Well it's great to be back. Grenoble is just such a great city, let me tell you. This old trope has been carted out here in front of you folks so many times but it needs to be said again: in Grenoble, as Stendhal (at least) once said, there is a mountain at the end of every street. It's really true. Well, not fully literally in every single sense. There are definitely some roads where you walk down and the road indeed ends but you're not at a mountain -- you're at a café or a shopping mall or one of those awful Nespresso super stores where even though they just sell miniature capsules with pre-ground coffee that are really pulling their weight in destroying our planet and livelihood with their tons and tons of needless trash piling up day after day they somehow need a gigantic store of probably 500 square meters or so. I presume it's for storing all those big George Clooney posters. But in general, no matter where you look, you can see mountains as far as the eye can see. It's awesome.
Right??? I'm here in "the Greno" as we once liked to call it for a few reasons (well I'm not sure about the reasons that we call/called it "the Greno" but I mean I'm here for some reasons of which I'm about to enumerate presently...). The main reason is because I love it and there was an excuse (actually a couple) to be here. The excuses are that I'm attending the 2018 European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR is the cool way to say it) and I will be giving a talk at my old workplace, the Xerox Research Center Europe (XRCE) -- which is now actually known as "Naver Labs Europe" after the Korean Internet company Naver purchased the lab last year. As an interesting side note, this is my second ECIR and the first one that I attended was also where I had my first conference paper accepted and which I presented at the conference in 2011 when it was in Dublin. How about that ("An Iterative Approach to Text Segmentation" available where all good papers are downloaded: here).
Note for the timeline-confused: the narrative picks up here now that a couple of weeks have passed and I'm no longer in Grenoble). The talk at Naver was good! It was a bit funny that there were so many of the same people still there, but it was also nice. And the place is just as easy on the eyes as it always was:
A beaut! Yes, that is the famous Chateau de Maupertuis where I once worked. My actual job. Cool beans yo. Here is an artist's rendition of the building where I currently work (more or less accurate):
So Grenoble was great, seeing friends was fun, giving the talk was nice, all good. Well, it wasn't all good; I had a cold most of the time and the trip was a bit short, but we can't have it all I suppose. Actually, the worst part was that I was there for 5 days and I didn't get to go cycling. THAT, my friends, is where Grenoble really shines. I would have loved to do the hour-long climb up to Lans-en-Vercors or headed down the highway to tackle the Alpe d'Huez or any other of the amazing cycling routes around here, but alas time was limited.
Another insane part of Grenoble that I realized this time but never would have even thought about when we lived there before is the housing prices. Good golly Grenoble is cheap! As is the norm (for some reason) in French cities, there are agences immobilières on essentially every street every few buildings. I'd conservatively estimate that 1 in 4 businesses are agences immobilières and they put up ads for houses and apartments and what not in the windows. This was just eye-opening to the extreme. You can buy a beautiful 3-bedroom house with a swimming pool on the side of the mountain for the cost of our crappy apartment and have enough left over to buy a Porsche each to race down said mountain. You could, if you preferred, buy essentially 3 city-centre luxury apartments in Grenoble for the same price as our non-city-centre non-luxury Munich abode. It seems basically that the prices there are a little cheaper than 1/3 of what you would get here. Insanity. Now, the salaries are a little lower in France. BUT, if your salary is 1/2 but your house costs 1/3, you still come out the other side a little better off, right? Let's see...
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