Eiffelover

Although I have now been living in Paris for five or so weeks, I only had my first full week of lectures last week. We had to give some indication of the courses that we wanted to take back in April. Ever since then I had been vaguely apprehensive about the classes I would be taking – a mixture really between the fear that they would be too hard mathematically and the fear that I just wouldn’t understand a word of what was being said. Well after one week of full lectures I am happy with the selection so far. In “Conception of Dangerous Strucutres” (there is Ronseal element to some of these course titles http://www2.ronseal.co.uk/) we will be spending the first three weeks looking at designing dams. Then we will move on to nuclear power stations and finally oil platforms. Lots of juicy danger for us to get our risk assessing teeth into. “Bridge Conception” is a tour de force of every time of bridge you could think of, each week given by an expert. Heaven!
The core desgin options – steel and concrete – were not nearly as baffling in French as I had expected. It did however help that we had covered some of this material before at Imperial. The twist here is that we are learning EuroCode instead of fuddy duddy old British Standards, whatever they are. Finally, the one that I feared was going to be the most mathematical, entitled Parasismic Studies, has recently had its maths content reduced after some complaints. Now if this all sounds like a walk in the park then let us not forget that all of the above is in French, as will be my exams. So, all things considered, a little déja vu is no bad thing.

Glen Canyon Dam, as featured in the popular film «Superman»

When designing, building and operating a dam, there are a few steps that ought to be followed in order to avoid large loss of life. Here are a few that I picked up at my first lecture in a series with the title that I have badly translated as “Conception of risky structures”:

1) Pay your workers well. The most dangerous period during the lifetime of a dam spans its construction, the filling of the reservoir and the first year of full service. Going on strike over pay during the construction is dangerous because the dam might not be ready for the winter’s flood waters and subsequently may get washed away.

2) When checking for cracks in the bedrock on to which the dam is to be founded, looking at 50 metre intervals is not good enough. A dam in Wako, Texas collapsed when a section of the bedrock between two cracks about 49 metres apart gave way.

3) If cracks have been found in the ground, it is unwise to leave them unfilled just because your client refused to give you any extra money to pay for this unforseen cost. To do so has led to death and destruction.

4) If you are satisfied with the conclusions of your ground survey that there are no cracks in the ground under your dam, don’t then move your dam a few metres downstream to make your lake a bit bigger without doing a new survey. Doh.

5) If when building, say, a 280m high dam in Italy, you notice that the mountain into which your dam has been founded has started moving(!) at a rate of several centimetres a day, don’t just carry on filling the dam and hope for the best. (In this case though the dam didn’t collapse, the mountain on one side of the lake gave way and a terrific landslide almost filled the lake that had been created, generating an enormous wave which swept over the dam and destroyed villages down-stream)

6) Finally, if your dam once built is not a profitable venture, don’t succumb to the temptation to sell it to a group of anglers. They may use it for stocking fish. This in itself is no problem. The problems arise in the rainy season when they may lose a significant portion of their fish down the overflow pipe. To prevent this loss, they may put a gauze over the pipe to keep the fish in, but which will also unwittingly get blocked with the leaves and branches which usually accompany storm waters, forcing the flood waters over the top, destroying the dam and killing 2000 people in the town below.

These six tips are from real examples of fatal dam failures.

When designing a dam, don’t just be safe, be dam safe.

Rose leaning over the Hoover Dam during our visit in March 2003

Tuesday lunchtime saw the end of the SPEIF (semaine préparatoire pour étudiants ingénieurs en Français – a stunning acronym). With our free afternoon a group of us students had hatched a plan to play football. The day before, one of our number spoke to the manager of the Pont’s sports pitches and said it would be no problem. However, when we turned up on Tuesday we were told that we weren’t able to use the pitches because we were not part of a registered team. I have to say that I wasn’t as surprised as some of my would-be team-mates as I had heard similar tales regarding extra-curricular activities at French universities. The trend seems to be that if it is not sanctioned as a registered team event then the doors or gates will be remain locked. I suspect for example that if I try and set up a band I won’t be able to use the practice rooms unless I can demonstrate my proficiency on the rhythm guitar.

The trouble is that we didn’t want to set up a team, we just wanted to have a kick-around. And even if we had tried to set up a team I wouldn’t have been able to join as I can’t join the sports club, the reason being that I don’t have a vaccine card to prove that I won’t get whooping cough as I step up to the penalty spot and sue the school. In this respect, either I try and dig through the annals of the NHS to find out if I have such a card, or I turn my arm into a pincushion and have all the jabs again at the same time and risk sending my immune system crazy. No, neither of these options were an option, so to speak. I was intent on finding some public space in the Cité Déscarts where we could play. The only large open space that isn’t fenced off is that in front of Les Ponts, a couple of acres that would have been perfect for football had it not been landscaped with long parallel ripples half a metre or so in height that would have made it difficult to play. I might even go so far as to suggesting that it had been landscaped in this way to stop us from playing.

Still, unflapped by another apparent barrier, we used our keen engineering eyes to survey the plot and found that between two of the ridges there was just about enough space if we played partially on the grass and partially on the helipad at one end of the field. With laptop cases for goal posts we were all set.

Apart from Michi who I think has had some pretty top-notch football experience, we were all tired after about ten minutes, (such are the barriers to exercise in France!) but we played for an hour or so. And no one was really keeping score – it was great just to have been able to play.

Freedom of speech for the mute

Today I taught for the first time my other English conversation class. This class is larger than the first; twenty to the previous lot’s eleven. It was hard work to get them talking, and that’s all my boss at in the language department wants me to do! I knew that the students of this second group were broadly from science and computing courses so I opted in the first lesson to teach from an article on Google’s recent entry in to the Chinese Internet market. Before we worked on the article itself we had a good session generating useful vocabulary for all to use. My second preparatory item however, a discussion about freedom of speech, was not so successful. Questions such as “what do you think freedom of speech means” and “do you have the right to say what you want here in France” were all met with stony silence. I had to hide the smile on face. It did seem a little ironic that we were talking in essence about a country where there isn’t the right to freedom of speech, and there I had a bunch of students in a ‘free’ country who could have said anything for all I could have cared but instead exercised their right to say nothing. A case of freedom of speech for the mute. Still, things picked up with a vocabulary quiz at the end where students had to buzz in with animal noises. That old pedagogical chestnut!

Cookie Doog

In August I went for an ice cream with my grandmother at an ice-cream parlour oft frequented by us on trips to the seaside on France’s Atlantic coast. She was giving the order, so I asked her to order me a double cornet with vanilla and cookie-dough ice cream. Not certain what I meant by cookie-dough, I pointed to the little card above the box that gave its name. There was no French translation. She wouldn’t even venture trying to say cookie-dough with a French accent so I made the order myself sticking to the English pronunciation.
The ice cream itself was unmemorable, but the question of how to say cookie-dough in French stuck. Clearly the ice-cream parlour didn’t think there was a translation. I was reminded of this question when I went to see Indégènes at the cinema the other day. There again was cookie-dough ice cream. I had by now reached the conclusion that French for cookie-dough is in fact cookie-dough which then raised another question, how do you say it with a French accent? My grandmother clearly didn’t know and Mary sidestepped the issue by plumping for vanilla (boring).
According to my dictionary, dough is pronounced “d𐐀℧” (at last, a good use for windings) which is not really a sound I associate with spoken French. But in a French class the other day, our teacher said that French speakers tended to say words taken from a foreign language with a French accent. She gave the example of people in France pronouncing itunes as ‘ee-tunes’. (In contrast, according to her, to the Germans who have a tendency to attempt the pronunciation according to the language of origin of the word). So I struck while the iron was hot: “comment dit-on «cookie-dough» en français?”

The subsequent conversation was one of the most surreal lesson experiences I have encountered. Cookie-doog, cookie-dooooog, coooookie-dow, cookie-dog, cookie-doth. Language assistants were called in. Heads of department were asked over lunch. There was no official consensus, so the class agreed upon cookie-doog upon-which the pronunciation of this foodstuff has stuck among our group. It and it seems to get mentioned on a daily basis. Yesterday our quiz team entered the name ‘les cookie-doogs’ and today Mantej reliably informed me that his French roommate had no idea either. Thanks then to Messieurs Ben and Jerry for this surreal language experience. Amazing things happen when you don’t just order vanilla!

First movie in the can
Today in French class we each gave a presentation on a subject relevant to our studies. My chosen topic was the Passerelle Simone de Beauvoir (already mentioned in this blog). Bored of power point presentations, I decided to opt for a different approach – I made a film. I wanted to interview people using the bridge, which gave me the idea of using video. I then thought why not give the whole presentation from the bridge itself. I managed to borrow a video camera from the French department without letting on what about my plan. I went to the bridge on Thursday to take some stills to help me with the planning. On Friday night I learned how to use the editing software with a short test-run movie. On Saturday afternoon I went down to the bridge to do some interviews, and then with the help of Cristina and Alex from my class, and later Mary, we filmed the bits with me filming. Eleven hours of editing later on Sunday afternoon and the film was ‘in the can’.

It took a great deal of effort to make but every moment of it was fun. It went down a storm today in class. I think I have found a new hobby to fill my abundant free time!

(I will be uploading it to the web at some time soon – watch this space)

This post refers to an event I took part in a couple of weeks ago and I have been meaning to write about it for some time. One afternoon Mary and I were walking past Place Gambetta in the 20eme when we were approached by a woman getting people to sign up for a peace protest in the following week. The protest coincided with the interational day of peace, I think. Anyway, what caught my eye was their plan to make an enormous CND sign using people holding flaming torches. I think that this kind of protest can attract a lot more meida attention than smaller activities and so can have more impact. This human CND sign was to be formed infront of the Eiffel Tower, so as to get a good photo shot from above. Mary couldn’t make it but I signed up there and then and bought my wax torch for the protest (the police wouldn’t let the protesters sell the torches at the event itself)

So later that week, I sauntered down to the Champs de Mars with my rather menacing enormous wax-covered batton. When I signed up I was given a number which corresponed to a position in the CND sign at which I would be standing. And sure enough, on the grass beneath the Eiffel tower I found my number written in flour in the glass. Not being a regular protester, I naively assumed that things would kick-off on time. Silly me. But over the next hour, the crowd started to gather. Pic-nicers enjoying a romantic glass of wine beneath the tower became unaware that they were slowly becoming encircled, trapped, overwhelmed by an enormous symbol of peace (I’m only kidding – everyone seemed quite friendly really). All of a sudden it was time to light the touch papers. From the ground it was hard to really make out the form of the symbol. There we stood for an hour while speeches and demands were called out. I only narrowly avoided setting light to the hair of my section commander. It’s amazing actally that no one’s hair did go up in flames. Then it was time to go home, satisfied that the world would surely take notice and get rid of all its nuclear weapons.

From the ground

From above

As far as food at institutions go, the grub at ENPC ain’t half bad. For the early morning caffine boost, elevenses and mid-afternoon pick-moi-ups there is the coffee bar situated in the full splendor of the atrium. Canny students know at precisely what time to grab the left-over croissants before they get put out at the end of the day. That just leaves lunch which is served in the cafeteria. There is a generous selection of hot and cold food not to mention the bulging desserts. Not only does it taste good, it is also subsidised, but instead of knocking ten percent off the cost of any purchases as they do at Imperial, they just knock 1.70 Euro off the bill. This reduction makes a meaty main course half the advertised price. But if you opt for the enormous bowl of salad from the salad bar costing only 1.50, when it comes to the check out my discounted meal has a negative price. That is, everytime I eat there, I earn money! All I need to do is eat 75,000 more lunches there and I will have paid off my entire student debt! Yum…