la souris parisienne: Journées d'intégration

Last 2 days I have spent in Roscoff, a little town (less than 4000 citizens) in Bretagne, north-west part of France. L'ecole doctorale invited all UPMC 1st year PhD students that are starting their thesis in biology, biotechnolgy, medicine, veterinary, etc. for a semi-formal congress, where in between of seminars given by a bunch of UPMC professors, each student was supposed to present a poster with his doctoral project and discuss it with others. The discussions were long and intense and we ended up getting to interesting conclusions after a couple of bottles of cold cider on the seashore watching the ebb tide around 2am :)
This is where Bretagne is localised, around 4,5h by train from Paris:

Train goes straight to Brest and we got off in Morlaix, where we took a bus to Roscoff

Station Biologique Roscoff (a photo from internet, the author must have played a bit with photoshop, actually.. put it all in greyish colours and you'll get it right)

My lovely room with a tv (first time from coming to France! turns out I start catching the plot of cartoons for 3-yers old in french!)

We were really lucky with the wheather, as Bretagne is famous for it's grey sky and horizontal rain from the see. Morining during the low tide.

The port

Boat trip to a charming island nearby Ile de Batz

The future of french life scinces (still sober)

some lovely spots on the island

Sarah, doing her research in reverse genetics system for rotavirus (grrr...)

François-Xavier, who prefers to be called FX (sounds a bit like a model of a robot to me, don't you think? XF-2001, R2D2,...). Investigates a role of Quaking, a mRNA binding protein, in the early muscle development of zebrafish. He actually stayed on the island for 2 more days to do some nature contemplation :)

Pomponik?

not quite a tropical island...

Back in the land we stopped by one patisserie to try some Kouign-Amann, a tipical cake from Bretagne, basically just butter and sugar and more butter..

I looked almost serious in front of my shiny poster, wish I had realised before that I had a giant banana on my tshirt.. (put on a sweater after the discussion with professors..)