I got back from France couple days ago, and my trip was absolutely exhausting. I arrived Montpellier around 6pm on 11/19, and of course, I was pretty much exhausted from all flights. First thing I noticed when I arrived at the airport was that I smelled smoke inside of the building. Yeah, you can smoke inside of the airport in France! How crazy is that!! French people just smoke wherever, seriously, it was gross. One of the post doc in the lab is actually went to the school in Montpellier, so he picked us up at the airport. When I got to the hotel, I wanted to just take a shower and sleep, but of course, that was not the case. I ended up going to the party and went to the club and stayed until 5am in the morning. I was asked to go to another club, but I refused to go because I was drunk and tired!! Day 1 was pretty rough! Anyway, the conference was actually good. Much better than I was expected. It was really cool to see many professors I only knew from their publications. After the conference was over, I had couple free days before I went back to the U.S., so we went to Avignon. The post doc from France told me that I should go to Avignon because it’s cool town, and actuall he is from there. He was staying his parents’ house, so he was able to show us around the town. The pope used to live in Avignon, and the pope’s palace was pretty cool. It was very fancy!

I guess my trip to France was better than I thought, but I am not sure if I want to go back there. One thing bothers me most is that I could not find regular coffee in France. I mean every time I ordered coffee, I got espresso. Yeah, French people drink espresso all the time. I do like espresso, but it’s too tiny!! I wanted to drink whole pot of coffee!! Anyway, that was my trip.