Refraction

The soundtrack to Paris, je t’aime includes this little gem from Feist (yes, she of “1234” fame.) There’s also an English version on the soundtrack, but it’s not the same song.
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Cultural collision, no 1:
When we make an appointment for 10 am, I expect you to be there at 10 am.

Happy New Year, everyone! The lateness is due to non-functioning WiFi chez moi… I’m huddling outside the lab typing this.

PS: Paris, je t’aime.

Is there any problem a dish of tomato beef served over rice can’t solve? Nope.

For those interested, my hotplate-and-one-pan version follows.
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One of the other students is returning to Spain tomorrow, and left me a few of her things. Like a pillow. I’m really looking forward to getting a good night’s sleep tonight. 🙂 (I’ve been sleeping on a $2 ‘camping pillow’ for the last three months.)

So a friend of mine has recently started up his own web comic, We Can Sleep Tomorrow. It draws inspiration from our high school years and so it’s been a little bit of a trip down memory lane for me (including the part where I had time and inclination to make websites.)

It’s not a series of one-shots, so if you want to start reading, I would suggest starting from the first one.

Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m really quite homesick. Being nine hours ahead of my friends and family, and living alone don’t really help.

I dreamt last night that I was back home, but it soon became uncomfortable as I realized I’d not really done much of anything in France. At this point dream-me started panicking and really really hoping this was all a dream. In fact dream-me gave my dream-arm several good pinches–

At which point I woke up, uncomfortably ensconced in my studio but a little relieved I hadn’t sleepwalked my way to the airport.

So I was all excited about no-bake cookie recipes… then I realized they almost all call for peanut butter, which is basically an import food item here. Oops.

It’s the little things that get you. Why isn’t this milk refrigerated, you wonder: and then you see that it’s sterilized, and that the refrigerated kind has only been microfiltered. You see a pay phone and try to find a slot that accepts coins, but there isn’t one: pay phones only accept cards here. You consult your map and see that your destination is almost due north, but you can’t find it because you keep running into dead ends and you can’t orient yourself.

But at the same time, you don’t want to miss home too much, because you’re a continent and an ocean away from where you were born, and this is supposed to be an adventure. So you stroll and you wander, a little more alert than you’d be at home… but you live in a suburb, and there’s not much to see. You wonder if you’ll ever make it here. You wonder if you’ll ever feel like you belong in this city, just a little bit.

I still manage to procrastinate by translating things. Who would have guessed. Anyway, the story behind this song? it’s off Mes Aïeux’s old album En Famille, which also features the brilliant song “Dégénerations.” This one’s a bit sweeter, though.
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I am quite proud of this icon for no reason; I really loved that Girl & Robot photoshoot. It’s a bit of a strange story, though, should you ever look it up… the last photo in the sequence has the robot in pieces.
The caption, “sputnik sweethearts,” is a reference to Murakami’s novel Sputnik Sweetheart. I just think it’s a cute turn of phrase.