Alvin’s Diary

Internship London > Culture > And you’d like to sit while eating ?

[ Version française ]

While the Tube [FR] is one of the worst public equipment in London, the meals served au déjeuner don’t really help to regain prestige.

English people are known to eat almost nothing at lunch, and to make up for it in the evening. I don’t really know what this is all about at supper, but in the day there is no canteen, no restaurant with a plat du jour (today’s specials) — no restaurant at all, by the way. The meals, consistently* to take away, are grabbed, literally, and sometimes they even offer a fork (!) Then, the employees can just go to a park when it’s not raining (almost never ;-) ), or go back to their firm: it’s how, between 11.30 and 13.00, it’s lunch time at the fourth floor, and probably everywhere, embroiling chicken, salad, crisps, and coffee smells.

English people try to eat equilibrated food: sandwiches with salad, one or two peas in the noodles for the Chinese meals, and voilà. Some dare to move to a snack - we can’t call it with other words - to sit and eat a traditional Fish and Chips (see picture, here to take away) - probably just tourists.

What’s missing, actually, is the notion of Today’s specials (Plat du Jour), where you can eat at a reasonable price (less than 4£=6eur for a sandwich…), something different each day, where you can rest and discuss with colleagues or friends: where you can try to make the most of your meal, instead of just eating to live.

Real “restaurants” like we know them just don’t exist: some pizzerias, some sit-snacks, here and there, some chic restaurants; for the average businessman, it will be a chicken-and-chips, to take away please.

* Consistently: systématiquement

Internship London > Culture > Buy, sell !

[ Version française ]

Far from being a post about the stock exchange (favorite subject of my firm), let’s be for some time very light and talk about the commercial life in London.

Like Paris, the city blends big supermarkets and shopping precincts*, daring Tesco’s (like Intermarchés) in the city, without neglecting the corner shops**.

A thematic organization
In France, every Carrefour provides everything you could need : meals, meat, clothes, fruits, computers, paper, stationery***, quick-frozen meals, canned food, CDs, books, dishes, furniture, etc. As for Tesco, you will just find food in it : to buy your pen, you’ll have to visit another shop.

Each and every retail chain has then its own domain : you’ll have to adapt. The biggest ones dare to try automatic checkouts, more developed than in France (3D, checks, cash, CB), and even checkouts with just enough space to put the bar-code reader and the bags, like in Germany. Note that they haven’t yet stopped to give plastic bags!

The vital caddie is available, but in self-service: you don’t have to give a deposit to use it, like in France. Everything is about confidence — and CCTV****.

A real (French) diversity of products
French people don’t really envy English gastronomy (see one of my future posts on this subject). It’s perhaps one of the reasons why it is possible to find such a big number of French products, like:

• Water: Volvic, Cristaline, …
• The French Baguette, French Brioche and French Croissants,
• Jam from “Bonne-Maman”,
• Cleaning products (as strange as it seems),
• Beauty products (Yves-Rocher),
• Cereals

… and really more than that ;-)

Some products are however unobtainable: chocolate (they just have chocolate to bake with - difficult to deal with that, especially for me…), syrup (you know, the thing with added water, not juice of the fruit cans!), and so on.

Eat it quickly, why not this evening?
If you buy food, it’s in order to eat it, isn’t it? So, go home, and eat: you’ll not have enough time to wait before the expiration date, from three days to one week. Even fruits have a limit; for anglo-saxon bread[5], you’ll have three days (France: two weeks); for meat, one day (France: up to one week); for milk, one week (France: some months, closed[6]). Really enjoyable… especially without freezer!

* shopping precincts : zones commerciales
** corner shops : commerces de proximité
*** stationery : fournitures de bureau
**** CCTV : Caméras de surveillance
[5] This bread is our “Pain de mie”
[6] Here, the milk is pasteurized, in France it’s upérisé.

[ Article traduit du français ]

Internship London > Life > Life in Poland

[ Version française ]
The French edition of this post is probably more constructed and fluent

Poland entered in the European Union in May 2004. The use of “enter in” can be seen figuratively, of course, but also literally: Polish people entered in the EU, more accurately in the UK.

Three years have thus been enough to transform our French plombier polonais in a real Englishman - but not English speaker.

Et alors? Just going straight forward: it’s about the multicultural environment we spoke about some posts before. Although the “official (internal) talk” is in English, the unofficial interns language is the one of the majority.

And when this majority chooses the Polish language, to talk about IT or to chat about the last holidays of someone, there are just two lost fellows: a Spanish one, and a French one. And what’s two on more than twenty people?

Just imagine that even the restaurants (say — the places to eat at lunch, we would never call that a restaurant in French) are carefully chosen in order to find Polish waitress.

Strange sensation of belonging to a group — but another one, of forcing everyone to talk sometimes in English, with me and between them, what’s kind of irritating, as much for them as for me.

Sensation of being required to answer to every sentence expressed in English, even when the subject does not directly concern or interest us. Just for the effort.

Desire to do the same, to pick the first French guy of the firm, to exchange words that we’ll be the only ones to understand : to show that it’s the same for us, that we exist, by, for, through our mother tongue.

How to get used to a language, when we have to ask for its use? Should we really stretch to search another group, select a real-native-Englishmen, to be internally convinced that (s)he will never divert to another language, even if we slow down this native fellow, with our slow and slightly-constructed sentences?

Fortunately, the international internships are not compulsory in Poland: I would have been disappointed about the (un)fairness of it…

[ Article traduit du français ]

Internship London > Culture > Bloomberg (presentation)

[ Version française ]

Poland, Spain, UK, France: the Interns 2007 team is a mix of a lot of different cultural influences, making this internship more and more international. Or how to discover a lot of countries in only one trip !

The first days of this internship have mostly been composed of lectures and presentations - yeah, lectures, like the ones given in our preferred university - to know everything about Bloomberg, at a technical and human point of view.

For the human part, the firm preens itself on* having less hierarchical stratums than any other company. If everyone indeed has a manager / mentor, up to the big-boss in the US, the stratums are flattened** by several ingenious ideas :

• The use of the first names (given names) is compulsory : you can’t call someone using a last name. On the badges the staff has to wear all the time, the first name is set in bold type, the rest in only here for security-reasons.
• The teamwork with a teamleader, giving directions. There is no one to debrief to, there is just work to do.
• The open-spaces with two to three hundred persons, where each member, independently to his salary or position, has the same privileges and equipment.
• The meritocracy, where the merit and the devotion take precedent on the age and seniority.
• The premises***, from the Kitchen (open-space with free stuff to eat and drink, from breakfast to the last break of the day), to the walls made of transparent glass, just like the transparency of the society.
• And so on…

The firm, principally working in communication, has been able to illustrate its skills inside the company, what’s another good point !

For the technical stuff, we first have to speak about their principal product: the Bloomberg terminals. With them, people can follow the economic evolutions, with real-time news (directly from the press agencies), real-time status of the stock exchanges (and not half an hour late), economical surveys, etc. This terminal is our principal tool, and is permanently corrected, or modified. Bloomberg is leading the market of the economic analysis because of the quality of this product, and that’s just our job : do a clean work, readable, efficient, and correct the bugs as they are discovered.

And starting tomorrow, our first contact with the teams, and perhaps real work to do.

Important information: please note that in agreement with the confidentiality obligation of the firm, no information about the technical functionalities, or information available through the Bloomberg system, will be published here. Every piece of information you’ll find in these lines, is either public ( example of this post), or not in conflict with this obligation.

* preen oneself on : se targuer de
** flattened : aplanies
*** premises : locaux

[ Article traduit du français ]

Internship London > Culture > Tube

[ Version française ]

Most of my readers had almost once taken the French Tube in Paris. Sometimes beautiful and open, sometimes old and scary, different populations of different ethnics origins are mixed within the customers. The difference between the “RER” and the “Metro” is that the first one is intended for long distances, coming every ten or twenty minutes (or more, depending on your destination) whereas the second one is for short distances, coming every three to five minutes.

In London, the concept of Zones exists just like Paris, but here “RER” and “Metro” are gathered together under the sign “Tube”. This city, with 9.3M inhabitants (vs. 2M for Paris intra-muros), has only one kind of transport on railways, now subterranean, now emerged. And if the emerged stations are just like the countryside-RERs in Paris (like Juvisy), the subterranean stations have nothing to do with the ones from Paris.

In fact, walking a long time between to railways is exceptional in Paris, and most of the time reserved to the correspondences between a RER and a metro (stations like Châtelet). Here, the exception is more to have a direct correspondence ! Just like in France, they have escalators to help disabled, tired, or lazy persons, but these ones follow each other to the pace of four per correspondence tube/tube : one of the tube is deep inside the ground, the other one is just below the floor. So, your 2-minutes correspondence in Paris takes five, six, or ten minutes of walk in London (depending on your luggage).

The confusion between metro and RER makes the time between two tubes very variable : if a metro *can* get *somewhere* out of the Zone 1 (center), it will only arrive in a station every seven to ten minutes, *even if* there are already other stations in Zone 1 to get through. From one station to another one, you have to count more than two minutes (vs. one in Paris) : are there the reasons why the taxis are so developed here ?

But there are also arguments in favor of the Tube : the Oyster Card, a magnetic card which is just like a purse, and can contain the equivalent of our Orange cards (”travelcards”), per example.

Here, all the populations are mixed, but this mix is not reserved to the customers : finding Indian Tube agents is not rare ! It’s a good way to integrate people from different origins, with a useful job in contact of public, but which can (for some jobs) be done without a high qualification.

We’ll finish this (long!) article by underlining that the Tube helps up to memorize our geography of London, by using the terms “East” / “West” to designate the east and west part of a tube railway (instead of just giving the name of the last station like in Paris)… Pourquoi pas ;-)

[ Article traduit du français ]