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Biking in Alsace and start of classes

16 October 2001

Hmm. Haven't written much in a while. I haven't felt motivated to sit down and write this out, but I'll take a shot at it now:

At the beginning of October, I went for on a four day bike tour in Alsace in France (by myself). A lot of was really pretty riding through little villages in the middle of vineyards and in the middle two days, it headed into the mountains. I rode up to the highest point in the area, Le Grand Ballon and you could see the Alps. It was an interesting four days, if nothing else. I was trying to follow a ride in Lonely Planet's Cycling France book and it proved to be more challenging than I thought, especially when the cue cards had the wrong street names or told you to turn in the wrong direction. I don't know if these are typos or if no one actually tried to ride with the cues. They do say that the bike paths can be tricky to find, but not that they're impossible to find because their directions are dead wrong. I didn't have any good maps, but a map wouldn't have helped me because where I got lost was in the towns, where your average cycling map doesn't have any detail. My stress level was pretty high when I was riding and often ended up spending 10 or 20 km lost every day. The only place I didn't get lost was up in the mountains, where there were only one or two roads to begin with, so it wasn't possible to get lost. I would never go on a ride like this again without a detailed map of every village and town I have to ride through. On the first day, I spent an hour standing in the rain or riding up and down streets in one town, only to return to a crappy map on a post outside the train station. One guy told me exactly where the bike path was (in French, mind you), but told me to go down the wrong road to get there. I'd figured out the right road to go down and another guy confirmed it for me. People seemed friendly, but my French isn't good enough to have a conversation, so I didn't talk to many people. Most people in Alsace speak German, too, so I think lots of people ended up thinking I was German. Oh, well.

Just where did I go? I rode from Strasbourg to Barr to Munster to Le Markstein to Colmar. I rode through lots of vineyards where people were harvesting grapes and through adorable little towns, but I was so stressed about getting to the next town before the tourist office closed (6 pm) that I couldn't stop to enjoy any of it. Parts were really pretty, especially up in the mountains. I started at about 9 am to ride from Le Markstein to Le Grand Ballon and the sun streaming through the trees into the fog was really gorgeous. It almost made up for all the stress. Maybe a day's worth. There are pictures on the pictures page.

(If you're planning on doing this ride, email me and I can tell you what's wrong with the cues. Most notably, there are problems through Molsheim, Thann, Bergholtz, and Pfaffenheim. It amazed me how I could get lost in towns which had at most 500 residents. Getting out of Strasbourg isn't easy either, but I didn't see any way to improve their directions. I did get better at figuring out the right ways by using the sun and knowing what direction I was supposed to be going in. Maybe I'll take a compass next time. And make hotel reservations in Colmar.)

My classes started today. I had my first parsing lecture and I understood almost everything. Most of the professor's transparancies were in English, which bugged me, but there's so much English in the field that I think it's unavoidable. I'd rather learn some more German words. We worked through a problem in class and I figured out something important about the sample language (it was ergative) and he realized that I realized and then I had to talk. It didn't go well because I didn't remember the word ergative and then I explained it backwards and with terrible grammar. Such is life. The intro to computational linguistics class turned out to be a general department introduction and stuff about how the major works, which wasn't very relevant to me because I'm only staying here a year. Tonight I learned unix basics at an introduction to their computer room. An hour and a half of how directories work, ls, less, cd, cp, mv, rm, mkdir, rmdir, man, and chmod. Woohoo. At least I learned the German word for "directory", which I already knew in the sense of "class directory", but wouldn't have thought to apply to computer directories. I need to memorize all the words that can possibly be used for copy, move, and delete before Friday when we have a little test to see if we know enough to get an entrance card to the room.

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