It’s been an exciting October so far.

Yesterday, down at the EPFL, our research group, the IGAT, moved our offices from the Chemistry building (go figure) back to the Mathematics building in the heart of campus. I’ll be sharing a brand new office with Gavin Seal, another postdoc working in Kathryn’s group, which should be fun. He’s a big fan a category theory, like me, so hopefully we’ll get to have some fun discussions.

In other news, my French classes for the semester kind of fell through. I won’t bore you with the sob story about why. It was a bit of a disappointment, but looking back on the past couple of months, I’ve made quite a bit of progress on my own (or so I like to think.) Besides, when you get right down to it, you have to put in the time yourself. Having a class to keep you honest is nice, but I feel pretty motivated anyway. So I think things will work out okay.

Side story: I was down at the train station the other day and a couple of young guys who had clearly just gotten into town asked me (in French) how to get to Croisettes. I was so excited that I actually knew what they said and that I knew what I should say that I didn’t realize until I was on the bus on the way home that I gave them the wrong directions! Sorry guys!

I lieu of a class, I did sign up for the UNIL (University of Lausanne) Tandem program, which is where you and a partner meet regularly to help each other learn a new language. My partner’s name is Simon, a local from around Lausanne who’s obviously a native Francophone. His English is already pretty good, so the “teaching” in this relationship may be a bit lopsided. But he’s really cool, and he’s into skiing and hiking and kite surfing (!) and the like, so I think I’m gonna have someone to do some activities with for the first time in a while. Hooray!

In light of the last post, I also went to the dentist to get my tooth fixed. It’s been a bit expensive, but that was kind of to be expected. On the whole, it was kind of exciting having to get everything arranged in a foreign language. The dentist himself speaks English, but no one else at the office does.

Finally, since I have a bit more time at home these days, I’ve been working on the old cooking skills. Tonight’s dinner was chicken breasts stuffed with apricot, almonds, and goat cheese. Yum!

Of course, part of the reason for my increased cooking adventures is that there’s really just not as much pre-made food for you to get here. Simon and I were talking about this the other day (he lived in the states for a couple months a while back), how in the US, it’s so easy to find meals just waiting to be eaten. Here, there’s basically no fast food to speak of, and restaurants are pretty expensive, hence kind of a rarity for me these days. Any way, I’m coming to really like cooking, so this is not such a bad thing.

My friend Jenna is coming to town on Wednesday, and next weekend we’re renting a car and driving to the Piedmont region in Northern Italy to do some wine tasting and exploring. Should be a blast! I’ll try to take some pictures and post them when I get back.

Lates.

Yup. 30. Booyah.

Though I will say that I am now convinced the Universe decided to have a little fun with some good old fashioned hazing before it let me into the fraternity of thirty-somethings. I gather this from how poorly October 2 went. Roughly chronological, here is a summary of yesterday afternoon’s mishaps:

1. I chipped a tooth. I bought these cookies at the store because I had been thinking that I rarely had anything around to snack on, and because they looked roughly like Chessmen, which I like. Turns out they are a bit more like Chess-rocks, as my tooth can attest. (This particular tooth had a filling which had fallen out, so I was planning on visiting the dentist anyway, but had not gotten around to it. Perhaps the cookies were just trying to encourage me to get off my ass.)

2. In light of 1, I made an appointment using an online form with a Swiss Dental clinic. They are supposed to call back to confirm, but as I found out later, I typed the wrong number into the form.

3. My cell phone minutes were depleted anyway, so I had to visit the Swisscom shop to fill them up so that I could receive the call I was expecting from 2, except that, of course, it wasn’t coming. The wrong number planted firmly in my head from typing it in earlier, I managed to fill up someone else’s minutes instead of my own by again punching in the wrong number at the Swisscom office.

4. I went to Coop (a grocery store) to buy some supplies for the weekend. (Everything here is closed on Sundays, so if you are missing anything, tough luck.) In fact, I could have probably made due with what I had, but I figured I’d make myself a nice big American breakfast (which are difficult to come by here in Switzerland) so that was on my mind as I was meandering around the store. Now, the one thing that I really needed was toilet paper. But this I promptly forgot about, and am still without it. But I do have plenty of milk, bacon and eggs. And coffee. And beer.

5. When I got home, I was pulling the milk carton out of the bag, and it snagged on the bottle cap of one of the beer bottles, rending a little hole low down on one side, which proceeded to cover my kitchen in milk as it spewed out from the pressure. I tried to tape it shut with scotch tape. This did not work. More milk on the floor.

6. My phone still did not work. How could this be? I pulled out the receipt from Swisscom and discovered my mistake, which consisted of transposing two digits of my phone number. This, of course, made me realize the mistake with my dental appointment.

7. This Swisscom office is closed by this point. I figured I would try to call Swisscom instead, and see if they could fix the mistake (the support number is free of charge, luckily.) I opened up my wallet to get out my Maestro card (like a debit card) in case they asked for the number I had used to pay for the minutes (it is blanked out on the receipt.) The space was empty. I had left the card in the little payment machine at Coop.

8. I returned to Coop, thinking this was not such a big deal, since I had forgotten to get toilet paper anyway, and this was an excuse to go back for it. I managed to get my card back in spite of my terrible French, at which point I casually strolled out of the store, sans t.p., and walked home.

Right, well, so much for being 29. I take it as a given that the Universe owes me now and that the next decade will be fantastic!

In all seriousness, I consider myself very lucky on my 30th birthday, and could not be happier. I have been meeting lots of great people down at the EPFL, and having lots of new experiences. For example, Kathryn Hess had two graduate students who just finished their doctorates on Thursday and we all went out to dinner together at a nice little place in St. Sulpice to celebrate. The food was great, and I was truly surprised to find myself able to follow a not wholly insignificant part of the dinner conversation. This was gratifying, as I have been working hard to improve my French.

Meanwhile, things on the mathematics front are progressing as well. I think I may have finally made some real progress on something that I was forced to leave out of my thesis, but would have like to have included. I gave a seminar talk a few weeks back and I think it was very well received. Plus, I have had the first two meetings of a discussion section which I am leading for Kathryn’s Homotopy and Homology course. It’s been a real treat, since the students here are very capable, and I’m getting to discuss some relatively advanced stuff, at least compared to the calculus I was teaching at UVA.

It sounds like I may have my first visitor as well! My friend Jenna Newmark is coming out near the end of October. This will be good motivation to get out an explore some more, which I admit, I have not been the best about now that school has started up again. Hopefully more pictures and adventures will be forthcoming, less of them involving such a long list of calamities.

Au revoir.

Things here in Lausanne have settled down to a much more measured pace at this point. By now a great deal of the administrative work is out of the way. I already have my titre de séjour (residence permit) which I imagined would take quite a bit longer than it did. So that’s nice. Makes things feel very official.

And just a few hours ago, I finally got internet set up here at my appartment. Hooray! It was a bit of an ordeal, which involved a number of calls to Swisscom, but it worked out in the end. My neighbors can now rest assured that no one is stealing their bandwith watching new episodes of Futurama. Unless there are other Futurama fans/internet squatters here in my building. What are the odds?

Another milestone will come tomorrow, when the boxes of stuff I dropped off at a rather shady looking warehouse in Baltimore are due to arrive. Honestly, I can’t even remember what’s in them. By now I’ve sort of gotten used to having only whatever clothes I happened to pack in my suitcase. It’ll be like Christmas. Except with considerably more heavy lifting and flights of stairs.

Days now are fairly leisurely. My boss is away on vacation for another week or so, and the couple of times I’ve been out to my office at the EPFL, the place felt mostly deserted. So I’ve been keeping busy here at the appartment learning about toric varieties and the field with one element. Exciting, n’est-ce pas?

Doesn’t seem like too much else is in the cards for the next month or so until the paychecks start rolling in again. Maybe then I’ll have some better pictures for your which don’t include my thumb.

After about a month or so living out of a suitcase, it’s really a relief to finally have a place to call my own. I met up with John Harper and an inspector from the rental company late Friday afternoon to finalize the transfer. The inspection process actually took quite a while, as the guy was more than thourough, filling out a whole page of information on an appartement that, to my eye, seems nearly flawless.

Here’s a short little video so you can take the “virtual tour,” as it were.

Overall, each day I’m feeling just a bit more settled. I should have the rest of my stuff here sometime this coming week, and I now have a cell phone, bank account, regular paycheck, and very soon, my own internet access. (Right now, I’m poaching some from the neighbors. Sorry neighbors.)

Unfortunately, the mail delievery is a bit of a snag. You have to pay to have these plaques made with you name on them to put on your mailbox (they’re not cheap either, it was like $160 CHF, one of the many hidden fees that sort of crop up here in Switzerland.) So in the meantime, the apartment company gave me a little label to stick on the mailbox so I can get my mail. They’re very strict here about not delivering anything unless the name on the box is correct. But the snag comes from the fact that the live-in supervisor, who’s just a floor below me, is given strict instructions not to allow anything but the official plaques on the mailboxes. So each time I stick it on there, I come home to find it removed and thrown in the trash. It makes me wonder how they plan on getting me the plaque at all if my name’s not on the box. Very annoying, and my French is not really up to the task of fixing it, so for now, the supervisor and I are having a bit of a war of wills. Really not the time for it either, as all my important documents should be arriving in the next few days.

More interestingly, last night I finally got to meet my new boss at the EPFL, Kathryn Hess. She hosted a party out at her house in Aigle, which is a couple stops to the East from Lausanne on the CFF (the Swiss rail line.) I had a book and some music with me for the half hour ride, but didn’t really make much use of either, as the scenery was unbelieveable. The train runs right on the edge of the water so that Lake Geneva with the Alps in the background fill the window to one side, while the other is taken up by a series of terraced vineyards and Swiss Chalets which seem to defy gravity altogether. I wanted to take some video, but the movement of the train and some slightly odd lighting foiled my plans.

At the party were a number of members of the research group I’ll be working in, so it was nice to meet some of my future colleagues. Kathryn and her husband Phillipe made us an excellent meal on the barbeque, and there was plenty of wine and beer (and later on, whiskey) so that everyone had a wonderful time. Here’s the view from Kathryn’s backyard, which as you can see, is enough to make just about anyone jealous.

Greetings!

It’s now day five here in Lausanne, and let me tell you, it sure is a beautiful one. It was actually a bit cloudy and overcast when I first got here. In fact, it managed to start pouring rain just as I was moving all my luggage from the Hotel Bellerive, where I stayed at the first night, to the Lausanne Guest House, a youth hostel I’ve been at since Friday. It turns out, though, that water is pretty harmless, and I’m none the worse for wear.

Even with the clouds, though, the view from the balcony of my room at the hostel is incredible, and I’m quite pleased with the place in general, modulo the various awkwardnesses which ensue from sharing a room with three complete strangers. Question for the Gods: is it absolutely mandatory that every room in a youth hostel have someone who snores? My experience so far says yes. It seems that most people only stay for about a night, so except for me, my room has been kind of a revolving door. So far I’ve met an American, an Albanian, a Canadian, and two Australians. They all speak English, of course, which I find a bit embarrassing, but I guess it will take some time for my French to get up to speed.

It’s been a bit of a hassel getting all the administrative work done to become a temporary resident here in Switzerland, but of course, that’s not too surprising, and it’s the reason I got here a week early in the first place. My favorite piece of red tape so far is the fact that it’s extra difficult for an American to get an account at UBS on account of the ongoing friction between the bank and the US government. When I handed my passport to the attendant and asked to open account, he made a sour face and said “Oh, you’re an American . . .” I have to go in for an interview tomorrow morning and provide all kinds of documentation and whatnot just to open a checking account. I don’t really blame them, I guess. I remember seeing a 60 minutes piece on the guy who blew the whistle on UBS. He was an American banker working in Switzerland, and was the first guy maybe ever to break the “code of silence” the Swiss have about their banking affairs.

With all this downtime waiting for documents and such, I’ve had plenty of time to explore the city. Here’s the Château d’Ouchy which sits right on the lake at the bottom of the large slope which Lausanne is built on. Pretty impressive, no?

From here you can walk along the lakeside in both directions for quite a long way. Supposedly you can walk all the way around, but occassionally people break the rules and put up fences so you don’t walk through their yards. Not sure I have the stamina for that in any case, but John Harper (the guy I will be taking over for) and I did walk from here down to the EPFL on Friday. There weren’t too many people out on account of the weather in the morning, but it had cleared up by then, and it made for a nice afternoon. I have yet to meet my new boss, but it should happen sometime this week.

Anyways, the next two are my favorite pictures so far. The first is from the Place de la Plaud, which is one of the oldest town squares here in the city. There’s also supposed to be a really cool statue in the fountain which sits in the middle of the square, but it’s under rennovation now, and I declined to take a picture of the scaffolding.

And the second is a picture of the Escaliers du Marché, which are a set of stairs leading from the Place de la Plaud up to the city Cathedral (more on this guy later). They were built in the 1200′s! Amazing!

Okay, that’s all for now. More to come.