Appartcity Lille

Hé hé !

L'Amérique latine, nous voici nous voilà très très bientôt !!!
Plus que quelques heures avant le décollage...
L'excitation et l'appréhension sont 2 émotions qui se battent en duel en ce moment.

Le départ est prévu à 20h ce lundi 7 décembre de Paris CDG et l'atterrisage le mardi 8 décembre à Buenos Aires.
Nous en avons rêvé et ce projet va enfin devenir réalité.

Nous partons tout équipés : les 2 v ...

I just arrived in Lille just over an hour ago by TGV (in right around an hour from Paris, super fast). I got a bit lost arriving to my new host's house, but here I am, safe and warm. I'll stay here till Friday, when we carpool (two groups in two cars) to a big CS weekend meeting in Rotterdam. There I should be able to meet up with my host in Hague (about 20 or 30 minutes away).

The last few days were ...

... well I think, travelling over 1400 miles (or over 2300km) and the car ran faultlessly! Overall it was an awesome holiday, we all had heaps of fun and all said we'd like to do it again. The next one is in early May, and is going to be a motorsport themed event, running through France to Monaco, ending at the Monaco Grand Prix. I'd really like to go on this rally, but won't be able to as I'll be on the Topdeck training trip!

... br>Yesterday on my way to work, I was sat next to a couple of respectable looking people until they got off and were replaced by an old wrinkly smelly man on one side and an old smelly woman on the other side. The woman smelt like very very very old cheese, and had a carrier bag that she kept looking into and feeling inside it for something but she never once brought out whatever it was so I never got to find out... perhaps it was the very very very old cheese.

Other ...

... anyone going to Belgium, the food is insanely expensive! Even fast food can run you 10 Euros and a decent meal will cost you 30 Euros easy. It was so difficult finding any inexpensive restaurants we almost went crazy.

Well that’s Ypres. Quite the learning experience for us both but we weren’t done yet. We decided to make our way along the French Flanders/Normandy coast before making our way back to my Aunt and Uncles for a rest.

... art" exhibition with Annabelle, the teacher in charge of me at school and a good friend. We went to see an exhibition by Peter Klasen, a German artist called "Retrospective". This was by far the most bizarre "art" I have ever seen in my life, ranging from photo collages to toilets with ultraviolet lights to a mock-up of "The Penal Colony" by Franz Kafka, a short story which I read last year for University and found most disturbing! I'm sure you ...

... with animals, we really enjoyed the acrobatics and the incredible diversity of the circus. Acts came from all over the world, including England and Kenya and was well worth the 7€!

My Sundays are now typically spent preparing for school on Monday, after a nice lie-in and a visit to the Sunday morning market, of course!

This week at school I began teaching. However, not many of the teachers remembered this. I arrived for my ...

... at various buildings. All were very interesting and each professor incorporated their own concepts/ideas with each building. This became a more integrated approach to us learning our architecture. The next day we traveled to Amiens, to look at another Notre Dame Cathedral. A little different then the last, but still very impressive. Amiens was a nice little town, it houses a main university in France so it was awesome to get to see how other students in Europe ...

... had a few interesting animals there, like red pandas and little mustached monkeys. After the zoo, we got some lunch to go and hopped on the metro in order to get to a suburb, Roubaix, to go to a museum called La Piscine (The pool). It is in a building that used to be a pool, and it was set up in a really cool way. They still had all the showers up, but had put art inside of them. Where the ...

... time I figured out what direction I wanted to head on my map, I'd passed most of the main tourist attractions: the Ribour Palace (which houses the tourist office) and has a kitchy but touching war memorial on its facade, the Vielle Bourse, a beautiful 17th c. Dutch building, Place General de Gaulle (the city's favorite son), and Grand Place, which at the time of my visit, was filled with tents advertising local ski resorts and ski equipment. The only major site ...