France ..The few good exp. of me

I have landed here at Charles de Gaulle Airport ,Paris and there it comes ..my language problem has already started. I went to a recption kinda desk just at the "Sortie" and i have been continously asking many questions to the lady over there and suddenly her expression has changed , and then i remembered that am in a stupid nation where people doesn`t speak english . After that i just said " anglais " ...pronounced as laa-ngle ..then she advised me to shift over to a side-by counter...i was very much amused on seeing some different kind of looks on her face (probably she might be scanning me ).After that finally i have managed to enquire about the TGV station at CDG. I have bought a ticket from CDG to Gare Part-Dieu for 42 euros (this is infact huge amount :) ) and then proceeded to the platform along with my heavy bag and the large back-pack. The first thing i did in the airport is to search for some daaru , so that i can enjoy myself in the train but i dint get any time to go to the appropriate shop to buy one :( . Then after boarding the train , i was lucky enough to get a seat beside an innocently looking female !!. She is almost silent for the first half an hour . I was impatient and thought that it aould be better to initiate some discussion , but didnt get a chance at that very instant. She is calmly solving the Mots fletch( French Crossword) in a local newspaper. Then below i could see an empty Sudoku . Ahh now i got a reason to speak something. I have started to enquire about her . She can barely speak english but she used to think a lot before framing one english sentence :) . From then on our discussion was very peaceful and it was on varied issues.After some time, I have grabbed the newspaper from her and started solving sudoku. I told her to remind me when the train stops in Lyon. Then i got down at part-dieu and we walked all the way to TOTEM, the place i am staying right now.
Then on the days became usual and the prof, Dr. Fabrice Marchal is an excellent person to work with. We used to have lunch and dinner together almost daily. I was always interested and got amused with his qoutes. For ex, i state some below :).
* " Several years before when a researcher used to propose a problem and he solves it using some mathematical techniques he wasnt aware of the practical problems that might be encountered, but when i solve those practical problems using the much developed technology and taking advantage of the programming resources , they say that am not doing research and am simply making one more application of already done research"
*"I am a budding computer scientist and i wander on the boundaries of computer science and transportation engineering . This is the reason why journal editors make my life difficult in getting publications even though am in some editorial boards :P"
*" i cannot get local french people to work under me because they are always fascinated to go abroad , so they really dont listen to the local system :)"
* " I was not born in france and that makes me happy because french are generally stupid :)"
* " I know vamsi that the things i say now are infact some propositions for our future collabaration and that they are very far away , but since we both dont have ne work to do sitting idly in a restaurant its better to discuss about our future prospects"
*" If i pay you less CNRS asks ahy are you paying very less amonuts , if i pay you more then also they will ask the reason. I simply dont understand the people here :)"
Like this there are so many i could qoute only a few which i remember exactly . I will share more of my actual experiences with all you people when i get sufficient time. I have written this post very arbitrarily without any plan in mind. Anyway good luck :).

F....igh...T!!!

Well the time gap between my last post and this one explains it all :).To begin with if i could have kept count of my nightouts in this yr till now, then maybe atleast it could serve as a guidance to my juniors who are ambitious of Foriegn internship and is seriously a measure of the amount of frustration that one have to undergo during this process. For those who wanted to be involved in this kinda process i would only say " Be prepared for everything!!...you might be successful within a week or it can eat up the whole two semesters ".one of my wingies have became frustrated on just watching me continously for a week and gave me a single advise-"Get a LIFE Dude!!".I hope that explains to some extent.

The process began like this. I have contacted many seniors regarding the information on how and when to mail the professors abroad.I had undergone numerous funda sessions for this after which i was too desperate to land in a very good offer. The first and foremost thing that one have to take care is to write a very good cover letter. It must communicate your interests and willingness to pursue a decent project. At the very onset choosing the field of interest is little bit tough job. In my case its a confused altercation between structural and transportation. I couldnt actually decide which field to choose. I picked up randomly and sent the mails in a very random manner. This is infact obviously wrong thing to do. Unless one sticks to a single topic , he/she will face tough time while writing the resume or cover letter . The whole process will be disorganised.After the topic or field is chosen then comes the main part where a lot of hard work and he/she should be patient enough to search for the appropriate universities and the profs' web pages. The best resource that i have found is www.findaschool.org where all the univiersities and institutes are listed according to the country. The first task is the completion of the possible universities/countries that were listed in this site. One could get a count of 400-500 at the near completion. If you are lucky enough you could land with a very good offer even though one could not count on only one resource. If you are unlucky then proceed to the journal sites where search option is available. you can search for all the published papers in the last 5-6 years in the chosen field. Clicking on the abstract will get you the authors contact information, just copy the id and mail him. There are as well many numerous resources like searching for the research groups , ranking sites, etc.. The mail should be sent within a specified time depending on the location. For ex: in case of europe you can start mailing after around 1 pm. The reason is that the profs so many requests or mails and his inbox will be completely piled up with such kinda mails. There might be a high probability that he wont read your request. So if you mail him during the office hours , the request will be fresh in his inbox. The other major problem with europe is that you need a translator to translate the webpages. For this www.google.com/translate is one of the best options or one could go for babelfish by altavista.com . This is the whole process very briefly and there might be exceptions as well. Finally i couldnt be successful even after i had kept enuf fight..a bunch of 1100 mails that are there in my gmail account. My last two hopes are the offers from France and china..well lets see god forbid i might be offered a decent intern next year...My present thoughts are completely undecided , confused and frustrated..sometimes i felt like as is the whole fight is wasted :(