Another cool thing about Grenoble is that it is in France and in France people (sometimes) speak French and they usually go to work late. And France has some other nice places that are easy to get to and you can fairly easily go to other countries as well such as Spain where there is Barcelona which is also really cool albeit in a very different way from the way that Grenoble is so cool. In Barcelona, for example, there is the beach and there are guys selling street beers everywhere; both cool things that Grenoble doesn't seem to have (well we have a beach at the lake and you can probably find someone to sell you a beer in the street but I guess it's just not as pervasive). But the food in Barcelona is kind of crap (why do people claim to like tapas so much? I think it's because they think it sounds classy to say that you're going for tapas even though they're never any good [the tapas or the people that say this]).
If you like heat then Grenoble is also good. It's 36 degrees celsius today and it will be that hot or hotter everyday for the foreseeable future. You can feel sporty by just sitting outside because without moving at all even at 9 in the morning you will quickly begin perspiring as you might in a colder climate after running an ultramarathon. There are some parks here that people like to sit in and relax, drink beer, smoke a lot, and play a stupid game where you tie a rope between two trees and try to walk from one side to the other like a tight-rope walker. It is pretty dumb but tons of people do it for some reason.
In one of the parks there is La Bobine which is a pretty awesome bar where they also have concerts. People also sit in the park out front of La Bobine and you can buy your beer there and then bring it out to the park (or bring your own from home or the grocery store) and sit and relax and drink your beer and smoke a lot and play the stupid rope game if you so wish. This is great because in Canada there would be a strict no leaving the bar with beer policy and probably a strict no beer in the park policy too. If there were a concert (as there was in a different park every night of the week last week) then if they wanted to serve alcohol there would be a big fenced-in area and if you tried to either bring your own drinks or leave the fenced-in area with drinks you bought there you would be given a swift kick to the head by an angry bouncer and then escorted from the premises. Here, you can bring your own drinks or you can buy them from the restaurants that set up little outside bars during the concerts and it is ten thousand times awesomer and cooler and neater (both "neat!" as in that's cool and "neat." as in tidied up; the latter applies because they set everything up quite nicely so that you'll be enticed to buy your rosé from restaurant A instead of restaurant B which isn't set up as classily).
There is even a hockey team here called Les Brûleurs de Loups but for some reason we never went to a game in the last 1.5 years. Oh well. We also have a really good rugby team I understand but we didn't go to a game for that either. For the last two years, however, we watched the annual Ireland-England St. Patrick's Day rugby match in the Irish Bar beside our house and it was pretty fun I'd say. In the same stadium where the rugby team wins all its matches there are also big stadium-like concerts (unlike the smaller concerts at La Bobine) but we didn't see The Cranberries when they came and we also didn't see David Guetta when he "played" there either (how do DJ's have concerts?).
Some other things that are good about Grenoble are the bike paths along the river (when they're not doing construction and so have to close them), the bakeries / patisseries (such as Maison Floran, for example), and the food in general is pretty good too. One thing that is really good about France (this applies to other countries such as of course Italy as well) compared to Canada is that if you ask for a coffee after a meal (or at any time for that matter) you get a real coffee not that dirty cigarette water that you would get in Canada in general and that people buy up by the bushel at their local Tim Horton's.
There are some things that Canada is much better at though such as containing a cottage (if you have one) so that you don't have to share the beach or lake or whatever with a million other annoying people and a very important thing that is bad in France and seems to generally be good in Canada is that at swimming pools in France every single person there seems to lose their common sense and becomes a raging moron set out to destroy your enjoyment by going either as slow as possible, taking up the entire lane, pushing off right before you arrive and then forcing you to wait for them or dangerously go around them because some other idiot is swimming perpendicularly to traffic and changing lanes with their eyes closed and is shocked when you run into them.
But besides those things Grenoble is pretty rad. You should check it out.
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