Keys, cards,...

I finally got an RFID badge for the doors to our lab today: I applied on the day I arrived but it seems to take them a while. This is good: in order to feel at home in a foreign country, you need to get all of the keys and cards you can get hold of. I now have a Carte Bleu for paying for things, a pass Navigo for Velibs and for the transport system, and I will soon have my annual pass. This is another slightly irritating aspect of the Paris transport system: for an annual pass they have to issue you another card, you can't just have it added to your pass Navigo like the London Oyster card system. Add to that the fact that you can't put credit for ordinary tickets on a Navigo, and you have to start monthly passes on the first day of the month, and you can see that the Navigo pass is a distinctly second-rate version of the Oyster card. I don't know why they didn't just buy the Oystercard system. It irritates me when things (particularly things involving IT systems) are crap when they could so easily have been so much better.

Shopping

This weekend we are going to go shopping for goodies to take to Jersey for Christmas. They have a Christmas market in the nearby municipal hall which should be worth checking out. I also need to buy some more conventional presents. I expect BHV will be as Rammed as the end of Ramadan in Ramallah, so we might have to stick to the local boutiques.