A Fresh Start (up)

It all started with me having my licence…and ended up with me buying this car (on the picture)!

OK, let’s do that chronologically (I don’t even have time to get creative while giving you some news!). On Tuesday evening we had dinner in SF with Thibault and Anne-Laure who were starting their tour of California: wow, that was so great to see some friends, and listening to them arguing about the next steps of their trip felt like home, and more exactly poker parties in Paris!

After a crazy week at work, on Friday night we went celebrating Jenni’s move from our team to the Motors team (this girl really helped me getting settled at work, this is so bad she’s leaving), in a great French restaurant called Foreign Cinema. God, I missed foie gras so much!! Pictures are here.

On Saturday, Audrey, Cecile and I attended a Fashion show organized by the Academy of Arts to recruit new students (pictures here)… It was absolutely great, exactly as we see them on TV, except that the models are even skinnier in reality… To sympathize with them, we went eating chocolate pudding just after :-). And then we went to the SF MOMA, I think I could spend my life there… This afternoon, and in particular seeing those prospective students at the Academy, made me realize that, since I decided what I wanted to do so early, I am not really aware of all the other type of careers and lives people have outside of the business world. I’m not saying that I imagine myself as a fashion designer (even if my mother would have preferred that!), but I would love to meet people with more diverse backgrounds… Speaking of which, on Saturday night Nicolas invited us to meet Thomas, his partner, who just joined him in the US: a true artist, graphic designer and photograph. If you want to check a great photoblog, Thomas’ one will definitely be worth your time. After eating with them and Seb around Castro St, we went to a pub in the same street… and I was the only girl, surrounded by guys who were obviously more interested in Rémy than myself… I’m definitely in SF!

And today… Rémy went checking some cars this morning and came back with a big smile: “I found it, we just have to sign the papers”! 200 hundred signatures later, I found myself writing a check of $11,000, on the verge on falling from my chair, imagining that the next time that I will check my bank account there will be a huge difference… In these kind of moments, you just want to be a kid again and have Mom&Dad (this is almost a brand) take care of everything, so I called them and they scared the hell out of me: “have you checked that the engine is clear? what about the brakes? how can you be sure that it wasn’t involved in any accident?”… Anyway, I bought a really nice Toyota Yaris, that I’m going to pick up probably tomorrow since I need to get an insurance first. What do you think? I find its “face” (no, I’m not crazy, I know that it won’t speak to me like Disney’s ones) really cute

To relax after this stressful choice, we went to… Alcatraz (I know, a spa would have probably been a better choice)! We chose the evening tour, and it was awesome, first of all for the view on the City, but also because you really get to see what you have in mind: the alignment of microscopic cells, the ways prisoners took to escape, the cells of famous prisoners… and you can’t of course miss the entire story of Al Capone… Eh, you know I love Mafia stories! Pictures are here.

After a nice work and a nice apartment, I start to have nice friends and a nice car. This expatriation is going well, right?

I am finally not a desperate case! It started really badly though: I arrived 45 min late because my instructor refuses to buy a GPS, and the examinator I got started by saying “oh, you’re from France? I hate France, people are so mean and rude there!”… It turned out that the guy was delighted to see me smile, since he thought that it might be the sign that “new generations are probably France’s last hope”… The guy was actually really nice, and I couldn’t really disagree with what he was saying: I did leave France for a reason! He ended up the conversation by asking me if Carla Bruni was smart, and I was… speechless! So now I’m going to buy a car… without knowing a single thing about cars! Any advice? I want to keep it under $10,000 (used) and ideally be able to resell it.

Well, this week is completely crazy at work, so I’m going to bed now, but just for info I posted an article about the New Media Arts conference on Tech IT Easy here, and an article about a great conference I attended today by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, about customer satisfaction, here.

I had an interesting week, the kind of week when you feel that your brain has been working more than usual.

I attended a great conference by Dan Roam about visual thinking as part of the eBay Speaker Series. I wrote an article about it on Tech IT Easy, and it felt good to blog about interesting topics, and not just about what’s happening in my life. I realized that I made the right choice to put my personal articles here and the articles with a little bit more meat on TIE. It allows me to experiment two of the advantages of blogging (staying in touch with friends without writing a common email to everyone and generating great conversations on interesting topics) on different and appropriate platforms without mixing readerships. Whereas before I had a large overlap between my TIE readers and this blog’s readers, now it is not the case anymore even if I encourage my dear friends who read this blog to also read tech topics on TIE, so that they won’t make this strange and annoyed face anymore when I’ll speak about my job with them

Apart from that, I went to a conference on Friday night about New Media Artists and the Law, which will probably help me a lot to definitely finish my thesis. I might write something on TIE about it too (yes, I try to be back in the game!)

This week-end was a little bit less intellectual: OK, I acknowledge that I went to see “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” at the cinema, and even if I’m sure that this movie can go directly to the “crappy” category for most people, I actually laughed a lot And it motivated me to go to Hawaii, so I might take so holidays and go there for Thanksgiving (yes, I am making plans well in advance!)

And finally today, I attended the Cherry Blossom Festival in Japantown with Seb, Audrey and Cecile (pictures here): too many people of course, but really nice parade, plenty of colors, and plenty of French people (don’t ask me why!). Then we looked for cold places since it was freezing in SF and landed in a really nice café, managed by French people of course, guess you can’t avoid them ;-)  Nice people and hot chocolate: I definitely start liking it here!

  After my worst day ever, a work colleague told me “you’re lucky, because it means that you will have great moments in the days to come, to balance good and bad in the universe”… and apparently he was right! I had one really great week end

On Saturday we went to visit Berkeley and UC Berkeley, and even if the university is not as nice as UCLA (OK, I’m so biased, but if you want to compare pictures are here!), I loved the famous hippie atmosphere. I have never seen so many billboards for so different causes: “Save Tibet”, “Stop Beijin’s Olympic torch and hold the torch of human rights”, “Vote for Obama”, “Save Darfour”…

On Saturday night, we went to the opening of Taste 2008 art exhibition: when you combine art and food (my 2 passions!) you get something really interesting, like paintings of delirious ice creams…and you can check it out here!

Finally, today we went to the San Francisco Chocolate Salon and even if it was a bit too crowded (who is able to resist the power of chocolate?!), I had the opportunity to taste some amazing chocolates, like the “banana froster”… yummy!!! Pictures are here, but you better not be hungry before checking them

The first steps of this expatriation are finally going fine, and I’m delighted by all the great things happening in the Valley; there are too many things to do every week end! The only expectable problem is just that… I miss my friends: I got most of you on the phone this week end and sometimes I feel that I would be more “useful” in France, that I wouldn’t have all the time the impression of missing some important moments of your lives… But I know that, should I have stayed, things would have been the same since you are all going to explore the world soon

I should have stayed in bed this morning. Being awfully sick and taking a day off would have been better than that. This morning, on our way to take the bus, we met a really nice drug addict who didn’t want to let us pass; Remy asked the guy really nicely “can you please let us go?” and in exchange, received a punch in the shoulder and in the back. Who said San Jose was the safest city in the US? I’m amazed how quick my brain is in this kind of situation: I pushed the guy away from Remy, and we just ran as fast as we could! Then I called 911; the cop didn’t seem at all impressed by what I was telling and asked me “did you see the guy punching other people? Did he have a gun?”. Since my answer was NO to the 2 questions, she told me nicely “we’ll keep you posted”, meaning “as if we moved our ass for a guy without a gun…”

That wasn’t the end of the bad day, no no no, it would have been too easy! I took my driving test today, of course, as you might guess by the title of this post, I failed, and my driving instructor told me that I chose the worst DMV to take the test, the worst time (lunch time) and that I had the meanest examiner! She told me to turn left, and I couldn’t go on the left lane because there were too many cars, so I stayed on the middle lane to go straight and simply said “sorry, I couldn’t go to the left lane, so where do I go next?” and she replied “if you are asking questions it means that you should learn how to drive before taking the test, now the test is over, go back to the DMV”… Really nice lady, isn’t she?

Hopefully, work was here to entertain me a bit today: with the Yahoo-Google-AOL-Microsoft-Myspace entanglement and all the rumors going around the Valley about this (these) deal(s), it is definitely fun to work in the strategic department of a big Internet company at the moment!

Yes, I did receive my California ID (and by the way I have way too much hair on it) but even if it makes me feel a bit more integrated, I still have a sword of Damocles hanging over me: we submitted our H1B visas applications last week, but the quotas (65 000/year) have already been reached, which means that applications will be picked up randomly. Apart from the obvious absurdity of this quota which prevents Silicon Valley from hiring all the talented people it would need to face the recession, I find the situation a bit crazy: it’s been now 2 years that we are planning to live here (not to say my whole life!), we’ve been through so much pressure to try to find jobs at the same time, to get our J1 visas, to settle down… and now that we have everything in place, that we both start really enjoying our work, we are told that our future depends on a… lottery!

The other suspense of the week: will I get my license?? It is way less dramatic than the visa issue, for sure! I will take the test tomorrow, and I can say that it will be a miracle if I pass: during my last lesson, I cut some yellow lines, I accelerated during a turn, I forgot to stop at a stop sign…. Nothing promising

Apart from all that:

• We went to see a hockey game last week (pictures here): I loved the atmosphere, but I didn’t know that it was absolutely normal to let players fight during the game, so I was completely astonished to see those guys punching each other in the face while the audience was waiting for…free pizza!
• I had my housewarming party on Friday, with work colleagues (pictures here), and I realize that my Sicilian origins haven’t disappeared: I can make 3 additional housewarming parties only with the leftovers! At least we used the BBQ
• While I was having a drink with a friend in SF on Saturday, a HEC student was passing by and recognized me, at the exact moment when I was saying “it is hard to meet young French people in the Valley”… I guess she proved me wrong!
• I went to a mass on Sunday, and no wonder why US churches are full and French ones empty… It wasn’t a fancy mass at all, but it was in a latino area and people of all ages seemed totally absorbed by their faith…It is somehow reassuring to see so much hope in the eyes of so many different people. Besides it is really interesting to analyze the relationship that Americans have with religion: it can be sometimes really scary and sometimes really inspiring, even if the line is often difficult to draw. And I definitely love gospel music