“Well, I guess we’ll have to meet in Switzerland”

I haven’t posted in a few days, but I should be excused. It has been quite a busy few days. First of all, I worked all day Saturday and Sunday so that we could a different paper back to the editor, this time to SIAM Review. (SIAM is the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.) Most importantly, I had to plan for the Super Bowl, which was on TV here from 11:00pm – 3:30 am. The Grey Horse wouldn’t be open at those hours. More about the Super Bowl in a subsequent post.

Then, on Monday, you see I had to sleep for most of the day after the Super Bowl. When we lived in Germany, the US Army always gave us Super Bowl Monday off. I was pretty sure no one would care (or even notice) if I took most of Super Bowl Monday off. Nonetheless, I was in the office by half noon (12:30) working some more on the SIAM Review article and preparing for a very important meeting this week.

You see, this week I am at a brainstorming meeting. We are meeting to discuss research ideas and directions for analysis dictionary learning. I know nothing about this subject, but was invited along. The hard part is, during the last meeting, when discussing the venue for the next meeting, they were hoping for something more interesting than London. One of the main guys on the grant suggested he host the meeting near Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. Someone asked precisely where, and he said a ski lodge. At that point, the head of the grant announced, “Well, I guess we’ll have to meet in Switzerland,” and they settled on the mountain resort town of Villars, Switzerland. If it wasn’t already dark here, I’d take a picture of the view out my window. So, I’m in Switzerland after two planes and two trains and many hours of travel. The venue for this meeting is, well, how should I describe this… ridiculous; it’s Switzerland.

Best part of French speaking areas: saying my own name. Every time I say my name, someone looks at a list, and then looks at me like I am stupid. They ask me again, I say my name “Jeff Blanchard (blan-churd)”, and they look over the list a second time. Now they’re convinced I am not on the list, so I either point to my name or say it the way they read it.

“Oh,” they say, “zshe freigh blaughn –shawd.”

I reply, “Yes, indeed, Jeff Blanchard.”

One time, at a hotel in San Malo, France, this exchange took place. Then, the woman behind the counter laughs a bit, takes out her wallet, shows me an ID card on which her last name was Blanchard. Of course, she pronounced it blaughn shawd. Every morning, she made a big deal announcing my French name the first time I saw her. (That was funny. Here, they seem to just think I am so stupid I don’t know my own name.)