02.25.2008
Day Nine:
Brice is my friend

Back to the grind. You know going back to work in any country sucks, no matter what time zone you are in. I spent most of the morning trying to get in to Airbus, evidently someone thought that I would have a ‘permanent’ Airbus badge by now, but it doesn’t look like that’s gonna happen on this trip. So I never got into the dungeon, which was no sweat off my back, the Moog TF facility is a much nicer environment, even though its pretty bare bones.

The day at Moog TF went by rather quickly, but you know the more time I spend there, the more cozy it feels, even though it’s really just a big shed. Evidently, they are going to remodel the whole place to put a second story in, and make it more of an engineering facility than a storage facility of crap. But right now, the facility is pretty bare bones, there are no cubicles, just tables and chairs and internet connections all over the place, a few white boards here and there, but nothing fancy. At least they have free coffee!

Oh, did I ever mention how small the coffee is here? Its very, very small, it’s like a shot of coffee, and this machine makes it in this super small cup, almost the size of the kind you gargle with, it’s pretty useless. However, the strength of the coffee makes it so that you probably couldn’t handle drinking more of it in one sitting without getting the shakes. I’ll grab a picture when I can get away from these guys for a minute.

Since I ended up staying at work fairly late, about 7:15pm here, one of the younger mechanical guys that works for Moog took me out to dinner close to his apartment, which is in the city of Blagnac, which is where the airport is located. So I followed Brice, (pronounced Bris) down to the middle of Blagnac, but some of the places were closed, so we went over to this French pub place instead.

The place is called Caverne Heidelberg and they had some pretty traditional French food on their menu. I am starting to recognize a lot of the dishes: Magret de Canard, Cassoulet, something de Boeuf….etc. I decided finally to try some cassoulet, and it was really good. Cassoulet is this big kind of soup thing, but not really soup, but yea. It’s basically a tofu stone bowl filled with beans, sausage, and various kinds of meat. The one I got had sausage and pork in it, and it was really, really good. The beans were really soft, but tasty in is own broth type thing, the sausage had good flavor too and the pork was really tender and still on the bone.

Mix this with a few beers and the night was pretty complete. Bris is a really nice guy and I enjoyed hanging out with him. He’s one of the young people at the Moog TF, which is pretty young in existence overall. He grew up in Paris, and has traveled for work to Australia, Germany and some other countries during school for internships and what not, so he’s very cultured, and speaks English fairly well. So it was a nice change from the old crusty guys I’ve been rolling with so far.