A Return to Metz

For a week, over Thanksgiving, Susie and I returned to Metz to see friends and to get a refresher of Lorraine cuisine. Over the next several posts, I'll explain what's new in Metz, tour an exposition on the Nazi expulsions of residents of the Moselle in World War II, note the commemoration of Metz's liberation 66 years ago, visit the Place de la Republique, tour St Julien-les-Metz, share a few details that caught my eye, and wrap up with some memories of the three communities in Metz with whom Susie and I are entwined.

Back in the US

Susie and I are back in the US of A, in the Continental Airlines President's Club in Houston, actually. The eleven-hour flight was actually pleasant, and I was able to get some work done on the plane.

I was expecting some degree of culture shock, but so far nothing to report. Maybe it's because, across the world, airports are such artificial environments that there's not much left to shock, culturally speaking.

As I wrote the other day, I'll continue to blog about our travels until I'm caught up. This will probably take a couple of weeks.

Nearly on Our Way Home

Our plane leaves from Paris on Saturday morning, so we're starting our way home on Friday. It's been a great few months, full of professional growth thanks to Georgia Tech-Lorraine, of satisfaction of teaching thanks to the students here, of discovering and learning about Metz and Lorraine, and of exploring much of northern France.

Susie and I have spent the last two days here in Metz, repacking and saying goodbyes. As you can tell from the blog postings over the last few days, we had worked our way east from Brittany. We spent two nights in Rouen and two nights in Rheims. I was able to post the blog entries for Rouen, and I hope to get some of the blog entries on Rheims posted before we leave. However, that will still leave a lot left unblogged, and I'm planning to post these items after we get back to El Paso. The remaining material includes villages in the Champagne region, our trip to Malta for the LREC 2010 conference, our visit here in Metz to the Robert Schumann museum (the father of the European Union, not the composer), more details of Paris, much more on Rheims, and some reflections on contrasts of daily life in Metz and El Paso.

So please check back over the course of the next few weeks for these postings.

Travel Plans, Blog Plans

In the last few days Susie and I have been to Malta and back. I presented a paper at an interesting workshop on multimodal corpora, part of the LREC 2010 conference. I've still got a number of items to post about Paris, so I'll get to those first before I write about Malta. Moreover, on Friday we're heading for a week in the Alps; I'm hoping to take alpine hikes and work on some journal papers. We'll be in a the countryside near a hamlet some distance from Annecy, so I figure that Internet connectivity could be sporadic. As a result, postings on the blog may be bursty--if you see a new post, please work your way back through the succession of new items.

The Scramble

We're in the scramble of getting ready to go. As the time to departure grows shorter the lists of things to do seems to grow longer. We've completed a trial run at packing, arranged for train tickets in France, and are hoping to dodge any strikes while we travel.

Although I lived in France on and off for six years, I never visited Lorraine. Susie and I have learned a little about Metz, including--remarkably enough--that there's a restaurant called "Le Tex Mex." We're looking forward to catching our breaths and and learning about life in la region Messine through time and exploration.

Welcome to the Dispatch

My wife Susie and I will be spending much of the spring of 2010 in Metz, France. This blog will report my experiences and observations, much in same way that my "Dispatch from Toulouse" covered my years in the south of France.

Susie is blogging about our adventure, too, at Susie In France.

We expect to start our stay in mid-February. In the meantime, we'll have a short visit to Metz starting December 23 to get to set things up and start to get to know people.