Old photographs

[ellarien]

When I was a young grad student, I had the opportunity to go to a conference in Grenoble, France. It was the first time I'd ever been abroad or on a plane, and I made a scrapbook of everything from cafeteria sugar-sachets to luggage tags as well as postcards and photos. This summer I scanned the photos I took, taken with a 110 camera. The negatives on those were tiny, so the low resolution couldn't be helped. Here are a few of the best, or at any rate least terrible.

	Hills around Grenoble These are more or less the foothills of the French alps. A cable-car slants from the old town up to the fortified bastion on a knee of the hill above it.
	Old Grenoble from above The river Isere runs green with glacier-melt through the middle of the red-roofed old town.
	Old buildings I can see where the architects of New Orleans got their ideas ...
	Fountain in the Old Town catching the light of the setting sun. The walls are predominantly grey, faded and grubby; some of the buildings were impressively crooked and ramshackle, crammed together as if holding each other up.
	Glacier near Deux Alpes ski resort It was a glaciology and ice physics conference, so of course we had to go and see a real glacier, at 10,000 feet above an out-of-season ski-resort. The last stage of the journey was by cable-car. The glacier itself was grubby, much messed about by snow-grooming machines, but the views were impressive -- we could have seen Mont Blanc if it had been a bit clearer.