Arriving in Jülich

Hello all! This is my first contribution to this blog, and I will be sharing my experiences regularly up until the end of August. I am a 3^rd year undergraduate student in Environmental Chemistry at McGill University in Montreal. But for the last 4 months I have been doing a semester studying abroad at Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in the center of Paris. I very much look forward to turning a new page and spending the next 3 months in a calmer atmosphere. No more crowded metro trains, the stink of sulphur dioxide that haunts all metropolitan cities, the buzzing of metros, trains, buses and sporadic mass protests that keep you awake on a seemingly peaceful afternoon, just when you need that nap the most. There is also leaving all that good stuff – world-class exhibitions, friends and familiar faces, the feeling that you’re part of something…but right now, I’m just very excited about starting a new life here!!

For the next three months, I will be working at the Forschungszentrum (birthplace of the famous IBM supercomputer, on left, picture taken from the website of InSiDE), doing research on the fate of atrazine (a widely applied herbicide) in soils. I’m a huge environment fanatic so I was very glad to discover that many laboratories at the Forschungszentrum focus on developing sustainable sources of energy and many other topics related to the environment!

I arrived in Aachen last Sunday, and immediately moved into my flat in the town of Jülich, about half an hour away by car. The town of Jülich is tiny compared to anywhere I’ve lived in before, and you can fully appreciate how small is it by underlining the fact that there is not a single movie theatre around, let alone one that plays movies in English. But, what’s great about this area is that the rent is cheap (for me at least), there’s plenty of free space, fresh air, and the people are incredibly friendly even if I can only communicate by grunting and pointing. I was lucky to arrive in Jülich right before a long weekend. Instead of travelling to nearby cities, I reluctantly decided to stay at home and work on a project I still needed to finish for school. This meant four full days of procrastination, generally pacing around the house, and dealing with recurrent headaches as I rarely left the building. No, I did not feel like a worthy adventurer this weekend. But I did try one sunny afternoon to chase down the wind turbines that I could see spinning in the distance from my balcony. My mission failed in the end, but this spontaneous bike excursion brought me to downtown Jülich, which was a lot of fun to explore.

Before ending this post, here’s a good line from the movie, “L’auberge espagnole” after the main character, Xavier, arrives in Barcelona for the first time. I couldn’t have said it any better:

When you first arrive in a new city, nothing makes sense. Everything’s unknown, virgin… After you’ve lived here, walked these streets, you’ll know them inside out. You’ll know these people. Once you’ve lived here, crossed this street 10, 20, 1000 times… it’ll belong to you because you’ve lived there.