Stockholm

I've been in Stockholm for a little more than two weeks now and it's pretty great! It's nice to be back in a city with ogle-able bikes and a well thought-out public transportation system.

I live on the island of Kungsholmen, which is really cool. There is a 9 km waterfront promenade along the perimeter, which is additionally buffered by big green parks/greenspaces for most of the way. It's so pretty, like makes me actually want to  go for a run; however, I've yet to take my phone to capture the great views. During the weekends everyone is crusin' around on their boats playing fun music and there are lots of balloons- it's like a parade! 

Rålambshovsparken is on the island and is super cool. When I first arrived, there were outdoor movie showings and picnics. Under an overpass that goes thought the park, they've built basketball courts, track straightaways and a skate(and scooter)park, since the area would have been concrete anyways. Last week I went kayaking around Kungsholmen and some of the other islands with some classmates. The red building in the background is the city hall and on the right you can see the main part of Stockholm and maybe even make out the central station.

It's an easy comute to school and close to the center. Plus, I live in an (sort of) actual apartment building (instead of a dorm) and my studio has a full kitchen (read: oven) that came stocked with cutlery and accouterments. My room still isn't "together" - I need a bookshelf or another set of drawers and have been checking the basement room for abandoned items regularly. Magents and postcards cover my fridge and the room came with a swedish flag, but the rest of my posters/art will be going up this weekend, if I don't take a trip.  I've been riding the metro, but will take more advantage of my subscription to the city's bike sharing program. The metro rides have given me lots of time to read on my new ereader, but I want to have a better grasp of the city.

The weather has been (surprisingly) quite nice, albeit a little schitzo. Shorts and dresses are still occasionally appropriate!

I've been practicing with the local ultimate team, the Stockholm Syndromes and I am way way way way-er out of form than I expected, but they are nice people and it's good to be running around again. The first practice was really weird, I did great during the drills part, successfully laying out twice during the hucking drill, but when it came to the scrimmage, I dropped every single disc. I also got skyed and a blackeye for the trouble (it's finally gone!). Playing-wise it has gotten substantially better since then, but I've been cupping and popping, so it's still unnatural and awkward. Nationals is in two weeks in Jönköping, I probably won't play that much, but it will still be fun to check out the scene and a different part of Sweden! They won silver last year, and from what I've gleaned they seem a little bit bitter about it, so we are totally gunning for the gold!

Sweden seems to run on cards. Metro card, temporary student card (photoless - just to get the reduced metro price, but also surprisingly valid for claiming the student discount at fancy, yummy, vegetarian buffets), bike card, bank card, cafeteria card, library card, insurance card, old student card for when temporary one fails, residency card, computer-room card, american driver's license for when residency card is not accepted, and my german blood donor card (just because it has my blood type incase I'm in an accident). Fortunately the change-purse that I bought in Morocco to give as a gift (and forgot to) is perfect for carrying them + some krona (and the wallet that I had planned to buy at home this summer, but forgot to, would have been horrible). The krona is sort of an annoying currency and not just because everything is expensive: the coins are relatively large. A small coffee at the non-student price is like two and quarter dollars, a cheap beer at a bar is about seven and a half. All of the citrus looks really sad to be here. That said, there is definitely a greater diversity of food available here than in Madrid or Nantes.

 

My Grandma has suggested that I update more frequently with shorter posts, so I may try that and see how it works out!

Here you can buy (light) fun

End of Semester

The end of the semester was really hectic. One morning there were 5 exams, some of which were open book. My testing seat looked like this:

The tests were generally frustrating; they covered half day seminars from the beginning of the semester and wrong answers were negative points. So the tests were short, but being exam ready on five different topics was rough.

That afternoon we went to an incinerator. It was pretty cool. Below you can see the giant claw that moves the garbage from the intake area to sorting belts. At residences recyclables are put into yellow bags and other stuff into blue bags, then they are optically sorted at the facility. I wanted to see the optical sorter in action (I had learned about a similar facility while at NCSU), but it wasn't running the day we went. We did get to look at the flame in the incinerator, although it didn't resemble anything we had learned about in our combustion couse. The loose trash, which doesn't get sorted is moved around using a giant claw (see video)... worst arcade game/prize ever?

bags to be sorted

optical sorters

It wasn't all work! People cooked for me! Anto made a delicious Indonesian meal and Caitlin made me a half-birthday fruit salad.

 


I biked with my mustachioed coursemates down to the new carrousel in Nantes to watch the Bastille Day fireworks, which were the most graceful I've ever seen. They were syced to delicate techno.

After the final IEP presentation (it went ok... I was poorly prepared) and a final night celebrating in Nantes (most of my friends went to an old shipbuilding warehouse that has been transformed into Crepetown), I took a train to Lyon where I met my cousin, her old exchange-sister, and Emily in Lyon.

Hipsterized fountain horse

We took naps at a roman amphitheater. The cathedral was beautiful and at the top of one of the huge hills. It was also a double decker: below the main level, which was full of mosaics, was another that was dedicated to Mary and was painted in pastels: blues, purple, green. So pretty!

Floor of the top level of the cathedral

We also visited some nearby beaujolais vineyards. The area isn't very touristy, so our actions were mainly dictated by our quest for food. We saw a church steeple and walked towards it, thinking there would be something there. There was a restaurant (closed), bakery (closed, but they deliver!), and a pharmacy, where the nice lady understood my poor french and let us know that there might be something in the next town over-- 5 km away. So we hiked there through the grape fields and there were two restaurants! One was closed and the other was open, but just for drinks. The kind men there informed us that there was a supermarket not too far away. It was next to a park, so we had a nice little picnic.

pretty house

little cousin in search of food

After the girls left for Paris, I met Max, a French intern that I worked with in Germany, for a hike near his grandparents house at the start of the alps, in the Massif de la Chartreuse. Aside from the hut with dozens of boar's feet, the views were stunning. After the hike, his parents took us to the lake that you can see from the mountain.

  

View of the lake from the summit

View of the summit from the lake

I flew to boston via Munich the next day. During the layover, I picked up a copy of my favorite newspaper and did a complicated interview/Fragebogen (survey) in german, which boosted my german-speaking confidence, which was sort of low after the trip to Baden-Baden. 

Thesis Presentations + IEP

Last week at school was pretty chill. We had some conferences to attend Friday, but most of the week was free to attend the thesis presentations of the cohort before us. There were some really great/interesting presentations/internships. It gave me a lot to think about with regard to what I want to do for my thesis. It is interesting to note that one of the presentations that everyone said was the best and "inspiring, even" did not get an A (I missed it), whereas good, but not fantastic ones that I saw did. I noted what questions were asked so that I can be ready to stun the jury this time next year. Several of the projects were in or required travel to Africa or Latin America, which could be fun.
At the first presentation, I took a full page of notes. At the rest of the presentations on the first two days I jotted down a few lines on each. By the third day,  I had pretty much taken to practicing my handwriting and taking down great quotations.

I don't yet know what I want to do for my thesis. We have so much freedom. I think it is more difficult to present, if you do a more business-focused project, rather than a research based-thesis; however, the evaluating juries consist of one faculty member from each consortium school, which means that the audience is really diverse and somewhat non-technical and purely technical report will be lost on them. Additionally, the engineering professors ask trying technical questions (as they should - it's your thesis defense), while the businessy guys propose horrible alternatives to your work. One management professor suggested transmitting hydro-produced electricity from southern-central Africa to Europe, nevermind the fact that you'd be building transmission lines trough countries with 2% electrification rates or that similar renewables programs in northern Africa are having trouble... Europe's demand for non-fossil derived fuels is more important.

 Each evening we had to stand beside the poster we had created for our Integrated Engineering Project (IEP) for two hours. This was poorly organized. No on knew who was evaluating us or how many profs were grading. On the last day, there were 17 posters and 1 professor who had to evaluate everyone's spiel, no one else was in the building, but we still had to stand attentively beside the poster on the off chance that someone walked by. We presented ours 2.5 hours into the session and there were several more to go after us. No one should have had to wait around for that long... my feet hurt so much, that I couldn't go out for the 4th of July.

Nevertheless, our project is pretty cool, we looked at a landfill in Mexico to see what the solid waste management practices were and what we could do about it. The results: barely existent and not much, but we have designed a fairly elegant solution. I'm just a little worried that we have expanded the scope too much and won't have a consistent level of quality in all of the aspects.

The most frequent question was "Why is it green?"

Some of my classmates organized an international dinner for the presenters and the jury members. It was fun to hang out with the older cohort after they were done presenting and soooo delicious. The first dish to disappear was the two Spanish tortillas (due to the large presence of professors from UPM?) followed closely by the homemade Mexican tortilla. Luckily the Mexican tortilla filling last much longer and I was able to create a baguette-taco. I made sweet potato-pecan couscous, an assortment of peanut butter and jelly/banana/honey sandwiches, and (eggless) chocolate chip cookie dough truffles. I stole the following photos form other social media sites:

Before

After

Dessert! Chocolate Cheese Cake, pineapple cups, apple crumble...

Concert and Dancing. (and lots of leftover baguettes)

I'm headed into a week with 8-16h classes every day + 5 exams and a field trip on one day! Yay Wednesday! Then the next week we have one more exam (that we know of, so far) and the final deadline for IEP with the paper, documentation and presentation of the semester long project due.  Then I'm (probably) off to the south of France for a few days before heading back to the States for 3ish+ weeks!

Baden-Württemberg + Paris

Hi. So, I haven't updated in a while because I was mostly just doing school work on campus. Leaving campus to go to the grocery store was a rare and extremely exciting event... I didn't think my musings on whether to buy bio applesauce or to spring for the pear-apple mix would be that interesting. My trusty readership has asked me for updates and I finally went on a little trip, so here ya go:

Last weekend I met up with a friend from highschool in Baden-Baden, Germany. This old resort town is known for its hot mineral springs with healing powers. We hiked part of the Panoramweg up to some cool castle ruins then back down through the city where we tasted the hot springs. 68C and very salty. I didn't really have any aliments that needed healing, but I (surprisingly) did not feel sore the next day.

First time in Deutschland as pork eater. 

Sunday, we headed to Freiburg where we checked out the cathedral, the Schlossberg park and its Aussichtsturm, and an organic  brewery. One thing that I really enjoy about crazy views like the one from the tower is that you get an idea of the energy situation of the area. We could see wind turbines, solar panels, and a biogas storage bubble.

Get out your 3D goggles- this was taken with the 3D panoramic setting on my camera... I don't think it worked. 

Afterwards, I  headed to Stuttgart to catch the night train to Paris. I spent my layover watching the England-Italy game and the Italian's celebration afterward was quite impressive. Driving around, waving flags and honking for over an hour. I can't imagine what their celebration was like when they defeated Germany a few days later. My favorite participant was the guy who just drove his Ferrari around: not honking or flag waving.

An uncomfortable train ride later, I woke up in Paris -- 3 hours after I expected to arrive. (There was one routing option where I could have changed trains in Metz and arrived at 7:30, but for some reason I opted to just stay on the same train). I got some breakfast, journeyed to the domestic train station to stash my stuff, and set off on foot to explore. I got a little disoriented (there is the Arc de Triomph and a smaller model of it in some park and my phone sent me to the miniature) and walking took much longer than I expected. I ate a a fancyish picnic lunch and took care of some business at the Swedish embassy (they have surprisingly little security).

Strawberry, mint, pepper ice cream.

I spent the rest of the afternoon chasing down the actual Arc, but didn't want to wait in a two hour line for a free ticket (I'll book online before I go next time) and catching random glances of la Tour Eiffel. I also hit up a grocery store with an american section and scored some bagels and soft baked cookies.

 

The trip reminded me just how awesome Germany is/can be (or maybe I was just glad to be outside of Nantes for a change). The jury is still out on Paris....

Just three weeks left in my semester and oh so much work left to be done. I'm giving a poster presentation on our semester-long project on Monday: "Analysis of a Municipal Solid Waste Landfill in Jalisco,

Mexico and Mitigation Strategies." (Yes, the title is a bit grammatically unsound, but our tutor insisted). I also need to arrange for my travel back to the US and around Europe for the summer. 

A+, cj

(that's short for à plus tard -- until later)

Cartel Prep

I've been practicing with the handball team in preparation for the Cartel, a tournament at the end of April between all of the Mines Ecoles in France (+ a few in Spain and Germany) where the schools compete in all of the sports for which they have common teams (read: not ultimate). You get points based on wins and losses and whether the event was a team or individual competition. This year it's in Ales, which is near the Med, and we have the two days after the competition off, so I hope to do a bit of travelling around afterwards.

I'm really enjoying handball, even though I'm pretty bad. Luckily (?), most of the team is new to the sport so we are all learning together. {All of the team sports compete at the same time, so most of the girls who were on the team for the regular season will play with other teams at the Cartel (soccer, rugby, volleyball)... there are only so many athletic girls at our small engineering school, they all play several sports -- when ME3 arrived on campus, we were all recruited heavily by the soccer and handball teams, even those of us who have never played sports before} You need the sort of body moves/fakes that are useful in basketball, which I don't currently possess. I finally felt like I was getting the hang of things the week before last and I sprained my left ankle taking a shot during a drill, but it's feeling much better now. At practice last night my shots went were I wanted them to about 60% of the time (I dropped 10% and the rest were off target), which is like a huge improvement... I've been trying to get my shots to go "bas" for so long. My ankle is kind of messing up my approach because it's in a brace and (like in ultimate) you push off with the foot opposite of the arm you are using, hopefully when i more to a smaller brace, it will be less of a hinderance. Here I am getting the handball equivalent of "skyed" during our first scrimmage:

More photos of the game can be found here.

The girls on the swim team for the Cartel are injured so I may be swimming in the 10x50m relay race with Emily (another ME3er who I convinced to play handball). We've been to the pool a few times and while I am slow, I'm not as slow as I expected after 6 years of not swimming competitively.  My cap and goggles are really pretty colors though, so it's all good.

So you can probably look forward to a post about the Cartel and our subsequent travels in the south of France.

Championnat de France universitaire d'Ultimate Recap

Champs!

Okay. I know it was like a month ago, but apparently I'm being held to my blog-promises. Disclaimer: I did not take any of the photos or videos. I don't know where most of them came from (a teammate got a bunch from friends on other teams and from fb).

It was unlike any other tournament I've ever been to. We got to skip school to play Ultimate! The tournament was on Thursday and Friday and was located at my school (and the one across the street - Polytech) with a field in each of our gyms and one outside. Initially it was designed to be two separate competitions: mixed and open, but several of the mixed teams were unable to meet the 3 girl requirement and had to switch to the open division last minute, leaving other mixed side with only three teams. In order for the mixed teams that traveled from afar to not feel like they came all that way to play just two other teams, the mixed competition was folded into the open tournament. I'm not entirely sure how the pools worked, but I think there were three pools of 4 (each with a mixed squad) and one of three (without a mixed team). On Thursday we played 3 open teams in pool play and a cross over game, finishing 2nd in our pool and 2-2 for the day. Games were 30 minutes long with up to an hour and a half between games... I may have spent more time & energy re-warming up than actually playing. A game by game recap can be found after these (hopefully) more interesting observations from the tourney:

• The open finals, between  Université  Lyon and Université Franche-Comté Besançon, was exciting to watch. It was outdoors and the outside field had disproportionately large endzones, which lead to some dramtic plays. I was cheering for  Comté, because really tasty cheese comes from there and because Lyon skunked us (more on that later) in pool play. Comté had a nice long game (it was sorta sneaky) and their team was predominantly made up of people who were studying Sport (like many of the other teams), but their athleticism wasn't enough to overcome. It was nice to see someone scoring on Lyon; I think they trounced everyone pretty well in pool play (that said our pool wasn't very strong: a mixed team, the last place team and a team that didn't finish the competition {they had exams on Friday})

• Each of the teams in the Open Final had a girl (even Lyon, who also had a mixed team). They were soooo good. I'm glad they didn't play mixed because they would have spent the whole game embarrassing me!  (the first row of photos is of the same play)

 

• After we won the mixed championship, I received a few marriage proposals from my teammates so that I could stay in France and play with them again next year. It's been awhile since I've been proposed to so that was nice, I guess. Although, getting French citizenship probably wouldn't keep me in Nantes.
• So much swag! I netted two t shirts (one for the tournament and one that says I'm a champion), a handy Nantes drawstring bag, a nice pink scarf (so French) with loire atlantique printed really small in one of the corners, some stickers and, of course, a medal! 

• Indoor Ultimate is so strange. I found out during the practice before the tourney that the stall count is only to 8. Thanks teammates for letting me count to ten while marking you for the past two months! There is also some rule about not throwing the disc short and having it bounce for the pull... I don't know what I did wrong, but it made the other team really angry (I didn't even do it on purpose, my shoulder was just tired).
• The Uni Nantes team is really good and fast and if they were taller, they might could've made it to the finals. My whole team (minus our 1-2 first years) is about to leave for their 3 month internships, so I may have to branch out to the wider Nantes Ultimate community.
• It's still really weird for me to be a handler, who isn't like the third handler on the field who doesn't get the disc much, but like the one who is expected to throw some of the scores. From watching clips of some of our games, I saw that I was actually breaking around my mark and not just relying on my IOs, which is neat to know.

Pool Play:

• University Lyon - the Pentagônes - They went on to win the Open Championship. On the way to that achievement, they beat us 13-0. They were great players and they knew it. I mean when you are 5 guys who score to go up 10-0 against a mixed squad playing 3/2, does that really call for a spike? They even looked like ultimate players (my team is strong, but deceptively scrawnier than average). Getting skunked always hurts, but for it to happen during the first game of a tourney that you have such high hopes for was rough. Really, I'm glad we played them first -  we were able to iron out some kinks (and by that I mean that I may have gotten a little angry at my teammates for setting the wrong force or not cutting until 5, I shouldn't have gotten upset, but got it out of my system and we were so much better about both of those things for the rest of the day).

(I'm not sure about the order of these next two games)

•  Ecole Centrale Nantes - our neighbors and arch rivals - We scrimmaged ECN twice to get ready for the tournament and it was usually very close (we'd be winning throughout the whole evening, but then when we'd play a game to 3 at the end, we'd loose!). We know their players' strengths and weaknesses and had practiced how to stop some of their set plays in training. I taught our team how to prevent the dump from making a strike cut. It was a tight, fun game. I don't remember exactly how the scoring flowed, but I think we were generally a little behind, but came back to win 9-8! It was also a bit of a confidence booster to beat an open team (we found out we could play them 4/1, but frequently had a 3/2 line out). 
• Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon - everyone on the team was from the physics department! - We played this game outside, which was nice since the whole weekend was beautiful. We  beat this team, I want to say like 9-4, but I'm not entirely sure.

The Crossover game was against our own school's Open team. The winner would make it into the top 8 and be contending for the open title, the loser would fight it out for 9th place. The teams were chosen primarily based on who had been on campus and who was away on internship (3rd years are required to do a 6 month internship), with some consideration for team chemistry. Basically the guys I'd been practicing with since February were on the mixed team along with two more girls and a guy with the nickname "D-machine", so our side had a bit more finesse. However, it was always known that the mixed side had a greater chance of winning a title (since we were guaranteed to podium), so the open team definitely had something to prove. We lost on a hammer that was thrown to the guy I was marking, but there was absolutely no way for me to defend that against a 6 footish guy. Losing this game put a  little ding in our pride, but allowed us to focus on our mixed performance.  

After the Mines vs Mines Battle... still friends (mostly)

All the teams ate together in the Polytech cafeteria, then our teams skipped the bar in lieu of hanging out in a common room for a bit. The bar, like everything in Nantes proper, was sooooo far away!

Friday we were supposed to have a round robin of the mixed teams scattered around our open tournament games, which sounds complicated, but since we had the "best" performance (I don't know how that was determined) of the bottom half of the bracket on day one, we got a first round bye. Then we lost to an Open team from Montpelier. Because the other mixed teams won their first few open games it came to a point the the open bracket where we were supposed to play each other, after having played our round robin, but before playing the final... Three games in a row against the same team is a bit excessive, so they just said that our mixed games could count for that part of the open rankings. So, we played that one open game, lost it, and came in 10th for the open tourney.

All of the mixed games were outside and the weather was so unbelievably perfect! The Games:

• University Lyon - I was a little intimidated going into this game considering how dominant their open side was. They were pretty good and would pull ahead by a few points and we'd catch back up. After the cap was on, the count was high and I threw a flick with to one of our guys in the endzone. His man was too close and I probably should't have done it, but he came down with it, then there was lots of cheering and someone was giving me a hug. We had won the match! I had no idea that it was tied and double game point. There's no way I would have thrown that, if I had known! After each game, we have a spirit circle, where we stand in a circle alternating teams with our arms around each other while each captain talks about how great the sportsmanship was during the game. This is very characteristic of European ultimate. After the circle in most of the games at this tourney, the other team votes on a player of the match and gives them a little gift (our team gave bottles of cidre, apple cider that is well known from our region). I'm unclear whether it is an MVP or a spirit decision, but whatever the case I won for this game. I got a picture that was basically a set of trading cards of each member of their team. It was a very clever gift. 
• University Poitiers - This team was almost entirely composed of non-french people. They were all really athletic and nice. They were communicating with each other in 3 different languages, wore jerseys borrowed from their basketball team and usually practice barefoot in a park. They were fast and taller than us, so it was a fun and exciting game. 

Mixed Finals (against U Lyon):  We started out down 0-2, so I was really paranoid that we were loosing the whole time, even when it was game point and we were up 6-4. My favorite part of the game was when I bid for a D, which I immediately threw for a score, then looked down and saw that I had an inch-long cut down the side of my thumb and then had to go deal with getting a bandage in French. Our boys played crazy defense the whole game -- anything in the air was theirs!!!  I had a few throws that were a little out of reach of my teammates, but we've since had a layout practice, so we're good to go for the future.

Mines de Nantes! Allez, allez, allez!

Well, I never thought the day would come that I was part of a national championship anything, but that day was yesterday and the nation was France! EMN went undefeated in the mixed division to win the Championnat de France universitaire d'Ultimate. Granted, there were only three mixed teams. I'll do a more in depth post once I get some photos from teammates and our open team players (I was to busy playing to document any of the games). For now, I'll leave you with this photo of a teammate holding our trophy (almost the whole team painted our nails the horrible shade of yellow that is our school's athletic color):

Nantes

I've been here for almost a month and, despite a bleak first impression, it seems like it's going to be pretty okay.

I've spruced up my studio.

Before:

 

After:

 

The school is far from the city and kinda reminds me of ncssm. It has about 800 students, many of which live in the dormitories that are 300 m from the classroom/lab building (okay technically there are two buildings, but they are connected). We eat lunch in the cafeteria and play sports in the afternoon.

My dormitory.

The Gym. (and snow)

The Academic Building - we live in an office park.

I've been playing ultimate with the ecole's team. It's a young (this is their second season), all male (except for Ezgi {a fellow ME3} and me), indoor ultimate team.  We have the national university championships in the middle of March so we've been practicing hard (for France... less than jäga's offseason practices). Here we are after a very productive scrimmage against the Ecole Centrale Nantes:

Not only did we work on zone and clam defenses, which are sort of new to me with only five people per side on the field, but I learned that my mid range throws are actually full field hucks. This is an exciting and dangerous revelation.

It is so nice to be back to engineering classes. I got to use some modeling software and make some graphs in excel! We even went to the laboratory and I got to play with a pressure gauge on a nanofiltration thingie. This is so much better than management classes. We may be in class from 8-16h30 everyday, but at least I buy into what we are learning.

My french is still pretty foux du fa fa,  but it is sort of progressing. Sometimes the grammar is like German's...okay, not really but it helps to pretend.

I probably overpaid for bought a bike. It's no townie or the touring bike that I thought I would purchase, but it's pretty nice and came with panniers, lights and lots of household goods that the owner was going to throw out (including 3 cacti and several glasses). I've taken some nice riverside rides and it cuts trips to the grocery store and city by more than half. Plus, it means that I'm independent of the city's ridiculous transportation system. Granted the school is in the boonies, but it can take two buses and a tram to reach centerville. Then there is this chunk of time in the evenings where the buses don't run because the day schedule has stopped, but the night buses haven't kicked in yet. And they change the routing when there is a soccer match, which is particularly inconvenient, if you are attending the match.

Like the school, the city was pretty bleh when I first arrived. You know, typical Europe: cold, castle, cathedral...

Slowly Nantes' charm is expressing itself: he old town is pretty, the elephant quirky, the isle modern and the crepes delicious. My classmates have found some cool cafes - there is even a local microbrewery that makes a dank (in a good way) ambre! So nice to have choices when it comes to beer. 

These guys are all over the city -- so urban!

Spain store - they don't have what I miss about Madrid.

   

Very leany building

Nantes is home to a cookie factory.

The shipbuilding industry is long gone, but still present.

Pirates and Neptune on a merchant's house.