Last day in Paris

So it's the last night in Paris, and we're going out for a fancy dinner in a few minutes. It'll be a nice change of pace, since the cafeteria food we get on the campus is really quite disgusting. But to totally disprove that we've been eating a lot of small quantities of shit food in the last two weeks, here's some nice pictures:

This is me eating salted caramel ice cream at the best ice creamery in Paris, followed by us (Richard, then Madeleine and Charlotte, then me) eating falafal at the best falafal place in Paris. Well, the best when the long line is in front of them, apparently sometimes the one accross the street is "the best." But the falafal was really, really awesome, roasted eggplants and spicy sauce in addition to what you would expect (cucumbers, tzatziki, cabbage, etc). The ice cream was awesome too.

Today we went to the Grignon farm, a working research farm which is part of the Agro Paris Tech university, which I think they said is the oldest agricultural university in France. The farm looks for ways for conventional farms to lower their environmental impact, such as no-till farming, rotating in legumes (to fix nitrogen), or growing miscanthus on marginal land to produce energy. It's not organic farming, and looks to help farmers improve their methods using methods which are low burdens on the farmer. Organic farming is complex, and is quite a commitment for conventional farmers, which are 90% of the farmers in France.

We pitched ideas this week to form teams for business plan formation; I pitched stealingthe 1 Block Off the Grid idea and expanding it to include more energy technologies, and also energy efficiency. I think there is interest in making it happen. 50 people and 50 ideas, it'll be a strange scramble to form teams by Monday. Some of the ideas are really good, some not as good; some have been developed quite a bit, some were developed the day before the pitch. There is a strange contrast between the business folks and the science folks - the science folks can be such communists! Lots of support for things like the government rationing carbon emissions, and doing just about everything else to fix the climate mess. I didn't think that was the point of a program on entrepreneurship. Anyways, I have to get ready for dinner.

I just realized I never published this, I was going to add to it but I already started a new post. We have very little time for anything - they are giving us way to many lectures, which we basically do from 8am to 6pm every day, and are expected to be writing a business plan and doing other reading apart from that. Even the lectures are too packed time-wise for us to have good Q&A sessions, because we're always behind, which is a shame, because we're a smart group of people with great experience and we have good questions!