Day-2, Thursday.

My first real working day at office, i got up early in the morning at 6:00 AM, again with great difficulty, am a late nighter in india and used to goto office at my timing of 10:00 AM, but new place, new timings :). so took the bath in the hot shower and wore the sweater presented to my friends when i was leaving india :), and i was ready !!. The breakfast in the restaurant was served from 7:30 AM. The breakfast was a buffet with lots of cakes, some wheat preparations, Fruits, 3 types of corn flakes, milk and ofcourse bread !!. there was a small surprise for us while having our breakfast, we met 2 chinese who were from GTCC, China and they were too on Professional trainee assigment and they had arrived on same day as us and staying in the same hotel, one was a guy aged 25 years named Li xin who was a electronics engineer and another was a girl named Lilee, they knew bit of english, since we were getting late for office, after exchanging greetings quickly, we finshed our breakfast and started our journey to office. The office is just 2 Kms from our hotel and we started by walk, enjoying the cold mornig of Pacy.

It took us around 20 mins to reach the office building and after greeting the receptionist with Bonjour we asked for our manager patrick, who came and took us inside. My laptop was ready and configured, it was surprising to see howe quickly they have alloted the system (It takes us almost a week to get a hand on our workstations when joined at GTCI, i hope my IT people there are not reading and getting ready to hit me :) ). The laptop was brand new Latitude D620 with a powerful dual core 2Ghz processor with 1 GB of RAM.


















The rest of the day went uneventful with myself reading project documents and discussing with christophe and Phillippe and occasional coffee breaks together. and getting acquatined to telling bonjour to everyone i saw. The lunch break soon arrived and i went with philippe to had my lunch bit late, since he was waiting for another friend, this time i was very careful with what i took at the restaurant counter and got myself some salad, some fruits and a burger, i paid the bill of 3.65 Euro. the lunch break here is a pretty long one as i have heard, but surprisingly my teammates finished pretty quickly (reason being of some project deadline ;) ) and soon were back to work.

The day ended pretty quickly and i started for home at 18:00 hrs in evening, the weather outside was still chill and we started our walk home. on our way home we stopped at a electric shop to purchase an adaptor for my personal latop, that i carried from india, since the converters are totally different here (One more interesting thing i noted here is that there are no switches here along with the sockets !!, surprising indeed, check here on swaroop's blog on a detailed explanation on this :) Electricity, Automation and the Flip Side.

Soon it was 19:30 Hrs and it was dinner again, today i was in a adventorous mood since i had a good day at office and wanted to try out something exotic and exotic it was !!.

I ordered maincourse Assiette de Bulots mayonaisse (Large sea snail or buccin with Mayonaisse), assuming it will be some snail meat with some spices, and what i got was something entirely out of the world. In a Big glass platter, in the centre was a big mountain of icecubes and around it arranged in a perfect circle were 14 small snails, in a chain like manner, initially i was horrified thinking they might be alive, but fortunately they were not, the snails were steam baked along with the shells !! and served and it was not fully baked, this was to preserve the juice of the meat and the waitress provided a kind of fork, i have not seen till date to use. it took me some minutes to figure out how to really eat this thing !!. I was in mood for some adventure, but not this magnitude :). but since i allready had ordered, i had no option but to try it out. I will not go into the details of the procedure to eat it :).