What's useful mostly at night?

I am never out of your sight, yet I am hidden from view.
I have hair, and you have two.
I am not very weak, but not very strong.
I am useful mostly at night, and to you I’ll always belong.

Answer below.
















ANSWER: Your eyelids.

A roar from Lyon

I finally have Internet in my room again...but it cuts off every two hours and I have to log in again. It's rather annoying when I'm in the middle of something...for now there hasn't been any damage, but I wonder what will happen in the case of a lengthy upload/download. Let's hope I never have to test that!

I would dye for you...

Here's a good sign for a shoe repair shop:

I will heel you

I will save your sole
I will even dye for you

How touching... lol

From here.

The nicest place in Clermont-Ferrand

Maybe because I went there in summer, I really liked the Jardin Lecoq (Lecoq Garden).

That's the way to the rose garden, though I didn't know it at that time.

I decided to go the other way first

The little boy was playing ball with another boy, I was waiting for him to run off so that I could take a photo of the "bird" behind him, but he stopped there looking at me instead :s

the other side

Tell me, do you see a dinosaur in the park?

steps down to the pond

I took the bridge instead (this was taken from the bridge)

Look, a castle entrance!
Nah, it was only an "entrance" to the bridge

See?

Did you find the dinosaur earlier? There are actually two!

the Clermont-Ferrand coat of arms?

just scenery

Meet Mister Lecoq (this is the white head in the previous photo...it was NOT on the flowers! :P

a small waterfall

Seems that it's dangerous...so they blocked it with barricades. You can see the waterfall at the back (The previous photo was taken from the "bridge" above, where you can see the red-and-white barricades. There were the same barricades at the bottom, and I was taking the photo through them)

There aren't only dinosaurs in the park...run for your lives! It's the hound of the Baskervilles! lol (I'm joking...but doesn't it look slightly menacing?)

Another photo of the fountain...I think it's left on all the time...I saw it every day going to/back from work!

And this is the rose garden

the pond in the middle

And all the roses!

Will post pics of the other parts of town another time!

Bears, bears, and more bears!

Okay, just a quick update. The Internet in my room isn't working. However, thanks to two friends, I am able to go to another room in my residence (my friend's) and use the Internet there. And when I'm in my own room, I can use another Internet, which, for some reason, doesn't allow me to load certain websites and doesn't allow me to send ANYTHING. But the upside is that messenger works. Though I can't send any e-mails, even though I can read some of them. Weird! Argh!!

Anyway this post is to share a few pics. I was watching a video on Youtube, and one of the guys had a teddy bear in his t-shirt. I thought, hey, that's cute, so I paused the video and took a screenshot. Then a while later he had two of them in his shirt, so I took a second screenshot. And then...you can see for yourself.

"read" from left to right, row by row

I didn't expect them to keep on adding bears! I initially thought that the guy had just picked up a bear that was lying about and was doing silly stuff with it... (the bears are most probably the ones they're selling...and they did this for some publicity) Which was why I didn't put the pics in separate files...I thought there would be only one at first, then two or three...

The video in itself isn't that interesting, just them talking (especially the guy on the left, the one on the right wasn't talking much, which was why I thought he was bored and playing with the bears!)...but you can click on the link if you want to check out how the bears reproduced ;P

And whilst I'm at bears...here's my happy bear family in Lyon right now ^_^


Okay, I know there's a hedgehog amongst them. Guess he's adopted... (or else it's the mummy and the kids (cubs?) take after their daddy :P )

I want to post up my Clermont/Brussels pics...but I somehow don't feel like doing it when I can't connect to Internet at home... :(

Pancake brunch

Continuing on from the previous food adventures, we had apple crumble pie and pancakes.

This is the apple crumble after we polished off half of it.

"pie" because there was a crust at the bottom...except that the apples made it all soggy. The top was delicious though :D

This was the weekend before I left for Clermont...Jiamin and I made the apple crumble on Saturday, and on Sunday she made pancake brunch for us (Mah, Dinie and me) and we finished the crumble as dessert.

the stack of pancakes...and still growing! (though it's nearing the end...that's got to be the last or second-last pancake)

After eating, we played poker. Dinie and Mah invested in a poker set (chips, cards and dice)...I think we can consider it the Lyon poker set, to be passed on to the juniors :P I mentioned that I recently learned how to play...and I kept losing. Jiamin and Mah were the big winners...while Dinie and I had to get "loans" from the bank a few times :P

Dinie had to leave early...and later we switched to blackjack (when I had no chips left, so I turned dealer instead). Then later Jiamin took over as dealer, and in the end I somehow managed to sweep the bank clean :P

with my stackS of chips! (Mah had a little less than me)

And if you look closely, I didn't even get paid in full, because I bet 200 and the bank had only 130 left! (we used red=100, green=50, grey=20 and blue=10) That's when the bank went bankrupt :P

Oh well...if only gambling were that easy in real life...

But I'd have already gone bankrupt during the poker game. :P

A l'aise? Bah!

This is going to be another grumble about French spelling. Today we received a collective e-mail from the Creatis lab.

A tous les usagers de la salle ultrason,

Après une semaine d'absence, je constate à mon retour, une négligence inacceptable dans le rangement des outils et ustensiles (parfois onéreux) mis a votre disposition dans la salle ultrasons.
Vous êtes nombreux à utiliser cette piéce et je comprend que le probléme ne soit pas facile, mais si chacun fais un effort, il devient gérable.
Je me permets donc de vous faire un rappel de l'importance a garder au mieux cette pièce rangée et propre, pour le confort de tous les manipulateurs (cela évitera détérioration ou perte de matériel , entre autre).
En vous remerciant de prendre en considération ces remarques pour vos manipulations futurs

François (merci de traduire a vos collégues qui ne serait pas a lèse en français)

The e-mail in itself is noteworthy...it is asking the people who use certain lab materials to put them back properly. *sigh* Is every lab like this? But I guess after someone put liquid soap into the piggy bank that's supposed to be for contributions for the aquarium, this isn't a big surprise... :P (we received an e-mail about the piggy bank, but I don't believe I posted it here)

But that isn't what I wanted to talk about. It's the last sentence between brackets...he says "please translate this to your colleagues who are not comfortable with using French". Except that he wrote "a lèse" instead of "à l'aise". Not to mention that he made a few mistakes in the e-mail as well. (though those are rather common, small mistakes) But imagine telling people to "spell korekly"...you get the idea. C'est toi qui n'es pas à l'aise en français! (You're the one who can't use French!)

Stop, thief!

On Saturday I was so busy blogging about the Puy de Dôme (it's just one post earlier) that I forgot about an incident that happened earlier that day. I was in a small shop (Maison de la Presse, for those who have seen it before), and as I was paying, one of the cashiers (I call them cashiers for lack of a better word, "workers" doesn't seem so nice) suddenly dashed towards the doorway. She grabbed a teddy bear (or some big plush toy, about 40cm tall...I didn't notice exactly what) from a man who was leaving, saying "I'll take that back". Seems that the guy was leaving with that toy tucked under his arm, without paying.

The cashier who was serving me burst out laughing, and kept saying "Il fallait le faire!" (literally "(Someone) needed to do it!", but in this context it's more like "What a thing to try!") Really, I was pretty astonished as well. What audacity...maybe because the 3 cashiers were all women...he knew he'd get away...with or without the teddy bear.

Puy de Dôme

I'm rather tired after a long day, but I wanted to blog about this before I forget all the details :P

I'm in Clermont-Ferrand now for 2 weeks of internship (don't ask for more details), so this morning I went out to town to walk around a bit, and in the afternoon Albin took me to hike the Puy de Dôme. It's a sleeping volcano, the highest peak of a ring of volcanoes in Auvergne (the region where Clermont-Ferrand is situated).

We drove up to an altitude of about 1000m (Albin has a car), parked there and hiked the remaining 400m (roughly) up to the summit. Usually there are buses going up to the top, and we can also drive up, but the road going up was closed to make a new train/cable-car to take people up, so for the moment the buses only go up to where we started hiking.

the beginning of the hike

some way up
(I find that the flowers add a nice touch to the photo :P )

after about 40 minutes (note: I was already tired after 15-20 minutes)
You can see the parking lot from which we walked up...it's on the top-left quarter of the photo.

the view was already pretty good

another view

Only this left to reach the top!

Ten minutes later:

We're arriving! (finally...)

45 minutes? We took an hour to come up...because I had to stop to rest :P

the map of the summit

We came up by the Chemin des Muletiers, and went around the summit before going back down the same way. Col de Ceyssat is where there's the parking lot we drove to.

We turned left upon arriving at the top, going towards Panorama des Combrailles. Then we passed by the "vous êtes ici" star (where I took the photo :P ) and went around the edge of the summit to the other panoramic viewing points.

from the fork in the road just before arriving at the Panorama des Combrailles viewpoint

puy de Côme (the name is thanks to the information plaque at the viewpoint ;) )

from the Panorama des Combrailles viewpoint
(the next two photos were taken from the same place)

the TV/radio antenna at the summit

where we came up (on the right of those brown buildings)

along the way to the next panoramic viewing point

The one with the "red triangle" on it is the Puy de Pariou. That's another volcano that some people climb up, and there's a path going down from it that continues up to Puy de Dôme. Actually the "red triangle" expression comes from someone we overheard. I don't know whether Albin would have used the same expression to point it out to me...

from the Panorama de la chaîne des puys viewpoint

from the Panorama de Clermont-Ferrand viewpoint (do I really need to tell you which town is that? :P )

There was also the ruins of a temple at the summit.




The we went down...we managed it in 35 minutes this time, since we (I) didn't have to stop to rest.

See how high up we were? See the Col de Ceyssat parking lot?

So, all thanks to Albin, I conquered the Puy de Dôme. :D (no way I'm conquering Everest or Kinabalu, so this is good enough, eh? :P )

By the way, while writing this post I discovered that "Puy de Dôme" is the volcano, and "Puy-de-Dôme" is the department. I never knew that there was a difference...