An ordinary morning

When I awake, the sun is already flowing down in the room: here, they don't have necessarily shutters of blinds at the windows. You'll ask me, what are these shutters, I see on the pictures... well, I went to check it out... these have nothing to do with real shutters, they're only decorative ones! Instead, you'll have venetian blinds, or heavy curtains.

Now, to preserve this way of life, ... I would have to make certain that none of you makes me a surprise to call in the middle of the night! So, here is a practifull link to check what time it is in the Eastern zone of the US (Eastern Standard Time) : http://www.time.gov/timezone.cgi?Eastern/d/-5 (you can have the same information on the website "horloge parlante"). Presently (from Sunday, March the 25th), there are 6 hours of difference between the time in Paris and in New-York!

If you're really attentive, you should have noticed that I wrote the first paragraph maybe two-three weeks ago... we've entered the new era of "daylight saving times" on Sunday the 11th, if my memory doesn't fail! Presently, the sun is making efforts to climb the wall outside, and I'm not even sure it has reached my window at the 2nd floor when I quit the house to run for the bus;NB: here, we do not count the "rez-de-chaussée" as "zero level" (perhaps to avoid to be refered into court)... but we begin at 1... and immediately below is "minus 1", which is the "basement".

As for what American people eat in the morning, I do not know. My roommate usually wakes up no sooner than when I'm already at work (when I catch my bus on time), so I cannot even watch her (and she is Carribean, so she surely doesn't eat like the average American familly... although ... it seems to me that she eats cereals, and I've heard that average American people eat cereals for breakfast ?... You'll be surprised to hear that you can find - for what concerns cereals - some that we find here too, like "Special K" ... but you won't be surprise to learn that they taste not the same (at least they don't taste the same as in Great-Britain, as my co-worker Daniel told me!). So, I do not eat cereals for breakfast, neither melon, as I've surprised our division secretary eating, one morning. I just make my own bread with whole wheat flour (I just struggled a lot to find a good flour, but it seems to me I've found a good one!) ... last week it was a bit heavy, so now, I replaced the whole flour by white one, and ... I couldn't avoid the dough to overflow from the container!

Generally, I am being late, and so have no time to explain anything to be noticed between the house and the bus stop ... except when I do miss the bus! ... but that happened by luck only one time (in that direction). So, then, I arrive a bit sweated after 10 short minutes, and rest tens of seconds at the stop (a very simple bus stop) until the bus catches me.

I present my two-week pass (10$ whereas the one-trip ticket is 1.25$ worth :-) ) and choose 2 seats... not that my belly would have increased that much, but there is usually plenty of space so that I can put my backpack on my left-hand side... and get my labtop from it, to work (I say that to look serious!) ... actually, it increases the excitation of the game... You feel the shakes on your back and on your laps, you have the sensation that the keys shift under your fingers when the driver accelerates, you feel relieved to have caught the ankle of your labtop before it fell when the driver suddenly braked... or engaged the vehicle in a 90° bend at 20 mph ... all in perfect smoothness (;-))...! I must precise that the type of bus from Clarksburg to Germantown transit station (where i take again an express bus to Shady Grave Metro station) seems to be not that much younger than I ...

Shady Grave Metro Station, terminus for the Red line metro (there are 5 metro lines, distinguished by their colour: the red one deserves the north of Washington DC, orange goes from East to West, Blue deserves the South West, green the South East, something like that...). There I can take the shuttle to NIST...