Carrefour shopping day: Strawberries

Luscious strawberries, couldn't pass them up: 1 EUR/package for 500g (1 lb.) They're not as good as the ones you find in Japan, but they were a nice after-lunch dessert.

I've been eating oranges for the last few weeks, so it was nice to have a little something different.

Yesterday made soup like I always do and it really hit the spot: it's been rainy and windy these past few days.

McDonald's / Hip place to be: stunning interior design.


Hey cousin W: take a look at the McDonald's of the future: soft-seated couches, generous use of blacks and whites, a number of seats looking out on the street much like a Starbucks or juice bar.



The food is still the same but the design wins awards in my book. I spent two hours there with my group discussing our year-long school project. Before lunch hour hit and the place overflowed with teenagers, it was just heavenly.

Lebanese food in Lyon

To celebrate the end of classes for the last term a bunch of us got out and headed for Mont Liban, a Lebanese restaurant just above the touristy bistro Rue Merciere bistro alley (that we ate the guts sausage andouilette at). The address is at 19 Rue Merciere, but it's in an area that's semi-residential and not cobblestoned like Merciere.

One of our classmates is a Canadian of Lebanese origin and he thought up the idea to come here. Mind you it's not cheap, but because he spoke with the owner in Arabic, we were able to get away with spending only 20 EUR for appetizers, several kinds of roasted meat, and one bottle of Lebanese red wine for seven people.

I didn't have a chance to shoot a picture of the meat (grilled chicken, griled lamb, and grilled hamburger seasoned with herbs and spices), but I include here the appetizers. Hummus, baba ghanoush, some kind of dish made of lentils (tasting like Indian daal), spinach-filled dumplings (like samosas) and falafel. Also a deep-fried meat dish whose name I forgot ... all of it was very good, very fresh. Yes, and a plat of taboule made with fresh tomatoes, mint and herbs .... but with no couscous on the bottom as is often the case here in France. Perhaps no couscous because it is "authentic"?

Next time I go I'm gonna get a group of people together to try to order the 15 dish set (probably some small appetizers, some small portions of entrees, small portions of the desserts, and coffee/mint tea), for 19,50 EUR a person.

Heck, when it's barbecue season, might even try to make the stuff ourselves.

=======

Address:

Mont Liban. 19, rue Mercière, 69002 Lyon, France

Links:

Baba ganoush (grilled eggplant (like Japanese yaki-nasu) pureed and served with olive oil and lemon juice)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_ganoush

Taboule / tabbouleh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabbouleh

* Didn't realize it originated in Lebanon!

Markstrat Strategy Game / Last Class for this Term

From Monday through Thursday our class broke into groups and played a simulation game called MarkStrat, short for 'marketing strategy.' Under severe time constraints each team had to make decisions about which product line to develop and which products to sell (or supress) and whether or not to invest company money into R&D. The money here is play money but the numbers are real. Gone is all the abstract theory from the marketing and strategy classes: here you make decisions within numerical constraints. Bad results for the third quarter? Well, find your advertising and R&D budget halved. And so forth.

Our group started off in last place and for four quarters suffered miserably at the bottom of the heap. Then, finally, towards the end, we got our act together and actually ended up on top for the final period (though last in the overall standings). Happy to say that the product I was the product manager for "SYES" did extremely well in the last quarter, the level of advertising and sales support being enough to push it to grab a 10% share of the lucrative "high-earner" market.

Of course, after the game all of us were wiped out. Some of my colleagues went right home after the last class ended on the last day, but I had a meeting with my yearly project group and went to two hours of French class before heading home. And after that .... a Lebanese meal you'll read about in another entry ...

Two nights, two dinners out in Lyon (one not bad)

Last week Thursday and Friday was spent eating out. A rare occasion, since I normally don't like to eat out knowing the cost of what food costs. But Thursday was a get-together of classmates and, as in Japan, it's important to show that you're there. And to enjoy the time there. Friday was just the end of a long day (no, long week!) and it seemed just reasonable to eat where I did.

On Thursday, our class celebrated Chinese New Year at a Chinese restaurant here in Lyon not far from Place Bellecour. The decor was charming with old wooden furnishings and a host who must have been here for at least two generations of diners. (Apparently Catherine Denueve, Daniel Auteil and former Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto have dined here.)

Nevertheless, the food was passable for some, and utterly bizarre for other dishes. The dish on the left here was like a spring roll made with leeks and shrimp wrapped in chicken skin and filled with chicken meat, sort of like a French terrine. Quite tasty.

But the main dish! Peking duck was fine, but what was this dish served in a pineapple boat (sorry no picture here). Apparently restaurants here in Lyon serve that dish, called "poulet au ananas" or pineaple chicken, which is an ersatz version of sweet-and-sour chicken made with bland chicken breast, onions and vegetables, and of course pineapple. Even with hot rice and fried rice it was hard to feel satisfied.

Dessert was a fried banana and a fried apple but please let's not go there ...

Friday night was at a restaurant I had been meaning to go sometime, L'Entrecote, which (I'm not joking) has one item on its menu: steak and fries. The steak is sliced into thin pieces and covered with a marvelous butter-based sauce, something like the garlic-parsley butter that they use when making escargots Burgundy style, and that's served together with a heaping mountain of thinly-cut French fries (which are excellent with French mustard -- that's the way I choose to eat them, bear with me!)

For 16 EUR you get the steak and fries and a side salad. My Russian colleauge and I shared a bottle of decent Bordeaux red wine, 11 EUR (still a premium compared to what you pay for it at Carrefour, but when you eat out, not bad at all), and so were able to eat out for about 20 EUR, not so bad here in France.

The interior of this place is decorated in Scottish Tartan (?) fabrics, and the service is peculiar: it's like a fine dining restaurant using fast-food conventions. Waitresses take your order efficiently (besides desserts, you can only order one set menu), drop off your plates within several minutes and stop by to replenish your order of fries or bring you water as needed ... with none of the sour looks that wait staff give in other restaurants.

The odd thing about this restaurant chain is that there are only five shops in the entire chain, and none are in Paris. The one in Bordeaux evidently has lines out the door. For a steakhouse in France! Unbelievable!
========

LINK:
http://www.entrecote.fr/

And the menu (with the single set menu), here:

http://www.entrecote.fr/menu.htm

End of the Second Term is Approaching -- Work, work and more work

It has been a punishing March, with me taking three classes simultaneously: B2B marketing (the way companies market themselves when dealing with businesses as customers), services management (the strategic management of services), and corporate control (strategies that firms can take when deciding on their capital structure).

I spent maybe 15 hours this weekend on a B2B paper on Rakuten, perhaps the #1 online shopping site in Japan. If I wanted to I could have blown off this work until next week (the due date is actually the first week of April), but I wanted to put a good effort into it and ended up presenting it as sort of a case study: "how Rakuten provides value to its merchant (business) customers." Well, that wasn't exactly the title, but it was the way that I tried to depict Rakuten's value proposition to its (business) customers. Rakuten's easy-to-use customer interface (for those buying products and services from companies and travel service providers registered on Rakuten) certainly makes it an attractive target (Rakuten provides strong competition to amazon in Japan), but its activities supporting the companies who register on their site are also crucial key success factors.

From tomorrow (Monday) we start another four-day simulation game: Innovation Marketing. I'm not sure how it will work out, but there will be crazy deadlines and we'll have all sorts of deliverables to turn in. At the end of it we'll all be drained, as we usually are. Have to pace myself or I'm going to wipe myself out before next Monday's tests in finance (not one, but two!)

EURO 2008: France - Lithuania, 1-0

Injury-plagued France defeated Lithuania by the slimmest of margins and only in the 79th minute of the game. Until that time I and my friends gnawed on our fingernails as we watched one opportunity after another slip away.

Granted the pitch was in a terrible condition (it appeared like they were playing on a high school American football field that had seen better days), and the temperatures frigid, but still, here was the number four team in the world struggling to score and dominate its Baltic rival.

France still has a handful more matches to play in the year, against Italy, among others, and so every victory, even the ones against underdogs, is crucial. Any missed matches and France could find itself finishing out of the top two teams that go on to the playoffs.

DAYLIGHT Savings Time: An hour lost ...

I stayed up until two o'clock working on a paper for one of my classes, and when I looked at the time on my computer, suddenly, it had turned to 3:00 A.M.!

Having grown up in Hawaii and worked in Japan for the last umpteen years, I was aware of Daylight Savings Time but had never needed to switch back (or forward) the clocks.

In fall when we gained an hour I reset the clocks before I went to bed and woke up the next morning feeling great with an extra hour of sleep (one hour gained).

This time, though, as I was awake during the changeover (last Sunday in March) I can't hide the fact that it felt like I was cheated out of an hour of time. Before I knew it and had finished taking a shower, it was almost 4 A.M. (although only 3 A.M. actually!)

The good thing about this is that there will be an extra hour of daylight somewhere and the days are going to be pretty long from here on out. I remember from last year, having dinner while it was still bright, at 8 pm in the evening ...

Printemps du Cinema -- 18 - 20 March

Theaters across France celebrated the Printemps du Cinema, offering moviegoers a chance to see new films or revivals at a discounted price of 3,50EUR. With some places charging as much as 8 or 9 EUR for a film, these three days are truly a precious opportunity to see some first-run movies.

Even though it was a weekday, the theater were I went, CNP Terreaux (about fifteen minutes walk from my apartment), was full of people. I snuck into the showing of "Letters from Iwo Jima" right as it was starting, and had trouble finding a seat.

The film itself was beautiful and stunning, although there were couple parts that were needlessly melancholy. Without those parts, the film might've been perfect (as one movie reviewer had suggested), and if no one had told me otherwise I would never have guessed Clint Eastwood as a director.

The film itself is NOT revisionist history of the Japanese fighting on Iwo Jima, but it does humanize the battle on both sides. Families on both sides have no other wish than to have their sons and husbands come home safely from the war.

Beautifully filmed and all in Japanese (I could follow almost all of it, although I kept reading the French translations on screen and got confused), this movie was worth viewing, although for those of you who don't like the gore of war movies, be forewarned: there are some gruesome scenes, just as in Private Ryan.

SNOW! (Flurries, only...)

Last week, we enjoyed absolutely balmy weather during the week, but towards the weekend and at the beginning of this week, a cold front came over Lyon and yesterday we had flurries and at one point, a shower of hail in the middle of the day.

Even today, the temperature may have dipped below freezing -- waiting outside for the bus was colder than usual.

Not much longer to wait though: spring's almost here!

Local bus decorated with iPod advertising

Nothing here to really comment on, but on some of the TCL buses here in Lyon they've experimented with advertising that covers the whole bus. IKEA has spread its decorations all over one bus, while here, Apple covers a bus in plastic with ads for its Mp3 iPod music player.

It's a good source of extra advertising revenue for the public transport system, but is it safe? I'm not convinced.

LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey) and a private fund purchase 10% of Carrefour!

Luxury brand group LVMH and a private investment group took a 10% stake in Carrefour yesterday, creating some havoc in the financial markets. I wasn't quite sure about the reasoning for taking a stake, but someone explained that it was to help the LVMH have a source of cash through Carrefour's supermarket operations, but that it was also to bring its expertise in strategy to the underperforming supermarket chain. A couple of French people told me that it was actually encouraging to see LVMH take a stake in Carrefour, because it suggested that they would try to improve it and that it was curently undervalued.

What a week it's been.

It's Thursday night, changing to Friday morning as I write this. What a busy week it's been, as I'm attempting to be one of the few students to take three "gateway" courses simultaneously. Not only is it a logistical nightmare, forcing me to stay at school from morning to evening, the workload is just something else ...

The three courses are Finance: Corporate Control (how to coordinate corporate strategy using the financial tools of debt and equity), B2B (Business to Business Marketing), and Strategic Services Management.

B2B is certainly important but it's not really quite what I'm interested in. It talks about how to sell goods between companies and not to consumers. Services on the other hand, has been interesting and has helped me to see how service providers design and structure their services. McDo often comes up in discussion, but also other companies in the service sector. I'd love to work as a consultant in this area someday ... always find a better way to do things ...

Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I have off, but I will be working to get ahead on my homework and stuff like that. I'm going to sleep in late and then go rations hunting in the afternoon. Used up all the food in my fridge. Well, not quite, but ...yes, I've actually made rice twice for lunch this week since I didn't have a full hour for my lunch break and needed to eat something better than the bland sandwiches for sale at the snack bar. (The cafeteria where I often ate in the fall is a ten minute walk and I wouldn't make it in time for my afternoon classes if I went there).

Today (Thursday) was just incredibly busy. Finance in the morning, a hurried lunch, then Services Management in the afternoon, followed by a one-hour conference with my Services teacher, and then after that a two hour presentation by a headhunter from Lyon (who gave great advice about self-presentation and being proactive in the job search process.)

Got home at about 8:30 and decided nevertheless to make soup from scratch, so I made it with bacon, onions, potatoes, carrots, canned tomatoes. Make sure I ate some veggies. Will get more when I got out shopping later on.

French version of Drano works like a charm

My washbasin was not draining properly (probably because of a half year's worth of hairballs and undissolved soap trapped in the pipes), and so on the advice of my classmates, I bought the French equivalent of Drano.

I poured half of it into the pipes (it reeked of bleach!) and let it burn its way through the pipes until the next day. The next day when I turned on the water to test it -- whoosh! the water flowed down the narrow drain as if it had never been clogged.

Funny how inexpensive some solutions can be. Remember the clogged shower drain? A 2 Euro plunger solved it. This Drano equivalent? 0,52 EUR. Less than a dollar. What a great value for piece of mind.

Tarte Flambee: Alsatian pizza on sale at the supermarket

As I've been writing in many of the journals, I can find the wildest things at Carrefour. Just the other day my Russian friend invited some friends over for a card game and I brought over this thin-crusted pizza, tarte flambee (or flammekuche in German), which you bake fresh in your oven.

It's a think pastry crust on which you put fresh cream, onions, cheese, and lardons (chewy, but not overly salty bacon) on top.

I've written about this before in the past and in fact our family tried this in Frankfurt, I believe. It's light and filling and the mix of the onions, with the cream, the cheese and the fatty bacon ... enough richness to last you for a week!

Champions League: Lyon loses 2-0 to Rome



Police were stationed outside of Place Bellecour before the game tonight between Rome and OL. Evidently some fans have made their way over from Rome for the trip and just to prevent any sort of violence between fans of opposing teams ....

Lyon lost to Rome at home, in a match where they played miserably. Nothing seemed to work right for the team at home, where they are generally invincible and had already had an inspired 2-0 victory over giants Real Madrid early last fall.

The sports newspapers are talking about the end of an era: OL is almost sure to win its sixth consecutive league championship, but with key players in the midfield set to retire within one or two years, it may be a while before Lyon has enough firepower to hold its own past the quarterfinals of the Champions League, where the best teams throughout Europe play.

As good as they are, I (as a fan) couldn't help but feel the big gap in the quality of play between the Italian league and the French league.

There's a league match this weekend to boost morale with arch-rival Marseille. I'll be going to that on Sunday night, but believe me, it won't ease the fans' disappointment of Lyon's early exit from the Champions League.

Dinnertime: rice (long-grain, and pilaf-style)

I don't know why I felt like eating rice today, but I did, and I didn't want to just eat steamed rice. I wanted to cook it in a frypan, just like when you make paella or rice-a-roni.

So I headed over to the supermarket and picked up a 1kg bag of rice for about 0,67 EUR or about $1. It's not cheap, but after I found out after cooking it how easy it was to make (and that it might actually make a good thing to take for lunch) I expect to buy it more often in the future. (Incidentally, the short-grain Japanese-style rice that I buy in Chinatown is about 1,20 EUR a kilogram, so the long-grain stuff is cheaper.)

Preparation:

1) Pan-fry 100g bacon (lardons) and one minced onion. Once cooked, set aside.

2) Saute raw rice kernels in fry pan using butter or olive oil until they turn clear. Once they turn translucent, add water (or chicken broth if you want to give the rice more flavor.) -- I used one-cup of short-grain rice to two-cups of water.

3) Cover and let it cook for about 15 minutes over low heat.

You now have a nice side dish! My main dish was leftover homemade vegetable soup, but I wanted to eat rice, so I made it and saved half for tomorrow. I still have another pack of kebab meat, maybe that will be for tomorrow's lunch?

Still working on the cable company ...

I still haven't received a refund for the overcharges of the last few months. Stopped in their offices again this afternoon, and they checked the status of the reimbursment. "In progress ..." Well, that's what they told me the last time!

Fortunately, the woman working there this time was the month who had helped me out greatly a month ago to straighten up the mess in the first place: the woman who deleted my bank account information from the other customer's information and the one who had signalled to the accounting department to issue a reimbursement.

She told me today that she would "push" my case again to get it processed through the system. I'm still waiting, but remain optimistic.

Just like in Japan, it doesn't make sense to get worked up over things you can't really change. Try your best and then let the system work it out. Hopefully you'll get what you want in the long run ...

KEBAB Sandwiches in the safety of your own home!

Thursday's newspapers ran stories about the unsanitary conditions in the French bakeries and doner kebab sandwich shops that exist here in France.

Before I came here a half a year ago, I too felt uneasy with the unrefrigerated sandwiches, raw and cooked ingredients stored side by side, and the other what we would call violations in the US that I saw on a regular basis.

Here's a copy of the article, in French, if you want to run it through a translation software on some home page somehwere (Google translation or babelfish) ... just be sure you don't read what it says before a meal.

http://www.rtl.fr/imprimer.asp?dicid=517393&origine=/info/article.asp

Just the same, I've gotten used to the conditions and my body seems to hold up all right. If you live here long enough and ride on the less-than-pristine buses and metro everyday your body automatically builds up a kind of immunity to all sorts of things ...

...

With that said, I found a neat new thing at Carrefour.

Kebab sandwich style meat made from turkey meat. During the promotion they're offering right now you can get one pack for 1,50 EUR and the second for half-price, so you get the equivalent of one or one and a half kebab sandwiches in each pack.

Of course it's not quite the same as eating it at the shop (watching them smear the white sauce and spicy harissa sauce on the toasted bread) but I found a way of getting close. I threw the meat and a cut-up onion into the frypan, toasted some brown bread (the kind I always eat for breakfast) and had it for lunch, with a side order of salad (pre-packaged lettuce and greens) and an orange.

It's more economical and the taste isn't so bad: I mean, well, it was red (probably from paprika) and tasted closer to tandoori than the kebab shop meats, but it was close enough and a nice, filling lunch.

Finance Test went smoothly on Thursday

I had my first "controle" of the term on Thursday, a three-hour exam on finance, involving company valuation. The first three problems went smoothly and I gave my best effort on the fifth problem, but I could simply not get problem four to give me a satisfactory result.

Nevertheless, with a passing grade at 10/20, I feel confident that I will be able to pass the course on the first try.

Others in my class were less optimistic after the test. Finance is supposed to be one of the harder majors or specializations here, but to me, because it deals with concrete numbers it's easier to manage than marketing or strategy, which takes into account so many more variables and things to consider.

Fortunately for my services management and B2B (business to business) marketing course this term I only have to complete several papers in lieu of final exams. It'll be a busy March, but that's what I chose to sign on to.