- Joined
- Dec 25, 2011
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Wow that field looks beautiful with the mountains behind it. Shame they are in such a crappy state....surprised no one from the outside has come in and dumped money into the team at some point of their free fall. Looks like they have the facilities in place and just need some money to sign players and get back into the game.
Grenoble is an old, fascinating city. Center of the alps, crossroads between Italy and France, major resistance hub (marquis) during the Nazi occupation. Obviously, major outdoor sports hub with skiing in the winter and hiking in the summer. Big college town, too. The school I was at was small (ESC Grenoble); but, U Grenoble and its affiliates have over 30K students in the city. STEM is also huge as Grenoble is trying to be one of the key STEM locations in all of France and already is the headquarters for French National Centre for Scientific Research, the top scientific research organization in the country, plus the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility is in the city - basically a giant X-Ray machine. Grenoble also has France's second largest American community after Paris, which is no surprise as the city's 3, 4, and 5th largest private employers are Caterpillar, Hewitt Packard, and Becton Dickinson respectively. The city itself is about a bit larger than Hartford with 160K residents and a metro area of about 500K (mountains really cut back on suburban sprawl. Grenoble has a small commercial airport, though many fly through nearby Lyon, whose airport lies on the TGV line that connects Paris to Lyon, Lyon's airport, Grenoble, and Geneva, Switzerland. Pro sports teams don't do well overall in Grenoble simply because there is just too much to do int the surrounding Alps. Rugby actually outdraws soccer.
Oh, and that slab of granite in the picture, which is one of the small mountains in the area, was right out my apartment window when I lived there, though I was about 2 km closer to it than the stadium. On the weekends, I would often hike up the Bastille (not the one in Paris) on the edge of the city and on a clear day, Mount Blanc is visible (the pic attached is from the Bastille, but facing the city, Mt. Blanc can be see to the left away from the city).