Première Inscription (First Entry)

It's day four in Nancy, France and I've finally found time to blog.  I flew out of Bradley on the 10th just before the snow began to fall and I thought that I was home free, but unsurprisingly, I was delayed in Detroit while waiting for my connection to Paris.  Not only did the plane arrive late, but we were forced to wait an hour or so in the plane while they hosed down the plane with some sort of defrosting substance.  So instead of leaving at 21.25, we left somewhere around 23.00.  What a wonderful start right?

I arrived in Paris only an hour late and met up with Julie and Jenn at the aeroport.  We made our way to Gare de L'est (East Station) to get the TGV (Train Grande Vitesse - the high speed train) to Nancy.  Jenn managed to get her bag stuck when passing through one of the metro entrances; the door caught her bag as it closed and had it not been for some strange, we would have been there for hours.  The rest of the trip was pretty smooth and we arrived at our homes for the next two months later that evening.  Having slept a total of three hours in the past 24, I was pretty tired so after grabbing some food from the nearby kebab shop (which was an adventure in itself, me using my broken french trying to order food), I promptly passed out

We've had French lessons all week and I'm surprised at how much I still remember from my high school lessons.  We got our awesome ENSIC (Ecole National Supérieure des Industries Chimiques - the school where we will be working) school ID's and our tram passes earlier this week.

So I should probably explain why I'm in France in the first place.  Every student, typically as a senior, must complete a Major Qualifying Project or MQP in order to graduate.  This project  serves as the culmination to your studies in your major.  As a chemical engineering major, I was given the option of completing my project in Nancy, France.  I'm working with another WPI student, Andy on a project concerning biodegradable plastics.  Along with Sarah, a PhD student at the school, we will be characterising the mechanical properties of plastics made from a mixture of starch based polymers and other organically derived polymers.  We won't actually begin lab work until next week so we've been reading loads and loads of journal articles to familiarise ourselves with the project.

All in all, the first few days have been pretty good; the project looks very exciting and I've become more and more accustomed to speaking french.  Hopefully by the end of my two-month stay, I'll be able to speak it without feeling awkward.

This weekend, a group of us are taking the train to nearby Strasbourg and spending our weekend there seeing the sites.  I'll be sure to post about our adventures come the weekend.

A bientôt!