First week in Nice

The first week in Nice was mainly filled with robot conferencing. I gave my 20-min talk on a new reactive obstacle avoidance method early in the conference and it went pretty well. I met a lot of fun people doing cool research and learned a lot!

About half these pictures are from right after I arrived, I gave myself a day before the conference started to get acclimated. I took two long walks around to keep myself awake. One lesson I'd hard but had to learn for myself is that shops in France are closed most of the time. I figured the supermarket would be open, but nothing was open Sunday afternoon when I tried to get some bread ... and then many of the smaller specialized shops don't open on Mondays, close for 3 hours for lunch, etc. I figured it out eventually and managed to enjoy several picnic lunch/dinners of fresh bread, cheese, meat and olives!

The ~10 words of French I started with got me surprisingly far before Danielle arrived ... I managed to order things in most shops without resorting to English, though I was usually stuck if they asked me questions. I definitely had to add up what I was buying in my head the first week though as it took a while to understand numbers, though fortunately all prices in France include tax (and service at restaurants too) which is such a sensible system. By the end of the two weeks I could mostly follow conversations between Danielle and our lovely French hosts which was neat.

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