I guess my body's adjusting to the new time zone. I just had the first good night's sleep I've had since I've been traveling. Of course, the half of a bottle of wine for dinner probably helped a bit as well.



It's cold here, getting down to the low 30's at night and staying in the 40's during the day. The sun is shining today, so I'll try to get some good pictures of the view from the office here. There is a green valley in the distance, a small castle on the hill. The office itself is filled with plants, and has a wall of windows overlooking the valley. Compared to the building where I normally work, which is a windowless 50's bomb shelter-style bunker, it's quite nice.



Everyone here in the countryside seems more friendly than those in the city. The IT manager offered a stay at his house, which he described as "a small castle", should my wife and I ever come back to visit. But then again people have no problem carrying on conversations in French in our presence, even though they all speak English. I would normally see this as rude, but maybe it's more acceptable for them.



Rural living is always strange to me, but the villages here are so....well, foreign. I took a quick walk through the village of Puylaurens after dinner last night, and I was walking down extremely narrow streets, more like alleys, lined with rows of houses, the occasional shops, all with shutters shut tight over the windows to defend against the cold. I don't know whether I'll have a chance to see the village or our hotel during daylight, so I haven't gotten any good pictures. It's just all very quaint, very old and very French.

After a night with practically no sleep, I went to bed last night at 9:00pm and went instantly to sleep. I woke up some time later feeling well-rested and ready to face the day. I looked over at the clock - 3:00am. Great. I tried to get back to sleep, but suddenly my mind was racing with stress about work and everything that needed to be done today, and it became clear that sleep was not happening. I turned on the light, read for a while, finished my book. After about an hour of being awake I turned off the light and once again attempted sleep. Eventually it came, and luckily when my alarm went off at 6:30 I was still rested and ready to go.



I got up, had breakfast and had time for a quick 15-minute walk around Toulouse. It was still dark, so I only got to see the city in the faintest gray light of dawn. At 8:00 the taxi arrived to take me on my 45-minute drive to the company facility in Le Faget in the French countryside. The driver spoke no English, so the ride was spent in silence, except for the music from the Joe Dassin CD he played in the stereo. We sped through narrow winding roads - first city, then suburbs, then rolling fields punctuated by tiny villages. Finally we pulled in to Le Faget and I arrived at work.



Work was....well, it was work. We made progress on our tasks, but not as much as I'd hoped. We broke for lunch at a nearby cafe where we had a starter salad and a main course of chicken baked with stuffing and a light pastry stuffed with zucchini and possibly some other vegetables. We had to leave the office at 7:00pm because we were losing our access to the building, and we came back to check into the hotel (I'm accompanied on this trip by an IT manager from Ireland).



The hotel is nicer than any place I would hope to stay on vacation. It's a very quaint country hotel. The large rooms have tile floors and wood-beamed ceilings and cool artsy little mirrors and paintings on the walls. The dining area feels cozy, like someone's living room. We ate at a table next to a huge fireplace with a warm, inviting fire. And the food - oh my god. Roasted duck on a plate of greens with a light samosa-like duck-filled pastry on the side. Local lamb cooked in lemons with cous-cous. A selection of various stinky cheeses afterward.



So yeah, even though the rest of the week will consist of late nights in the office, the accommodations are definitely not lacking. I can't eat like this every day, but it's my first day in France, ya know? And I wish Jen could just teleport over here now, because it's not as fun without her, and she would totally dig it the most.



(btw, I posted a few pics here)

I'm in France. Toulouse, to be exact. I'm not sure which was worse, the 7-hour flight from RDU to London or the 8-hour layover at Gatwick. After that it was a mere 1.5 hour flight and 20 minute taxi ride to the Toulouse city centre, populated by long Boulevards, narrow side streets, and countless cafes and restaurants. There is a circle at the end of the block with a carousel and a lighted Christmas tree. I haven't seen it during daylight, but the lights at night are quite beautiful. If I had a better camera I'd have taken pictures, but you'll have to take my word for it.



I'd like to be out exploring, but I'm exhausted after only about 3 hours of sleep. I caught about 2 hours on the plane and then an hour or so in an incredibly uncomfortable chair in the airport. And I do have to be alert for work in the morning, so it's almost 9pm and I'm ready for bed. Weak. I did manage to get a taxi, check into my hotel, and go out to eat dinner without knowing more than about 3 words of French, all of which I just kept repeating (Bonjour, Merci, oui, Bonjour, Merci, etc). It's my first time solo in a non-English-speaking country, so it's kind of weird.



Tomorrow I head out to the countryside, so hopefully the weather will be better (it's rainy and windy now, which made landing a delight) and I can snap some pictures.



Au revoir!

While I was a member of the Master Singers, I sang songs in probably at least a dozen different languages. One of the hardest for me to pronounce was always French. The best advice I ever got for pronouncing French was to "ignore half the letters and mispronounce the rest." Now that I'm going to France I'm trying to at least learn a few key phrases that will get me by for a week - simple things like "Hello", "Goodbye", "Please", "Thank you", "May I have a glass of red wine?" and "I didn't vote for George Bush".



So far it's been going OK. I bought a French phrase book, and every time I think of something I might have to say in French I look it up. And then forget it five minutes later. So far I think I remember how to say "I'm sorry, I don't speak French," but I still have a few more days to learn more. I was able to connect to the servers in the office where I'll be working and fumble through the French edition of Windows 2003 Server, but that was mostly because I knew where all the icons were already.



I'd love the chance someday to spend enough time abroad to completely learn a new language through immersion. I have enough of a base in German or Spanish that I would probably be able to pick one of those up quickly if I was forced to use it every day. However, since I don't foresee moving to Germany or Spain any time in the near future, I expect that won't be happening.



As a humorous aside, I was copied on an email sent out to the employees at the facility where I'll be working next week, informing them of when various servers and systems will be unavailable. I ran it through Babelfish to see what it would come up with as a translation, and it was close enough that I could figure it out, but whenever it came across "server", it translated it to "waiter". I guess Babelfish needs an IT version.

For the most part I'm very tolerant when it comes to service in restaurants. I rarely get upset if the wait staff isn't overly friendly, if an order gets screwed up, or even if service is a little slow. People get grumpy at work, make mistakes, get busy - whatever, I get it. I still leave a tip. One thing I can't stand, though, is to be ignored, and this has happened to me three or four times in the past couple of weeks. I walked out of one restaurant after sitting unacknowledged for at least five minutes, during lunch hour. I know people were busy, but would it hurt to say "I'll be with you in a few minutes" or even just make eye contact? Another time I refused to leave a tip after being abandoned by a waitress who dropped off our meals and then disappeared into the abyss. No drink refills, no "how's your food?", nothing. I had to get up and hunt her down just to get the check. We could have just walked out of the restaurant and she never would have noticed. Tonight it almost happened again - we were seated for several minutes before anyone came to our table. Luckily they showed up before I got too mad, because it was some damn good Indian food.



But sheesh, what's the deal? Give me bad service and I can hang - just don't frickin' ignore me.



On the bright side....I'm drinking some hot chocolate with whipped cream and a little peppermint schnapps. I just walked Sunny Dawg and it's like 35 degrees outside. Brrrrr.