A few days in Grenoble

Time for my yearly business trip to Grenoble! (there's been a trip per year during my career at STMicroelectronics so far - although there might more coming up this year, let's see...).

Me, and my two colleagues jumped into our rental car early Monday morning and sped down the motorway Northwards towards Grenoble, located about 5 hours drive from our office in Sophia-Antipolis. Rather than stopping for a quick lunch on the motorway, as we usually do, we decided to stop at Romans-sur-Isere for a proper lunch (as we were actually running a bit ahead of schedule). We struggled to find an open restaurant, but eventually found a nice little bistrot, nicely located by the Isere river, which flow
s through town.

What followed was a week of hard work! We had plenty to do, so the days were long at the office. But there was time for a bit of fun as well - especially as the 17th of March is, it may surprise you, not only Saint-Patrick's Day, but also my birthday. So this, naturally, called for a couple of pints of Guinness - and what better place in Grenoble to have a couple of pints of Guinness than O'Callaghan's? Well, turns out it was impossible to get in - due to the mad crowds celebrating Saint Paddy's in the pub, and even outside the pub in the square next to it. There were even some bagpipers livening things up (much to delight of our Scottish colleague, I suppose??). Anyway, it was all great fun - and if there's one thing I take away from Grenoble is that Saint Paddy's seems to be a lot more fun here than in Nice!

I did even manage to drag myself out of bed early one morning and do a bit of morning photography, even! Grenoble doesn't rank amongst the most beautiful cities in France, but it does have a nice enough historic centre, and is rather stunningly located on a flat plain, surrounded by very imposing mountains (this does lead to rather extreme heat and unpleasant air pollution at times). I decided to stroll along the Isere river, walking back through the town centre. Nice way to start the day!

Our workshop wrapped up Thursday lunch time. Before heading off, I decided on a bit of a detour. A good friend of ours, Christian, actually works in Grenoble. And it so happens that he's the vocalist of a local rock band, who were actually having their practice not far from our office. So we decided to gate-crash their practice! Good fun...

Before hitting the road back to Nice, we decided to make it up to Bastille also to check out the views over Grenoble and the surrounding mountains. There's actually a cable car that runs up there from the town centre, which is pretty cool, but we decided to drive up there. And the views from up there were certainly pretty amazing.

And that marked an end of our short but intensive stay - time to head back Southwards!