Bamboo picking

Word of advice: if you ever try to hide a bamboo shoot, your inside coat pocket is not the best place for it. Those things are sharp. On the other hand, simply putting it into your outside coat pocket means it'll fall out and get lost before you can take it home to grow in your water bottle.

This is what happens when there is too much travel. Apparently, attempts at bamboo smuggling.

I've just been off on a trip to Rennes for a week, followed by another week in Barcelona. After each one, I got home just in time to drop my bag and run to French class. Because clearly, that's the only important thing that happens in Lyon: French class.

No regrets, though. I visited Rennes to help V-- buy furniture for his new apartment. IKEA furniture. It was great. We'd wake up in the morning, and start putting things together. It turns out that IKEA arm rests are these vacume-packed foam slabs, that are, like, 1 inch thick. When exposed to air, they inflate, and then they're arm rests. Apparently, the same is true of McDonald's hamburgers- they inflate on the grill.

Rennes has a downtown with a bunch of winding cobble-stoned streets. The houses have dark wooden frames in box-and-x shapes, with plaster filling in the middles. When I came back, my office mate told me that it's how they built things in Medieval times.

The university is kind of far away from the city center, about an hour's walk. And along this walk, there are a billion parks. There was a big one with lots of little pools for ducks, and a big parrot-cage in the middle, with parrots of all sorts of different colors. One cage had green parrots, blue parrots, and then, next-generation tourqouise parrots.

It was the right sort of city.

The Barcelona trip was to visit a friend of mine, who's also a co-author. Which is pretty cool, because this meant that he could invite me, and for the cost of one seminar talk, my travel expenses were taken care of. That's why it's good to do math. You get paid to hang out with friends!

In Barcelona, it was summer, and everyone was wearing dark coats and scarves wrapped several times around their necks. Seriously, you don't wear coats when it's 70F outside!

My friend works in a special research department there, which means that his wing of the building is infinitely nicer than the rest of the math dept. And, their vending machine made really good hot chocolate. (But trip food deserves its own blog post!)

So we worked, and saw Barcelona, and working while seeing Barcelona. We went to the Park Güell, which was built by Gaudi. First, we tried a back entrance, and found a group of people picknicking with a bunch of big-ish black dogs that started getting upset at us as soon as we entered their terrasse. Then, we had to go around the whole thing, and every singe door we found was blocked. We did finally find a way in, though.

Half the park must have been fenced off. And there were boy and girl scouts roaming behind the fence. There must have been hundreds of them, and they weren't all wearing the same uniforms. Not really sure what that was . . .

Oh, and in Barcelona, I got stick shift lessons! It turns out that driving stick is really really fun. I'm clearly biased, because I love driving in general, but there's just so much more you can do with manual transmission. And now, I can rent a car in Europe. Really excited.

So yes, those were my past two weeks. Now, I really need to work. That would be a good idea.