LABtoLAB - Nantes, France

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Playing catch up in the blogging game is not fun - it's interesting, reminiscing about the past year, but suddenly realizing how much I left out is a bit terrifying. As such, I've decided to put in a few short entries so we can see where I've been and then a longer one about the last few weeks. Let's take it from the top:

France.

France you see, was part of the summer of absolute craziness.

First there was Vancouver, including the CHI Conference and a visit with family and friends. Then there was Brazil, and the crazy printer - there's a video here now by the way, showing the journey and what it resulted in:

Okay so that was that, then we went to Copenhagen literally overnight, celebrated father's day by participating in the Technical Museum's really amazing father's day celebration with steam powered trains and automobiles and bringing our fire cannons along. Not one to waste a day, obviously. We repacked and headed off to Nantes, France for a conference about Media Labs in Europe. A brilliant conference put on by some great people and in most circumstances this would have been the highlight trip of the year but we were so worn down with all the travelling that we could barely appreciate what was going on around us. Nantes is a very cool city though and one I'd happily go back to, it had wonderful food (though bewarned, they have wacky eating hours, all meals are at very certain times, coffee after 1800 is taboo and Monday is 'second Sunday' so you literally can't get anything except beer or wine). We were able to experience "Les Machines" an amazing exhibition dedicated to incredible machines such as the bigger-than-life walking elephant. You can see all the photos here: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150206889273806.304942.504013805&type=1&l=7deb62757d and see some of them in amongst this post.

We had endless crepes, completely stereotypical but they were amazing. I haven't had crepes that were not full of nutella before and these were whole wheat, egg, spinach, goat cheese renditions of happiness on a plate. I loved every bite.

We finished off our trip with a great night at a venue called Le Lieu Unique, which was very similar in function to illutron - an artist hang out / workshop / performance area with cool goings-ons. Here's a video our "Touching Booth" that we created for the event that particular night. <a href="
beaucoup LABtoLAB people - you put on a great conference and truly showed us the city; it was incredible :)

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