Le Cabaret Frappe

So, I got out of the lab around 6:30PM today and decided to head into town for some dinner. I went to the usual area to find some food and noticed some music and purple lights in the distance. To my surprise they were holding a concert in one of the parks near Victor Hugo (this is the central park of downtown). It was called Le Cabaret Frappe. I saw the flyers for it earlier in the week, but didn't realize it was a public concert, apparently it was playing from July 23rd -29th. Usually there are night concerts starting at 7PM and playing about 3 bands a night, one at 7, the others at 9 and 11. I went for the 7PM showing and guess who I saw, Michel! He was using his bike as a stool and was perched up near a tree. The group that was playing, HK & Les Saltimbanks, had a reggae, hip hop, rap feel. I didn't really understand what they were singing about, Michel said it was political in nature, but either way it was very nice to hear. One thing I do like about the French music is the incorporation of the accordion. If you have the chance, you should check out some of the bands on the cabaret frappe website.

Nice Evening Meal

Phew. Just finished dinner. It was a home cooked meal for once. Well, as home cooked as one can get when living in a guest house with limited cookware and spices, but nonetheless enjoyable and, at least for me, soothing. This week and next week will be stressful. My time here in Grenoble working with the Vivaudou Group is coming to a close and, as with all endeavors to achieve results, results are slow to appear, which is in contradiction with what I hoped to achieve here. Then again, I guess I couldn't really say how much work could reasonably be accomplished in seven weeks.

Cooking is nice because it provides time to reflect. In between chopping, sauteing, seasoning, and allowing each of the flavors to meld, the day's pace slows down and you can spend more time processing and assessing things you couldn't throughout the day. This evening was one of those cases. Lucky for me that I had a special treat. Anne brought me a bag filled with fruits (fruits, French word) and vegetables (legumes, French word) from her garden. =) I've a picture of the gifts below. The tomatoes were awesome. They had a sweet tinge to them and lacked the acid notes found in grocery market tomatoes. These, were real tomatoes ripened on the vine. Along with the tomatoes (tomates), there were zucchini (courgent) and squash. With the tomatoes I made a tomato salad with pieces of herb cheese. The zucchini was sauted in butter, along with some beets I had in the fridge. In addition, I made my own rendition of a croque monsieur by pan frying buttered bread with pieces of Gruyere cheese and ham in between each piece of bread and finally finished the meal with an apple and some bread and cheese. Yum.

Looking at it, I've at least come to better understand how to perform the basics of patch clamping and have been introduced to other techniques, like two electrode voltage clamp (TEVC) and droplet-interface bilayers (DIBs). Each time, I learn a bit more about the oocyte system I'm using, whether it be methods to stabilize membranes which show no promise and others which have shown hints of promise but require further investigation. Little by little, we'll tease out an answer, but in a short time, probably not. That's science. It's funny though, when you observe a different outcome you want to investigate it more and more and in doing so you've come to better understand your system of study. Since many of these experiments are new to both our groups, we are doing just that, and at the same time trying to provide a biological or chemical explanation for the outcome we see. That's why it's sometimes good to have a nice evening meal as it provides time to reflect on the days events, consolidate and organize the various attempts made and their respective results, provide an explanation or possible explanations for your results, and construct future experiments to support or disprove your hypotheses. Each takes time and why not spend some time thinking over some nice food.

Les legumes et fruits du jardin d'Anne.

Le diner

Le Tour de France

What an exciting day. The Tour de France held the penultimate stage here in Grenoble. The course was 42.5 km, starting and ending on the northeastern side of town with a climb up through the eastern mountains. The riders have to mountains to climb, first is the Brie-et-Angonnes which sits at 475 m above sea level, followed by Saint-Martin D'uriage which is at 593 m. For reference, Grenoble sits about 213 m from sea level and . Here's a map of the course.

I rode the bus into town and then walked over to the start of the course by about 10AM. It was quite the spectacle. Near the Velodome, each team had set up their trailers and were preparing bikes for the day and eager fans were sitting outside the gates, peering through visible spots cheering on their favored team. There was even a band, yes a band in the musician-sense, of guys dressed as vikings playing rehearsed songs. It was great to see! Other people had bought or brought flags of their respective countries and were wearing them as capes. I walked down the race course a bit and unexpectedly ran into some friends. We parted from the area around a little after 1pm, I to do some shopping, and they to return home and have some lunch.

As I walked back there were a group of students, probably middle or high school, asking us to sign something for the deaf and mute. This particular girl wouldn't leave me alone, so I decided to donate 2 euros. I accidentally took out 1 euro and she asked for the second. I pulled out a 2 euro coin and hoped to take back the 1 euro coin, but before I could, she closed her hand. In the end I ended up giving her 3 euros (150% more than I decided to). I've never experienced such a thing in the U.S. Though people ask for donations and pledges, they don't grab money from you like that. This isn't the first time I've heard to be careful in France regarding people asking for money or donations. In Paris, it's common to see people selling these "love bracelets," woven wristbands. Without asking you, they would try and tie one of these bands around your wrist and then ask for 5 euros. You need to be very careful about this type of "salesmanship." In contrast though, there was another group in Paris near the Gares Montparnasse that was advocating cancer awareness and they were quite pleasant to deal with. So I'm not sure, but in the end, I need to be more cautious.

From here, I returned to the guesthouse, took a nap and then decided to head back into town to see if there were events going on in celebration of the tour de France. In an anticlimatic way, there was none. I didn't hear bands playing. The nightlife didn't seem any busier. Restaurants seemed the same and streets seemed less crowded. Where had all the people who had been there during the race gone? I returned to the area where the race started and found my answer. The caravans had all left, not a single one was still near the Velodome. For the most part, the park was cleared out, you could barely tell there had been a race during the day. The trampled green grass will probably grow back within a week. It's quite a sad scene to see such a well-televised event come and go like that and leave very little trace outside of a poster ornews column. Sigh.

Vikings.

The start.

The finish.

The podium.

Some kangaroos.

Soup and Science

It's been a while since I discussed some science. As to be expected, experiments always take longer than expected and protocols don't always go as planned. We tried polymerizing a patch membrane excised from an oocyte using patch clamp protocols. Patch clamp is a technique developed in 1976 by Neher and Sakmann in order to study ion channels. For their work, they received the Nobel Prize in Physiology Medicine in 1991.

In the simpliest explanation, patch clamp measures the current flowing between two electrodes placed on different sides of an excised piece of cell membrane expressing ion channels or receptors. To excise membrane, a glass capillary is heated and pulled to make a pipette with an 1-3 micrometer aperture. This pipette is pressed against a piece of cell membrane and a small suction is applied, causing the membrane to press against the pipette walls, generating a highly resistive seal (on the order of gigaohms, hence it is called a "gigaseal") and capable of maintaining membrane integrity even after excising a piece by quickly retracting the pipette. Ion channels or receptors carried within the patch maintain their activity and are kept in their native environments for the most part. Agonists and antagonists may be administered to the patch to observe changes in the conductance state (fancy phrase to say how current changes) of the ion channel or receptor.

Explaining how patch clamp works is easy, actually getting a gigaseal is more difficult, and it seemed almost impossible for me today. Christophe didn't seem to have a problem forming a gigaseal, so I must have been having a bad day. To further complicate matters, gigaseals are only formed with still living oocytes. Old oocytes, and any cell for that matter, or dead oocytes have "leaky" membranes and it is incredibly difficult to form a gigaseal. If I recall correctly, we went through three oocytes this morning before we found one which could form a gigaseal, attempting to form a seal at least three times per oocyte. Sigh.

It probably didn't help that I was feeling a bit under the weather these past few days and the rainy weather didn't help but perpetuate the gloomy feel. To perk myself up, I asked Christophe if there were any places to buy soup and bread. To my surprise, soup is not a common food to find in France due to the underlying connatation that only poor people eat soup. In the winter months, eating soup is more acceptable, but in summer, not so much. This is different from America, where year around we can purchase items like "soup and salad," or "half-sandwich and soup" for lunch everyday throughout the year. I think the best example of the U.S. equivalent is where people shop. When I was growing up, I don't remember people openly admitting they shopped at such places as Goodwill, Salvation Army, or the Thrift Store. I feel nowadays, it has become more acceptable, at least among the younger generations to look for clothing there. Apparently there is a spinoff store called the Buffalo Exchange that utilizes some of the same principles, with one exception, that they buy back used clothing and then resell it for reduced cost. I went there last Halloween to purchase some items for my Waldo costume (it's actually quite nice and you can find a couple articles of clothing that are well worth the visit). Either way, a connatation is a connatation. I wanted soup. So, I rode my bike into town, walked into the supermarket bought some soup, bread, saucission, a mixed berry tart, fruit and a couple snacks and had a nice dinner outside in the sunshine with a cup of tea and a paper from Analytical Chemistry.

Now the REAL work begins

As I depart Grenoble, I am very happy and grateful for the time that we have spent together.  I have wanted to collaborate with the Channels Group at IBS for an extended period and we had begun to discuss some rough opportunities to do so last Spring.  As many of you know, the activation barrier to discussing a collaboration and actually performing it is quite high.  This is particularly true when working to build international collaborations with different time zones, research areas, etc.

The GREET program opened a very important door and made it possible to spend time with our new collaborators and to discuss and plan extensively how to proceed.  As I leave Grenoble, we have a very clear plan with defined action points and items that we will continue to develop.  Further, I leave Mark behind to continue collecting preliminary experimental data, learning new techniques and making a new sensor protein that will form the basis for some of our future works.  While it is possible that our groups would have still found the time and effort to collaborate, the GREET program enabled that opportunity to be accelerated and strengthened.  So for that, I’d like to say a special THANK YOU to ACS, the ACS Office of International Activities and the GREET program staff. 

Bastille Day

Today is Bastille Day (English term), or more commonly called La Fête Nationale, and in France, it marks the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 and the start of the French Revolution. In a sense it is similar to our Independence Day and is filled with celebrations around town. I missed the military parade earlier in the day due to travel, but I did get to see the evening fireworks and Champs de Mars concert at the foot of the Eiffel Tower with my friend Alli and some of her friends.

The theme of the concert was equality, more specifically to advocate tolerance of other nationalities. Their lineup constituted over 50 artists and it was very nice. I really didn't understand what they were singing or saying (minus a Michael Jackson song they played), but I certainly enjoyed the day. At just the concert, 1.2 million people showed up. To put that into perspective, that's larger than the population of Tucson. Fantastic!

Here's the concert at dusk.


Here's what 1.2 million people may look like.



The fireworks show.

Somewhat jealous

On Monday after work Michel took us to dinner. Before we headed into town, we took a 20 minute car ride up to the northern mountains to a fort built at the mountain top. The road was steep and narrow. If I had to guess it was barely wide enough for two Honda Fits to lie side by side. There were tens of very sharp switch backs and it almost seemed impossible to see if another car was coming up or down the switchback until you got pretty close (then again I was sitting in the back seats). Unfortunately the fort is closed on Mondays so we weren't able to get in, but that didn't stop us from exploring a bit. Off to the side of the fort entrance, there's a staircase built into the mountain side that allowed us to reach the very top of the mountain peak. We scaled no more than 3-4 meters and voila, we were at the top.

The cliff face is incredibly steep, it drops straight down right after the edge. Great for paragliders, not so great if you don't enjoy heights. Regardless of the height, the view was absolutely breath-taking, and I mean it. The sun was about 1.5 hours from setting, so there was more than enough light to see the whole city and into the glacial valley. Facing east you could see Mt. Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps, just above the trees; facing south you could oversee all of Grenoble and even some towns more east in the valley; to the west were more mountains. Maybe it was the sun, maybe it was just low hanging clouds, but there was a faint blue haze that defocused objects that were farther in distance, adding to the valley's beauty.

There was a walking trail carved out from the many hikers making a dirt path through the lush greenery. Outside of this 15 inch dirt road, you had plants with yellow and purple flowers, large rocks, trees and still active insects (I saw some flies, bees, and ants). Heck, the bees were so busy with the pollen they didn't even notice us. The trail stopped at a gap in the mountain top, so that's where we stopped. A bit more east though, and across the gap, there was a path built into the mountain side with a passage way that cut through the solid rock. Apparently it extends for miles. That's when it hit me; there aren't close places with such beauty, history, and sights in the U.S. I don't mean the U.S. doesn't have such places, they just aren't normally a 20 minute drive up the mountainside from a well-populated city. And that, is why I'm somewhat jealous.

From here, we walked back to the car, but we didn't go into town immediately. We noticed some hikers walking up an even higher cliff than we were previously on and so we decided to follow suit, even though I wasn't wearing the right shoes (just a pair of sandals). The adventure started out down a hill side with various size stones. Some were about the size of a baseball, others grapefruit-size. At the bottom, we paralleled what seemed to be a man-made moat. Odd, yes, I wouldn't expect a moat on a mountaintop. Interestingly, parallel to the length of the moat, and situated in the center of the moat side, was a small jail-like housing. On our way back to the car we looked inside and on the wall there was a sign. Michel translated and apparently the jail-like place housed cannons of sorts. If intruders tried to get across the moat, they were fired at.

The moat ended and a path leading to this new mountaintop started. We made it up without too much trouble. The hikers we saw earlier were having an evening picnic with the sun set. They had carried up a case of wine and laid out a blanket on the ground. I saw what looked like a pasta salad with chunks of tomato, though I couldn't really tell. They took some pictures for us and we did they same for them. It was very fun. We stayed up there, for about 10 - 15 minutes, then decided to return to town for dinner. By the time we returned to the car, it was about 8:15PM.

Dinner was yummy. It was three courses for 27 euros. For my first course, I had a salad with fried cheese and thick slices of a prosciutto-like meat, then rabbit with a bed of vegetables for my second course. I've never had rabbit before. It didn't taste "gamey" at all, and was very lean. I think I enjoyed the vegetables and the sauce they used a bit more than the rabbit meat. Then for desert I got sorbet. It was a good meal for the end of the day.