but our friends had come to cheer us on and so we forced ourselves to hobble through the city to a place to eat and then later on in the evening we couldn't move any more so we ordered pizza and a bottle of wine to our hotel and watched Back to the Future in French (side note: only 2 more years till the year where Marty went to the future and had a hover board and all that.. I don't think we'll make it).

Then Barcelona was really really amazing. We spent some time with Brittany and Craig the first few days and we went to the beach, saw the Gaudi stuff, the big church la sagrada familia, etc etc... Then we rented bikes and went to the beach again and did a lot of walking and it was just a really cool place. We also stayed the second part of the trip with a friend-of-a-friend from Leeds and that was quite nice. I will write more soon and include some pictures.

We've been watching the Giro and unfortunately our boy Ryder had to pull out yesterday due to illness and the same for last year's TdF winner Bradley Wiggins. But we're still watching it's pretty relaxing.. kind of like watching golf at the cottage.