Hello Again!! From Grenoble!

11 PM, 19 Sept 2010
Résidence de la Houille Blanche,
Grenoble.

It's been ages since my last post on this blog. Now that I am slowly getting settled (well...at least to some degree!) in Grenoble, I guess, I have a lot to share with the known and unkown (once) readers of the blog.

A lot of writing on these pages will follow as I explore the French way of life during the coming three years. I quite liked the city at first sight; the mountains follow you wherever you go, as do the tramways and the buses; Constant invocations of Bonjour and Merci and general politeness was indeed very much welcome but kind of unsettling at first. The week long integration activites during each aftenoon and parties in the evenings made the welcome into INPG really memorable.

Now talking of the hard sides of the 'culture shock', language is a major issue here and I have had only five days of French classes that I guess was only for "getting started". It's gonna take considerable time for me to start communicating in French. One day, over lunch, one of the (female) professors in the group quipped, "Find a French girlfriend :) ". Nice suggestion, but then it's like a feedback problem, and I guess there is a particular term for it which I can't recall at the moment. Anyway, I need to enquire about the next stage of the classes and get enrolled soon.

Food- is another fundamental aspect of the life here that I need to tackle properly : The French have a penchant (or maybe that's how the society evolved here over the millennia ) for eating meat - almost everytime they eat...So for a non - beef/pork eater, finding edible vegetarian food is not an easy task. Even some of the innocuous looking salad items have meat. So "sans viande" is the magic phrase for me in the CROUS canteen where I have my lunch everyday. Now that I have started cooking (yeah, even I can cook now!) the food problem is kinda resolved, at least from First order perspectives, if I can manage to regularly at least once in the weekdays and twice in the weekends, which I guess is pretty doable! Kitchens are shared, so it's not so comfortable, but then you get to meet new people while trying to push your culinary skills to new heights!

It's always great to find people from your own country, here too we have a few (very few) Indian students. Met some more people from India through the guys who have been here for a year or more. Homesick ? No, not at all. I am quite used to being a nomad, a musafir - and I like it that way. But I do miss a lot of things back in India and people of course. I think there is no Durga Puja celebration held here (so much unlike the US) . But then there is internet and it has really made the world shrink!

On the whole, it feels excitingly good to be back to university. My supervisors have been awesome - much more that I had expected. My PhD work has started too, though I need to speed up a bit now :-). Will write more in the next post.