Group Pictures

My semester in France is starting to come to an end, which is pretty sad because I've had some great times here in Europe and made a lot of really good friends, but at the same time I'm ready to go back to the states and see my friends and family.

I would be writing more but the last round of tests/projects has been taking over my life for the past week or so, and now it's time to prepare for finals. We got some group pictures the other day with all of the undergrads at GTL. Our group is really small compared to the one that's coming here for the summer--that one is gonna have over 200 people!

Anyways, i'm one of the oldest in the group..most of the undergrads are sophomores and juniors, so a lot of them got to experience legal drinking for the first time when they got to France. I think just about everyone is majoring in some sort of engineering, mostly mechanical and electrical. Everyone goes to Georgia Tech back in the states except for 3 kids from VT, and it seems like most of the GT people are from out of state, which makes sense because we out-of-staters get in-state tuition at GTL.

This is the back side of the GTL building





Heading back to the apartment after class

We had a cheese tasting in our last statistics class, so I have a few more cheeses to add to the list.

Aged Comte
Delice
Aperobic - This one was amazing..it's an artisanal hard goat cheese that's pretty hard to find. And it's in the shape of ear plugs.
Double cream

Atlantic Station

When I first came to Atlanta back in 2006, Atlantic Station was one of the first things that I saw. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's a fairly new development in Atlanta that used to be the site of an old steel mill, but they cleaned it up and now it's a vast area of residential and retail stores, complete with a MASSIVE underground parking deck. If I had to compare it with anything in Pittsburgh, it would probably be the Southside Works.

A plan of Atlantic Station from atlanticstation.com


Atlantic Station has been the subject of a decent amount of debate in some of my classes, especially the city planning class that I took last semester, and I've been hearing a lot of conflicting opinions and ideas about the development since I've been in Atlanta, and only recently have I been starting to form a concrete opinion about it. First off, some more details about the place: since the developers started off with basically a barren wasteland, they could plan Atlantic Station as they wanted, with no real geographical boundaries besides the home park neighborhood to the south and the Interstate 75/85 connector to the East. They way that it is planned makes a lot of sense, with some traditional 'city blocks' in the heart of the district and some more wide open areas with pedestrian-friendly tree-lined streets and a small lake in the more residential areas.

It has some serious problems though, and I think someone in my city planning class put it well when they called it 'intown sprawl.' The location of this place is very important--it has no real link to the public transportation system of the city besides a rather unreliable 'shuttle' that runs from the outskirts of the development to the arts center MARTA station. This fact, which many folks may consider meaningless, makes the residential part of Atlantic Station nearly off-limits to lower-income people who cannot afford cars, which may have led to an unnecessary gentrification and social separation commonly found in wealthier suburban areas.

The design of the buildings is spectacularly unoriginal and could be found anywhere else in the country, and the huge underground parking deck with subsidized parking further adds to the notion of 'intown sprawl' because visitors are actually being encouraged to bring their cars to the development, despite the fact that the website labels it as 'pedestrian-oriented' and 'transit focused'. The whole development added a huge amount of traffic to that section of town, and now the home park neighborhood is having to make some street changes to prevent the traffic jams from extending into it. Meanwhile, there are still large surface parking lots in downtown and midtown Atlanta, where residential or green space could be added to increase the density and beauty of the city.

So what do I think about all of this? I think I agree with my history teacher, who said that it needs more time to change and become more personal and real, much like the old neighborhoods in Atlanta like Inman park or Virginia Highlands. Although it is a place for people to live with fancy apartment complexes and classy retail stores, I would never consider it a real neighborhood; I think of it more like a shopping mall with apartments nearby--a little piece of suburbia in the middle of a big city, complete with massive big-box stores (Ikea) that are usually found outside of the city and make walking difficult because of the sheer amount of space that they take up. It has no local flavor--you could pick up the whole complex and put it in just about any city in America, and it would look fine, and the locals would recognize 90% of the chain retail stores.

I have some issues with this, and it is definitely not a place that I would ever live, mostly because it's just too fake. Maybe I'm just a traditionalist and prefer and old-style neighborhood with small businesses, a market, and a post office, much like some of the neighborhoods in Atlanta and Pittsburgh. However, I will admit that Atlantic Station is definitely an improvement on what was there before, which was essentially an environmental hazard and eyesore for the city of Atlanta.

PS: A few new French cheeses to add to my list.

Boursault
Reblochon
Tomme Blanche

A Change of Pace

When we first got to GTL, one of the professors here gave us a powerpoint presentation about all the different things to see and do around town, and one of the attractions that she talked about was a bike trail that supposedly goes along the Moselle river from here to the next town called Thionville, which is about 30km north of here. I say supposedly because when we asked for more information, she said she didn't really know where the trail started or how to get there.

Friday I decided that my goal was to take a little solo bike adventure to find the trail and do some exploring of rural France. Since my rental bike got stolen a few weeks ago, my friend Josh was nice enough to let me borrow his bike for the weekend. After biking to the city center near the river, I went around in circles a few times before finally giving in and just asking at the tourist office. When I told her that I wanted to bike the trail, she was like "Oh...that's going to be difficult. The trail isn't completed yet." But she told me where it starts and said I might have to bike along some roads to find the completed parts of the trail.

Some of the original city walls of Metz, built in the 1300s


I got stuck at some dead ends in the middle of the woods, almost rode into the port of Metz, and rode past a meat packing plant that had me on the verge of stopping the bike to puke all over the side of the road, but I finally found the trail! By this point I was already a few miles away from Metz. Being that far from a similarly sized American city would probably mean I was about to start hitting some cookie cutter strip malls, subdivisions, and soccer moms yapping away on cell phones in their SUVs, but suburban sprawl is not a huge problem in France, so I was effectively immersed in farmland and gorgeous countryside.

And by gorgeous I mean that I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. I felt like I was in the middle of a movie that took place in the stereotypical French countryside: one-lane roads lined with flowering trees and fields of vegetables, a family of cows staring at me like I was crazy, and an endlessly charming village called La Maxe. It was so interesting coming into the village from the surrounding countryside--one minute i'm biking past farmland and the next minute I'm on 'rue Principale' of La Maxe, which was lined with humble houses, the occasional cafe, and of course the town square just ouside of a gorgeous church. I veered off the main trail to check out this village so I really had no idea where I was or how to get back, but I loved every minute of it.

One of the roads leading into the village of La Maxe.

The village from a distance. You can see the cows staring at me in the distance.

The church in La Maxe


I eventually found my way back to the river and biked along it for a while, then started getting tired and headed back to Metz, almost throwing up again when I passed that meat packing plant. As soon as I got into downtown Metz, I found a bench in the sunlight with a nice view of the town and slept for at least an hour. Turns out I had biked about 30 miles total. What a great way to spend a Friday afternoon!

La Moselle

Yet another adventure

It's time for a fun and exciting post after that boring essay that I last posted. Today in heat transfer we learned about the NTU method for optimizing the design of heat exchangers. It's an exciting method because you only need to know the inlet temperatures for the two fluids in the heat exchanger to calculate a heat rate OR an overall effectiveness! Just kidding...


This past Saturday was one of the most beautiful days that we've had over here, so of course I spent just about the entire day outside. We started out by checking out the weekly market that happens in Metz just outside the Cathedral, then hopping on a train for the cheap and short 45 minute ride North to Luxembourg. I heard some mixed reviews in the past regarding Lux so I didn't really have high expectations of the city..we just figured it would be a new and possibly interesting place to walk around on such a beautiful day, and it definitely overcame all expectations that I had.


Market outside of Cathedral St. Etienne in beautiful METZ!


What impressed me the most about the city was the amazing natural beauty that it possessed. The topography is really interesting--the main commercial and residential parts of the city sit on the tops of large hills that are separated by deep, stunning valleys with rivers, parks, and trails running through them. The hills created such a huge separation between the different parts of the town that each level had a different name: upper town and lower town, which is similar to the 'slopes' and 'flats' in Pittsburgh.

Some nice contrasting scenery in Luxembourg


We only spent a short amount of time in the upper town, walking through the dense, compact streets of the old town for a while before descending into the gorgeous green valleys. It was such a contrast from the hustle and bustle of the upper town. The valleys were quiet, peaceful, and serene, and it felt like we went from a city to a series of small villages connected by parks and biking trails. After wandering through the valleys for a while, we decided to check out the old fortifications of the city. From seeing the fortifications, it's pretty easy to be able to tell why little old Luxembourg isn't a part of France or Germany right now--it seemed like it was just about impenetrable back in the old days! Coming into the town by river, you're surrounded by soaring cliffs, castles, and walls that seem really imposing even today. The Luxembourgers (Luxembourgeoise? Luxers?) must have protected that place really well.

Sid the kid in the Old part of the upper town


Gorgeous view from the top of the fortifications


Contrasting layers



The hills reminded me of the burgh


All in all, it was a really interesting city. I could tell that it's a very wealthy place; there's no shortage of BMWs and Porsche's rolling around the city, and the town is filled with quirky little art galleries and expensive cafes, but we walked through a neighborhood of shacks not more than 2km away from the city center in one of the valleys. The topography of the place makes it so much more exciting than most other European cities--I thought of it as a place with all the excitement and culture of a cosmopolitan city combined with the natural beauty and quaintness of the European countryside. Lux is definitely a winner.

Urban Development

This is a short essay i wrote for my history class about urban development. I decided to post it because it's something that I'm really interested in, and it might be worth a gander if you have any interest in public transit, social problems, and/or sustainability. What's really interesting to me is the massive paradigm shift between the early 1900s and today regarding streetcars (or 'trams' here in Europe)--back then they were the first step towards suburbanization and class division but now they're seen as a progressive step towards higher density, environmental sustainability, and more livable cities and towns.


A modern streetcar/tram in Sevilla, Spain

Throughout history, the growth and development of cities have been governed and assisted by countless factors. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the development of both American and European cities changed from being directed by political and institutional forces to primarily those of economic forces. In other words, private companies and market forces, for the first time in history, reached the forefront in the determination of the way that cities functioned and developed. This in turn led to various developmental results, social consequences, and a variety of ways to address this new form of growth which differed between the United States and Europe.

Perhaps the most blatant result of these new economic forces and technological development was the mass decentralization of American cities. Many private forces contributed to this spatial deconstruction, but two in particular had the greatest impact: electric utilities and streetcar companies. In the late 19th century, private utility companies in the US started supplying energy to many of the major cities, and soon enough, the American lifestyle depended on the continuous electricity provided by these private companies. According to historian Harold Platt, as more people purchased their electricity from these providers, “the unit cost of electricity fell, encouraging even higher levels of consumption” (247). These low prices and constant availability of electricity allowed Americans to move to the suburbs and enjoy the openness of rural American while still having the same commodities that were previously only available in cities.

At the same time, streetcar and transit companies in both the US and Europe were strongly lobbying for the mechanization of traction systems within urban areas. As their streetcars caught on with urbanites, they led to the growth of “streetcar suburbs,” especially in the US. This new form of transportation contributed directly to the spatial development of cities because it allowed people to live away from the city and use the streetcar to commute to and from their jobs every day. The primary form of propulsion for the increasingly popular streetcars was overhead electric traction, which required a large and constant source of electricity provided by the private utilities. Thus, a connection formed between these two privatized distributors of technology—Americans who had moved into the suburbs relied daily on the streetcars, which in turn depended on the electric utilities to deliver the power that they needed for overhead electric traction. Also, as discussed in class, the streetcars expanded along power lines in the city, and since the lines ran along sources of electricity, businesses tended to form along the same lines, further popularizing the decentralized urban development that became increasingly tied into privatized forces.

This new form of urban development in the United States did not come without its social consequences and various ways for urbanites to address these changes. Historian Anthony Sutcliffe calls into account the vested interests of these private transit companies of the 19th century: “The mechanization of street transport clearly favored tenants and property owners on the periphery of the urban area” (34). As a result of this, property owners in central urban areas along with owners of the pre-existing means of transport banded together and lobbied to retain the status quo that had been upset by this new form of transit. Because the streetcar provided the first step to the mass suburbanization of the United States in the 20th century, it also contributed to the social and class discrimination commonly associated with the suburbs. The suburbs of the 20th century became the havens of what is commonly referred to as “white flight,” which left poorer minorities in the central cities without the same transportation, education, and technological opportunities as their suburban counterparts.

Also, according to Platt, these new electrified street railways and utility companies caused social stratification that had not been previously seen. Because the utilities at first only supplied electricity to large cities, “electric lighting was associated with downtown areas and notions of class status” (Platt 251). The availability of electricity in urban areas added to the social stratification between the city and the country, and perpetuated the notion of urban elitism in working class, rural Americans.

While all of this was going on in the United States, Europe was also experiencing the advent of new technologies such as electricity and urban transit, albeit in a slightly different manner. Much like their American counterparts, European cities became reliant on the streetcars, but “these private transit firms were more strictly regulated by national and municipal governments in Europe” (McKay). In the United States, the government only had to concede some property rights to the streetcar companies, then the market forces took over from there and the state imposed minimal regulation on the industry. Large European cities, on the other hand, faced strict governmental regulation; in Paris, “everything was regulated: routes . . . rates, timetables, stations, technical progress” (Larroque 43). This high amount of regulation even placed restraints on entrepreneurs of the streetcar business—thus diminishing the possible economic forces on European urban development and constraining them with harsh political and institutional forces.

Although there were some significant differences between the experiences of American and European cities in the late 19th and early 20th century, both encountered vast economic and technological growth. With streetcars running on constant electrical current, expansion of cities on both sides of the Atlantic reached levels that had never before been seen. The advent of new technologies and industries forever changed the growth and development of urban areas: for the first time in history, private economic forces played a tremendous role in shaping the evolution of cities by contributing to social, fiscal, and spatial changes that can still be seen today.

In Bruges (and Brussels)

Since Easter was this weekend, we had an extra day off from school so I traveled north to the wonderful country of Belgium. I started the trip with visiting the ancient town of Bruges, which is in the Flanders region in Western Belgium. The town itself is pretty small, maybe about the same size as Metz, but it's one of the biggest attractions in Belgium.

It used to be one of the biggest cities in the world in Medieval times and was the main port city in Belgium. But in 1500, the river that connected it to the ocean filled with sand, and the city was completely forgotten about for about 400 years. Since the city basically fell asleep for so long, visiting it is like going back in time. The old medieval buildings are almost all still intact and the streets are narrow and covered in cobblestones. When we first got in on Friday night, we wandered around the dark, narrow, deserted streets for a long time, which was the best way to see the city. I felt like I had been transported back to a time before electricity, cars, or anything else we have in modern society. I must admit it was one of the coolest experiences I've had since I've been in Europe, and words/pictures cannot describe what it was like. It was something that everyone should experience at some point.

This picture is from Wikipedia but i think it almost comes close to giving the feeling of what Bruges is like at dusk/dark.

Bruges by day was pretty cool as well. We ended up doing the touristy stuff that you can do in pretty much every other European city--visiting various really old churches, climbing up to the top of the belfry (366 steps!), and eating the local food, which you can probably guess since we were in Belgium: Waffles! The Belgians really have their priorities straight..the three things that they are really known for are waffles, chocolate, and beer. Unfortunately I didn't have any of their chocolate since I'm not much of a chocolate person, but I had the waffles and beer. Most of the really delicious beers in Belgium are made by religious monks who live in Abbeys. They sell the beer as a way to make money for their respective abbeys, and most of them have been brewing using the same ingredients since the 1200s. Belgian beer is by far my favorite in the world because it's usually dark, strong, and full of flavor. A couple of my favorites that they also have in the states are Chimay, Duvel, and Delirium Tremens.

Bruges by day..it still felt like I was in a different world


Medieval windmills! There were a few more of these along the canals.

One of the squares of the town with the Belfry in the background

The view from the top of the Belfry. Check out all the wind turbines in the background!

Inside of one of the churches in Bruges

The next day we went over to Brussels, which was a nice city but definitely not as impressive as Bruges. It is the capital of Belgium and a much bigger city than Bruges, so it felt pretty similar to many other big European cities that I've been to.

Brussels, on the way up the hill to the Royal Palace.

The Royal Palace in Brussels

We did go to one really unique place though: Saturday night we were walking around and met two British guys and a French girl, and we decided to all go to a bar together. The place that we went to was something that I had read about previously in a NY Times article about Brussels and was probably the most interesting bar/lounge I've ever been to. Here's what the Times said about it, because their description is much better than what I could have come up with:

For good times, stumble over to Goupil le Fol, an eccentric, three-story bar housed in a former brothel that looks like a cross between an opium den and a 1970s porno set. The walls are covered with old paintings of nudes and lurid landscapes, as well as vinyl LPs. Sink into one of the couches, order one of the owner's favorite fruit wines and party into the wee hours, with an Edith Piaf song blaring from a nearby jukebox. Those with less bohemian instincts should stay downstairs, as the clintele gets more and more risque the higher you climb.

We were on the 2nd floor. I definitely recommend going there if you ever go to Brussels.

My rail pass just expired this past weekend, so that's probably the last of the foreign trips that I'll be doing this semester. Only about a month left in the semester, then I'll be leaving for the states on May 15th!