• Is there a strike on the French transportation network near Paris? Check this status page.
• ”Indermnité journalières”: daily allowances for mission abroad paid for by INRIA.

Time and weather in Paris. There is also a handy interactive weather map for France.

Staying at the hotel on the Polytechnique campus provides you with a convenient way to visit the campus and to get some work done. There are downsides, however. The campus is known for being quiet. Actually, on the weekends, it is more accurate to describe it as “dead quiet”. There are only two places on campus that serve food: the large cantine (that requires a badge) and a small cafeteria (sandwichs and salads for cash). Both have greatly reduced hours during the weekend (check their schedules carefully!). Since you are not supposed to make food in your hotel room, eating during the weekend means being somewhere else for meals. Lozere has little to offer, especially at night. Paris, an hour away by RER, is a good place, of course, for food. There are also some restaurants in central Orsay and Palaiseau that are reachable from the RER.

The organizers of two LIX Workshop (Frank Nielsen, 2008 and Olivier Bournez, 2009) placed some pictures on their web site showing how to get from the RER B line to the campus of Ecole Polytechnique. I reproduce them here (as a Picasa gallery). These pictures display two options for making this trip. The first has you take a bus to campus and the second avoids a bus but requires a steep walk. WARNING: Starting in the summer of 2010, the place to connect to the bus at Massy-Palaiseau has changed and the photos below are not accurate.