40 - A little bit of night music - Dax, Biarritz, and Bayonne

 Monday, 15 January 2024

It was good day at the office today; we had a couple of high level visitors and it was interesting to listen to a rah-rah speech in French over lunch.  I stayed late to have a "skip-level" call with my boss' boss; he wanted to check up on me as well as discuss plans for a possible return.  That I need to depart for the US is clear but he wanted to play with the idea of a longer work permit than 3 months; I suppose we'll have to see what HR comes back with and whether my days in 2023 count towards the 183 day limit in 2024 before the company and I'd need to start paying European payroll taxes.  

Started looking at return flights; looks like I can depart at 7AM and land in Newark, NJ or I can leave at 10 AM and land in JFK.  🤔🤔🤔  You know, JFK doesn't sound so bad...

Dinner was at El Meson where I got my fish fix in: sopa de pescado and morue à l'espagnole.  At first I'd thought I'd ordered a pricy bowl of soup, but I should have suspected something was up when the waitress put an empty bowl on my plate...  It was a hearty soup with mussels, clams, a piece of cod, and a langoustine in it.  

The cod was tender with a vinagery garlic and piment d'Esplette sauce.  On the left is pureed carrots seasoned with cumin, definitely a side to try at home.

Tuesday, 16 January 2024

While looking up a physical property for a chemical, I noticed this in Wikipedia's summary of the SDS: 

How does one get a rat to drink 10.8x it's body weight of anything??  LD50 is the dose required to kill half the tested population after the specified test duration; I guess it means that rats are pretty tolerant of the chemical but still...

I visited another site today in the afternoon and I think this was the most impressive chemical plant I've ever seen.  It had equipment of various sizes, some tricky chemicals to work with, and some glass tech I'd never seen before.  Parts of their site reminded me a bit of mine in Newark, the parts that were dirty and cramped jk jk 😆. But in all seriousness, all my site visits have been very interesting if not educational and bring perspective and context to what I think a "chemical plant" means.  

My evening plans were thwarted but to good outcomes.  First item thwarted: snacking on a sausage I'd bought at L'Atelier Bouchier.  A quick check in with a French amie yielded the advice of "Don't eat that!".  I wasn't sure what the rule of thumb was for stuff on dried sausages but this one seemed suspiciously blue and fuzzy...

I dunno, seems like the French eat all sorts of weird stuff; good thing I asked an expert

The 2nd item thwarted: the theater in Dax was sold out for a musical tonight, a musical version of The Count of Monte Cristo.  I'm not sure how well it would translate to a musical, so only maybe c'est dommage.  Instead, with no sausage eaten and no show to watch, I was in town right on time for dinner at Chez Nous!  

Noix de St. Jacques (scallop) in coconut milk

Leg of rabbit with beetroot infused pasta and (light) wasabi aka kiwi?

They were super appreciative of me dropping off some Reese's Cups for them the last time I visited, one guy even mentioned he thought of me when he saw Reese's at the grocery store 😂

Wednesday, 17 January 2024

I came into the office to discover many others were in a meeting discussing schedule: looks like we'll be kicking off a test run next week starting at 5AM.  Since it's important to ensure things start right, I'm the guy to walk us through cast-off and then I'll hand the conn over to the next guy at 5PM.  I suppose it stinks to have to wake up so early, but I really can't complain given that it's for a very narrowly defined window and only one time.  The rest of my day was focused on tightening up my test procedures, incorporating commentary from people.  

In the evening, I had to return to the Biarritz airport to renew the contract for my rental car.  Sadly, they had to take the Fiat 500 back since it was due for an oil change.  It was a bit of a conundrum finding an automatic transmission vehicle for me within an acceptable vehicle class; I'll definitely need to look into learning how to drive a manual car when I get back to the States.  But the rental agent was able to find something for me: a Citroen DS3.  I'll have to dedicate a post to the three vehicles that carried me through this trip, but the change this evening in rides was like jumping into the future: the entire control scheme was different, sleek, and angular.  It took me 10 minutes on the road to figure out how to get the cruise control engaged and 5 minutes to figure out how to turn on the radio...

I played with the idea of sticking around and having dinner at a restaurant in Biarritz, but I'd just bought a couple quick meals at the grocery store the previous night so I ended up returning chez moi.  Tonight's meal was a choucroute: saurkraut and meat.  Apparently it's a dish typical to the Alsace region of France (on the border with Germany) but I remember seeing a poster about it in a restaurant window a while back.  Overall: an easy meal, not much to write home about (but I suppose it's too late now).

Thursday, 18 January 2024

Had a bunch of meetings with a mix of fracophone or anglophone groups but I'm wondering if my French is off this week, either people are talking faster or I'm just not understanding as well as I feel I should be able to.  Oh well, not really worth stressing about.  

There's a fire hydrant Among Us

Towards the end of the day, I received an email from HR.  Before they pay some consultants to start the work permit process, they wanted to know if it'd even be feasible for me to get an appointment with the French embassy in a reasonable time frame.  Thinking about how the Olympics will be held in Paris this summer, I suppose that's a reasonable thing to ask before paying lawyers.  But if they weren't going to pay the consultants to check, then it fell to me to check, which is also (to some degree) a reasonable test of "how much does he want to do this?"  Still, I felt like they could have given me a little more instruction to go off of: the instruction was "contact the embassy to find out when the earliest appointment you can make is".  You could at least point me to the official website...

Anyhow, a little digging unearthed the official government website for applying for a visa as well as the 3rd party website for booking appointments with the consulate (I guess rather than developing/managing a schedule tool in house, the French government is contracting it to a private company?).  It requires a valid application number to see the available appointments so my filling out a dummy application was worth the effort when I discovered that essentially all days in February have availability for appointments at the NYC embassy.  That's one hurdle cleared, now we need to figure out the actual details for the paperwork.

Oh, and I think there'll be someone else from the Newark facility coming for a couple weeks to continue immediate support for the start up.  Details on their travel schedule are pending but hopefully there's a couple days of overlap so they can get their bearings here.

Friday, 19 January 2024 

Quite a few meetings again today, one of which was starting to onboard the woman who'll be tagging out with me.  The plan is for her to arrive for February 5th so that there's a few days overlap; but, now that HR has been made aware of people traveling, it's a question of whether they'll allow here to visit and work on the 90 day tourist visa like me or if they'll force her to get a short stay work permit.  If the former, then I'll be seeing her soon; if the latter, well, I'll also be seeing her soon but in Newark.  

After work, I made a quick stop to the apartment before heading down to Bayonne.  I'd reserved tickets for a spectacle (musical show) at La Lune Negra, a cozy little theater tucked in a quiet alley of Bayonne.  I didn't know the musical group and had simply been looking for a performance to attend tonight; but I lucked out because the group Jour de Fête was amazing!  Their cabaret-swing style was really catchy, I could make out most of the lyrics, and they brought a lot of fun and energy to the stage.  

The alley to the theater

The group made great use of the lighting on stage, the changing color of the backlight canvas made for really great silhouttes.

A CD for 10€?  Don't mind if I do.  I'd better start spending the rest of the cash I'd picked up here, starting with a great souvenir.  Of course, my only CD player is my car in the US 😅