Long commutes and strange keyboards

As I travel back and forth to work each day, I am discovering what it is like to have a 1 hour commute each way.  While I am not stuck behind the wheel of a car, I have also discovered that trying to do any reading or writing on the bus makes me feel sick pretty quickly.  So the 2 hours I spend in transit every day doesn't help me get any work done.  It also leaves me little time for seeing much of Paris since by the time I get home, we are eating dinner and putting the girls to bed.  I have peered over the shoulder of one woman who appears to be preparing her thesis (or maybe just a journal paper) on her commute back and forth.  Every day, as she gets on the bus, she opens up her computer, fires up her LaTeX editor and fights with formatting issues to get everything just right.

Since I don't have any way to connect it (no WIFI) and I can't work on the bus,  I haven't even been taking my laptop to the office with me.  Instead, I get to work on a pretty substantial workstation with a ridiculously old OS - Mandriva 2006.  Mandriva seems to be a Linux distribution of choice since it is a French effort.  With only 2 weeks, I am worried about how much time I would lose trying to reimage the machine, so instead I end up working remotely on a colleague's machine down the hall.

And speaking of that.... All the keyboards here are French keyboards (what would you expect), which means they are nearly impossible for me to use.  I can remap the layout to a US layout, but then I have to rely on my muscle memory to know where the right keys are.  For some of the non-alphanumeric keys, this is definitely slowing me down.  Even more fun, though, is that I have set up a 1-click toggle between the US and French key-mappings so that when one of my French colleagues wants to take the helm we can easily switch.  About 50% of the time we forget to switch and get all kinds of interesting results.

Tomorrow will be a sombre day with France's loss tonight to Mexico!

Trocadero full of Football fans

Trocadero from the Eiffel Tower
Originally uploaded by gonuke

Everywhere we turned in Paris today, there were people flying their Algerian flags in celebration of today's football game against Slovenia. This includes the majority of those who filled the Trocadero for the outdoor screening of today's game.

While it is quite natural to expect a lot more Algerian flags than Slovenian in Paris, it was a little surprising to see how excited and demonstrative the Algerian fans were even after the lost.

We are quickly learning how the kids see things through a different lens. It took a lot of convincing to get them up the Eiffel Tower ("it's just a building") and they were not very interested in the Arc de Triomphe. Their cultural highlight today may have been watching the police flush out the illegal vendors beneath the Eiffel Tower and trying to understand what was going on.

We've finally arrived

Near Jardin de Luxembourg
Originally uploaded by gonuke

Our second attempt at leaving went very smoothly. We had chosen a ridiculously early flight from Madison to Detroit - good thing since the more logical alternative was delayed long enough that we would have a repeat.

Upon arrival, the only glitch was the longer than expected walk, with all of our bags, from the RER station to our flat. The girls did a great job with their loads.

After a quick cleanse, we grabbed a late lunch and roamed our neighborhood up to the Jardin de Luxembourg where we engaged in some sailing on the pond and took in a little big band concert.

We held off the jet lag until a normal bed time for us all, including watching the US-England draw at the world cup.