This Side of the Lens (A Year in French) One American's perspective of living in France

August 22, 2008

North to Paris

Filed under: Exploring — Tags: , , , — Swami-G @ 9:11 am

Notre Dame de Paris

Today Christine and I went to Paris to welcome and assist the students that are enrolled in the Paris portion of the program.  Those of you that saw the video I put out from our last trip to Paris may remember that it was a whirlwind tour that we squeezed into 3 days.  Compared with the time frame that Christine had to work with the Aix-en-Provence students, the Paris students were looking at an similarly expedited experience.  Where the students in Aix’ had two weeks to settle in, the students in Paris had four days to get acclimated and hopefully find a place to live.  This meant that Christine was equally busy assisting the students, and I was left to explore Paris on my own during the day and with Christine during the evenings.  

We stayed at an apart-hotel which is a sort of long-stay hotel where the rooms include a small kitchenette, so you don’t have to eat out if you don’t want to.  We were a couple of subway trains away from the office, so depending on the time of day and the direction chosen out the front of the hotel, you could make it to the office in about 20 minutes.  I went down to the office with Christine to meet her associates and learned that I could help them out in the office as their IT guy had recently gone back to the states, and their new Macs were having some trouble communicating with the networked printer.

Point Cap dispenser (ok it's a Durex dispenser)

So instead of beating our feet to a pulp and running back and forth across Paris, Christine was trying to a recover from a cold that was just starting to rear its ugly head in my throat.  I was able to take some time to sleep off the worst of it, but Christine had to struggle with virus throughout our stay in Paris and even back to Aix-en-Provence.  I did get to start a couple of photo projects that I will pursue throughout the year and even though I have not posted any of the pictures, if the project turns out I will happily share the photos with you.  Which brings me back to the subject of the Gallery.  I have posted a lot of photosfrom my travels here in France to the gallery with the hope that I could share with you and possibly have you share some with me.  Let me say that it is not required for you to put your own pictures up, but it is required that you join the gallery to view the pictures so please take a moment to sign up and take a look.  It does not cost anything and I am not using any of the information for advertising or any other targeted purpose other than to share photos.  The gallery simply lets me see how many times the photos are viewed and makes it possible for you to rate and comment on them at the same time.   I guess that’s enough about that.  How about it?  It’s all about catching up…so until next time take care y’all.

-G

August 13, 2008

Nothing like the fires in Cali

Filed under: Thoughts — Tags: , , — Swami-G @ 10:22 am

A fire burns off on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence

I hope I never told anyone I was some sort of professional blogger.  As clearly, you can see, I am not.  I find myself again in the position of trying to play catch-up with real life events.  I was only eight days ahead of my last blog entry when I made it, but the time seems to fly by and next thing you know, two house guests later and I’m behind again.  Maybe really behind, though I don’t know if I’ll drop any clues just yet.  I’m using my photo library to keep track of events and keep myself chronologically oriented in the blog, so when I saw this photo I thought it looked like an easy way to post a short update.  For one thing, I only took one picture on this day, so there was no need to upload a bunch of photos, pick the best and describe them to you, or to recall the events surrounding them.  The photo in this post was taken from my bike on the way out of town when I noticed the plume of smoke trailing across the sky.  Apparently the weather here is a lot like California (though somewhat warmer) and fires are a problem with all the dry grass in the surrounding hills.  OK, that said…I do have a bit of news I wanted to bring your attention to that will likely be appearing in future posts, so you should all get signed up.  I know.  I hate to do it, but I think I’m asking you to sign up for yet one more on-line thing-a-mabob.  I couple of you signed up to be able to reply to my blog posts, and I thank you for that.  One of you even commented on one of the posts.   Thank you Katy for taking the time.  

What I have done is created a photo gallery on my web server so that I could share photos with you all, and hopefully, maybe, possibly you too could share photos with me and the other users of the gallery.  Doesn’t that sound like fun?  Sure I’ve noticed that some of you prefer Picasa, Flickr etc…, but with this gallery you are first and foremost only sharing with members that I have approved and if you wish, you can choose to only share your albums with other members in the gallery that you approve.  So what do you say?  Are you willing to share?  I am willing to share, but recently it has become increasingly apparent that in order to share some of my photos and not have them lifted by google or other sites and spread across the internet without my knowledge or consent, I will have to put up barriers.  Instead of putting a big copyright symbol in the middle of my photos which make them less attractive, I thought this small barrier would make more sense.    So would you please join me at the Larger Purpose Gallery.  The URL for the gallery is http://gallery.largerpurpose.com in case you would rather cut and paste the link.  Your registration requests will be processed a.s.a.p. so please allow some time for me to get to them.  This is not a blanket registration system where any email request is processed by the server.

There are some pictures up there now, though I plan to add more from the archives as I get a chance.  I hope you all are well, and I hope you continue to return to the blog (and the Gallery) from time to time.  Thank you,

-Graham

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