Paris and Massy

Well, I finally picked a place to go, and I'm on the train to there right now. Arles, near Marseille, in southern france. It's known for bull fighting, Roman ruins, and Van Gogh. He painted several of his famous paintings in Arles and then went crazy there too. More about Arles when I have actually spent some time there. For now I'll write a bit about my month in Paris.


So... Paris... it's pretty cool. It is all those things that Paris is supposed to be. Lots and lots of patisseries, and cafes with excellent bread, quiche, coffee and tarts. Miles and miles squared of beautiful old buildings with wrought iron balconies. Second hand bookshops and antiques. Lots of tourists. Lots of people in general. Beautiful city parks. Nice public transportation. I saw the big sights, the Notre Dame cathedral, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc du Triomphe, and lots of other stuff too.

Massy, the small town in the suburbs where we stayed, wasn't that bad either, despite the bad things I had heard about it from coworkers (boring and ugly). You didn't have to walk far to find cute neighborhoods with cute old stone houses. The yards had patches of pretty spring flowers, like violets and crocuses, interspersed with the grass. I found a big gypsy camp on the side of the highway. On the other side of the Massy train tracks we and Anna fond a nice patisserie, and an slightly shady, but delicious restaraunt/bar with an excellent chicken cous-cous dinner, an assortment arabic speakers, and no shortage of wine in carrafes.

Argh, I have several bits and pieces of stories and things I did that I'd love to share, its always a struggle to decide what to write...

Luxembourg Park in Paris is my favorite city park ever. It's very manecured, with lines of trees cut into perfect squares and such. But what I love is that there are there are people doing all sorts of things I love to do, all in one place. There are people playing tennis, a pavillion of people playing chess, some with spectators. People having tasty picnics of bread, wine, and cheese. Ducks, pidgeons, and sparrows begging for food. Pick up games of basketball. People sitting in the sun reading. People sipping coffees at outdoor cafes. If there was one drawback its that the park was crowded, but hey, the more people there to enjoy it, the better.

To finalize our last day in Paris, me and Anna decided to walk to the eiffel tower to see it lit up at night. It started raining about halfway, but what the heck, we were almost there. Except the eiffel tower is very big, which makes it look decievingly close. We got there eventually, and it was big and beautiful and lit up and worth it, despite the fact that we were wet and shivering. As we walked away they lit up flashing lights over the whole tower, so the whole thing from top to bottom was sparkling. It looked like a firework, and it was a wet night so it reflected of all the puddles and wet cars and windows as we walked away.

On another note, don't ever order Andoullette unless you are prepared. I'm pretty confident that I can eat anything, so, even though I was feeling queezy from too much wine the night before, I just picked something randomly off the french menu, "something something andoullette something". I ended up with one large sausage of smoked pig intenstines. Tripe tastes like horses smell. And horses smell like horse poop. I TRIED to eat it, believe me, but in the end the tripe won.

Alright, well that is enough for now. I'll have some new stores about Arles soon. And I'll probably post a big slew of pictures at the end of this trip when I'm in the airport waiting for my plane to Oman.

Where Should I Go?

Sorry, this is pretty much shameless bragging, but here goes...

After I finish my month long course in Paris, I'm going to take another week in France for vacation, but I need help deciding where to go. I think I will head to the south of France. I like water, old stuff, mountains, and smaller towns. I've narrowed my destination to three places. 1) Frejus 2) Hyeres 3) Corsica.

Frejus and Hyeres are both towns of about 50,000 people on the Mediterranean coast in France. Frejus has some nice looking Roman ruins. Hyeres has a history from 300BC and is a bit less touristy than Frejus. Corsica is a french island just west of Italy. It would be a bit harder to get too, but sometimes remoteness makes a place interesting. And I enjoy ferry rides.

Well, if you have any input on this difficult decision, leave me a comment. Thanks :)

In France for a Month

Indeed I am... I'm staying in a hotel on the outskirts of Paris and taking a class on geophysics software.

Its wierd living in a hotel. I've kind of wanted to try after watching the movie Lost in Translation. I just got back from foraging for breakfast. Success!.. I aquired some napkins, teabags and butter. Along with that a couple bread rolls pocketed at dinner. Too bad I lost my tiny jar of marmalade swiped from yesterdays breakfast buffet, or tomorrows breakfast would have been a perfect. You see, I'm not yet sure if my company is paying for hotel food.

On another food related note, they served snails for lunch today in the company cafeteria. Not fancy snails separated from their shell and cooked in butter in a fine restaraunt with a glass of wine on the side. No, these snails looked like they had been picked up off the ground, lightly rinsed, thrown in a steamer for 10 minutes and then put on my plate to cool. They still had moss and bits of seaweed on the shell. They still had that hard covering plate that protects them when they retract back into their shell. They were firmly stuck in their shell too. After seeing me struggle, a random french guy in the cafeteria recommended I use a toothpick to get them out... but when I tried, they broke the toothpick, that is how stuck they were. I had to get a good stab and pry on them with a metal fork. When I did succeed, they were really good. Like an extra meaty clam.

After my lunch of snails, we went, as we do every day, to The Coffee Room. How very French! Attached to the cafeteria is a separate room just for coffee. In it are some standing tables where you can be served an espresso or a tea, and a little bit of chocolate. Lunch is very leasurly here. In fact you can't get back into the training room without a badge before 2pm. I love it.

I went for a jog yesterday, its about 15 minutes to a small town center. Its very cute. It reminded me of Milford, New Jersey. Cute little shops and houses and people walking on the street. It was evening and just about everyone had a pair of bagguettes in a plastic bag. I assume they were walking home to dinner.

Not too many exciting France stories. Mainly I've just been learning software.

A Random Day in Seismic QC

Perhaps you'd like to hear about a random day of mine in Oman...

There are three of us in the QC office now, Atila the Turk and Nurul from Bangladesh. Today, apart from QC-ing the daily data, we spent some time planning for our next prospect. This prospect will be near to the location of our previous prospect. It will be down south where there are camels, and vegetation taller than 2 feet. No sand dunes though.

I got into a heated argument today with Atila and Nurul. We were figuring out how to go about renumbering receiver lines for this new prospect. I tried to explain why I thought the method they had planned wouldn't work, and why we need to do it a different way, but they insisted it would work. I attempted to test it and ran into about 8 million difficulties along the way, finally got them sorted out, and now the jobs are running on our computers so I just have to wait.

In the afternoon me and Nurul finally sorted out exactly where our disagreement was. He thinks attributes get created and applied to seismic traces according to the receiver line and receiver station we have in our raw data, whereas I'm almost certain they get applied according to the channel number, and only the channel number. Anyway we will find out when the jobs finish running (although chances are I'll find some thing wrong with the jobs after they finish and have to run them once or twice again).

This afternoon I took some time out to study Arabic. I'm learning different versions of the verb "to be". I've been walking around surveying people on what is the correct way to say "I was not there" or "I will not be there". So far, I've got 5 and 3 different ways to say each of those respective phrases. It’s because my sample population comes from various places in Turkey, Jordan, Oman, and Tunisia. Arabic is notorious for sounding very different in different countries.

Unfortunately I didn't get any time to continue my investigation into the cause of inflation in the American economy (that supposed to sound half sarcastic). I have a dream that I want to get economics Ph.D. one of these years so I've been spending time understanding the hell out of supply and demand curves, diagramming the cost and benefit of subsidies, and now, understanding how inflation happens.

Another thing I didn't get around to doing today was making notes for the course I'll be attending in France, after my next leave. That's right, for the first 4 weeks of my next hitch I'll be staying in a hotel just outside of Paris learning about a new processing software that our company intends to switch over to. I really want to spend some time thinking of just how we will be using this software, and know what parts I should have 100% clear. Switching our office over to new software is going to be a big job. I'm a little frightened, but also a little looking forward to the challenge.

Now that the day is over, I don’t feel like beer, so instead I’m going to go watch a cheesy movie in the mess trailer staring Vin Diesel as a muscley Special Forces officer on a mission to baby-sit 5 kids, during which he will use discipline to turn their lives around for the better. The Pacifier. Oh yeah. Then I’ll go to bed.

Okay, so there you go, a pretty typical, if slightly more interesting than usual, day as a QC on a seismic crew.

Happy New Year Updates

It has been a while. I have two overdue things to write about.

1)I finally got to see small town Oman! I visited the family of one of my co-workers, Soleman. They live in Bahla, about a half hour from Nizwa. I got tobe "that crazy foreigner". In one situation, a kid on the street saw me and proceeded to run into his house, yelling "ingleezi, ingleezi!!". Then his 3 siblings all came out to stare. I ate lots of "Kahwa" and dates. I had to try to speak Arabic. Finally a place in Oman were people don't speak much English. It's hard to find.

I was struck by how not-busy life is in rural. Other things that struck me: People don't have furniture. Everyone, babies and grandmas alike, just sit on the floor. Eating is very different too. The family just spreads some newspapers on the floor and they all eat from one big plate. They grab a handful of food, usually rice and something. They squish the food into a lump in their fist and eat that. I like it! And it certainly makes for fewer dishes.

2) For Christmas I went to Mexico to a town that takes two days of traveling to get to from El Paso, and that has cows and chickens roaming freely through the streets. The most exotic experience of this trip was purchasing meat. There isn't much fresh meat in the stores, so we got the idea in our head to buy a goat and have it slaughtered. I came down the morning we bought it and there indeed was a little cute white goat tied to a tree, happily eating grass. Then they tied it up, slit its throat, and we watched it die for the next 15 minutes. That was intense. I always wanted to see something large be killed, I feel morally obligated because I eat meat. It wasn't fun.

I got into Muscat today at 3:45am. Emirates Air just started a direct, 13 hour, Houston to Dubai flight, which makes my trip easier. Although, I spent 7 hours last night wandering around the Dubai Airport.

What's New With Me

Already 16 days done this hitch. Its gone by fast, because we've been really busy in the QC office. This is because we are collecting data from an area that is covered in sand dunes. Usually all the geophones and vibration points are laid out in a nice grid, but when there are sand dunes, things get shifted all over the place. The QC office has to keep track of that.

I'm working with a QC I haven't worked with before. His name is Atila and he's from Ankara, the capital of Turkey. He's worked seismic for many years. He just came back to work after a 4 year retirement. It was a fun coincidence that I was coming from Turkey at the beginning of this hitch. We've chatted a bit about Turkish politics, food and nargila. I showed him some of my pictures.

Atila and Jamiil, another Turkish guy on the crew will sit outside at night and drink tea from water glasses and talk. Its a very Turkish thing to do. A few of these nights I and a few others have joined them. We sit at the edge of camp, looking out at miles and miles of nothingness, and our conversation jumps from Turkish to English to Arabic and back.

In other news, we have a camp move coming up. Again, we will be picking up all 20 some trailers and moving them to a location 15 kilometers west of here. As a result our camp will be closer to some sand dunes....hopefully with in running distance!

I've been running a fair amount. Yesterday I ran along an oil pipeline that passes by our camp. A few days ago I tried to run to some industrial construct I can see off in the distance from camp. I think it’s a petroleum storage tank or something like that. I didn't make it there yesterday, but I'll try again. Instead I changed my path to visit a rusty old barrel sitting alone in the middle of nowhere. It must have been sitting there for years, and it had served as a trashcan to an occasional passer-by. I was told later that these barrels sometimes mark absolute coordinate points for differential GPS calibration...or something like that. I've also been seeing some camel tracks while running, and some fresh looking camel droppings. I've yet to see an actual camel near camp this since we moved here 4 months ago, but this gives me hope.

Flipflops Confiscated

Browsing the front page of the newspaper this morning, I read that 600 pairs of Oman flip-flops were confiscated. They had the Sultanate of Oman's flag on them and it was insulting for people to be wearing this on their feet. Islam has a thing with feet.

An article from the Oman Tribune reads...

Insulting products confiscated
By Suleiman Ambusaidi

--Citizens praise Oman Tribune and Al Watan for exposing brazen disrespect to national identity

MUSCAT The expose published in Oman Tribune and Al Watan on Wednesday on products which carry images of the Sultanate’s name and flag insultingly evoked a unanimous reaction from citizens and officials. They consider it an irresponsible deed and a shameless violation of the sanctity of our national symbols.

In phone calls received by Oman Tribune and Al Watan, a number of citizens expressed their anger and wanted the authorities to move swiftly to cleanse the markets of these products and punish those who promote them....

A Link to the Article

Oman is a strange place.