lake to lake (aka fml)

The rolling hills in
Rural France make for lovely
Scenes and my sad legs.

I like lakes. They're so peaceful and calm: the water just floating around and minding its own business, people milling about and enjoying grassy or sandy lakesides (especially on a warm day like this one), ... So I jumped at the chance to go to Annecy, France, with two other coworkers, namely Hugo and Piotr. It has a lovely lake and a gorgeous old town, and it's basically a composite built of all the things that Americans think about when they think of "romantic Europe." Except the Eiffel Tower. It didn't have that.

But there's this funny thing about lakes. They tend to form in low areas. That generally means that two lakes that aren't connected are separated by something like.. well, like a high area. In this case, it was a very high hill. I just did a map on mapmyride.com and it informs me that we climbed a total of 1210m over our 130-ish km bike ride. That's a shitload of climbing. The woman at the restaurant we went to in Annecy didn't believe that we had come from Geneva.

We did get a late start (about 11:30 we left from Genève), but we got back shortly after sunset. Not too shabby. That includes an hour or so spent in Annecy touristing through the old town and stuffing our faces with as many calories as possible (in the form of pizza and pasta and ice cream).

All in all, the French countryside was really beautiful. Unfortunately, France isn't so friendly to cyclists as Switzerland is; they don't have many bike lanes (we had to settle for the shoulder of small highways), and they lack open stops with fresh water. We were honked at and stuff several times, but Piotr taught me some curse words in Polish, so that was okay.

I now have a sunburn on my back like the ones I used to get when I had long hair that I left braided all the time: burn everywhere except for a nice white strip down the middle of my back where my racer-cut top sat.  Lovely.

Oh, and a map of the ride: Lake to Lake.

seeing (and not seeing) the sights

Drifting past churches,
Faithful, faithless, wind, and snow,
Zürich's slow pulse throbs.

First, I want to welcome Mr. Joe Blaylock to Switzerland. Woooooooooo!

Somehow I never made it to the capital city when I was living in Darmstadt last summer, and somehow it also took me almost two full months to make it this time, despite the fact that it's just a 3 hour train ride away. Maybe it's the fact that everything there is a half-order of magnitude more expensive than anyplace else in Switzerland... ;______; But, in any case, I did go to Zürich this weekend!

Zürich is in the northeast-ish part of Switzerland. It has a population of around 300,000 people, depending how you count, and it is the namesake of its canton. They like to tell everyone that they have the cleanest water in the world, and they have some 1200 public drinking fountains (by "public drinking fountain" I mean "elaborate fountain in public whose water is drinkable and not grungy like the water in public fountains elsewhere") scattered around to show it off. Zürich was one of two self-governed little regions in modern-day Switzerland that was basically neutral all through history, except that they did take sides in the Catholic/Reform battle eventually. Now, though, religion is not a big part of life there except that it makes the architecture more gorgeous for tourists.

As a city, Zürich was mostly what I expected. Like Geneva, it's situated on its own lake. Unlike Geneva, when I woke up there yesterday morning there was 10cm of snow on the ground, and more was still falling. It's March. One thing that I also didn't expect about it was how small it is. I accidentally happened upon 4 of the (semi-obscure) places I'd intended to visit just wandering around.

The requisite churches around town were pretty cool; the only one that I actually went in was the Grossmünster. It's along one of the rivers, and it had THE BEST WINDOWS. They weren't stained glass: instead they were thin slices of geodes connected together. It was an awesome effect.

The Bahnhofstrasse in Zürich is renowned for being supremely expensive. It leads from the Hauptbahnhof to the lake, and it's lined with every designer label I could think of, plus a couple dozen more. On Saturday, it was too cold to be outside for very long at a time (I was dumb and decided that Zürich would be a lot like Genève weather-wise... so not true, and all I brought was a medium-weight coat), so I shopped. And by that I mean that I tried on lots of things that I had no intention of buying just because they were super fashionable and -expensive. I tried on a scarf that was $400. I tried on a trenchcoat that was $1700. I tried on $800 dresses. Life is sweet.

I attempted to visit the zoo, which is supposed to be pretty good as zoos go, but I was blinded by blowing snow and settled for a walk through the nearby cemetery instead. Cemeteries covered in snow still clean of footprints are super creepy. I don't know what I'd've done if I'd seen a set of tracks that... only went out... DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNNN.

I tried to visit the Chinese gardens along the lake, but they are sadly not open until the end of March. The university's botanical gardens, though, were open, and I wandered through them for a while. And a friend of a friend suggested a place called "Cakefriends" where they serve, unsurprisingly, cake. I had lemon pistachio; it was delicious! Near that area there was an exceedingly strange shop, though. It had three pairs of flags: two American flags, two Canadian flags, and two Californian flags. The awning read "Papa John's American Restaurant and Caribbean Bar." What?

I also visited the very cool Landesmuseum, just behind the train station. I didn't know a lot about the history of Switzerland or Zürich before, but this place had it all. It's kept inside what was obviously an old castle of some variety (if the museum said anything about the castle, I must've missed it), and it's twisty and turny and awesome. Clearly the exhibits have been populated in stages: at the front of the museum, everything is in German and French on the walls, and there are cards with English and Italian on them. Further back, the English cards disappear and the Italian appears on the walls. Then the Italian disappears. Moving on, there's nothing but German labelling ancient weaponry and furniture from the Renaissance era. My languages got a workout. But did you know that Switzerland didn't have nationwide women's suffrage until 1990???????

I think my favourite thing about the trip, though, was dinner at Blindekuh. It's a restaurant staffed entirely by blind people where you dine in the dark. As in 0 light. To get to your table, the servers have you put your hands on their shoulders and lead you through the dining room. They tell you that your glass is on the right at the top, your fork is on the left, and your knife is on the right. When they bring you anything, they tell you where they've put it relative to you. Eating penne without being able to see it is a challenge, I assure you. On the plus side, table manners are totally a moot point, and I happily licked all the cream off my chocolate cake plate, knowing that it would not bother any of the other diners. It's not like I'll ever see them again, anyway. Or that I ever saw them in the first place. :)

It was a pretty relaxed weekend, I guess. I went out to the clubs with some Finnish guys, but other than that it was a lot of just exploring. Probably it had something to do with the fact that Saturday found everything buried in snow and lost from sight if it was more than 200m away (blowing snow == no fun). Sunday everything is closed, but it was a lovely day, anyway. Maybe next time I find myself in Zürich it will be during summer when I can have epic adventures on the lake. :D

change

Gentle ringing can

Become harsh jangling, SPEND

THAT SHIT, TRAVELER.

I realised today that I have 23CHF worth of change in my pocket.  Guess what!  In Europe, coins can be spent... just like regular money.  In Switzerland, there're coins up to 5CHF.  Yeah.  You can spend that.

first impressions

The world machine whirs,
Spinning up, in a frenzy,
Crash, ye particles!

As far as I know, the LHC isn't actually working right now, but that's not really the point. Okay, here is time for my impressions from my first two days here!

I guess I should go with factual things first: yesterday started with my being shut out of CERN for poor planning. I guess I hadn't been entered in the database yet, so I had to beg a woman to look up the phone numbers of the people I needed to contact. I called them, but they were both busy for a little while, so I hung out in the CERN swag shop. If anyone's interested, there are some pretty cool CERN shirts for around $20 US.

After that, I met with my boss, Salvatore Mele. He's Italian, and super smart. I guess he's known since early high school that he wanted to work at CERN. He's also published on the order of 300 High-Energy Physics (HEP) papers. For those of you not familiar with "published," that means that he was involved in the experiments in some way, not that he necessarily did all the work himself. Some papers have 2,000+ authors, and often papers will list professors or superiors as authors when younger or more inexperienced students have written them in order to get more exposure for the papers. But, still, 300 is damn impressive.

I also met my team (Inspire) and saw my office. There's a dart board and a big plant (I'm not sure what kind yet, but it looks vaguely tropical, I guess) named Travis. Travis is Joe Blaylock (my friend from school who got me this job)'s boss at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in sunny California. I'm sharing with 4 grad students, and there are 4 more in the next room. They are from all over Europe, and hearing so many accents again is kind of fun. :)

I got a CERN id card, which has a photo of me looking very attractive and jetlaggedly exhausted. I now also have an official CERN email address: valkyrie (.dot.) arline (.dot.) savage (@at@) cern (.dot.) ch (sorry, I don't want to get spam for posting that thing). I was pretty excited to add myself to the CERN network on Facebook, hahaha.

Then I met my temporary team (Invenio), since I guess the guy I'm working with on the Inspire team (which they call "the library team" here, for some reason) is in India for another week or so. Invenio is one of the things that Inspire is building on; basically Inspire is a project aiming to combine Invenio and SPIRES and add some extra search functionalities.  I found out exactly what my project is going to be, and although I haven't had to sign an NDA (a fact which I suspect stems from CERN's seeming... lack of organisation), I think I'll not babble about it here on the interwebs.

There are like 13,000 "users" at CERN.  There are 3,000 or so permanent employees and 4,000 or so visitors at any given time, so this campus is HUGE.  It can easily take 30 minutes to walk from far end to far end.  It's also situated right on the border of France and Switzerland, so my hostel room and office are in Switzerland but my temporary office is in France.  That's sort of a weird thing to think about.  I guess I'm going to be living in Switzerland (in an apartment!  yay!) soon-ish.  The housing coordinator woman from IU told me it would probably take about 2 weeks to find something.  In the meantime, if any of you has an itch to send me mail, my desk is an okay place to send it:

Valkyrie Savage
CERN
CH1211 - Genève 23
Suisse

Technically, my desk is 3-1-021, but I think it should make it with just that much address.

Now, impressions!  For being such a high-tech place, CERN is really low-tech.  I had to scavenge computer parts from abandoned machines just to have a workstation, which was sort of amusing, in its way.  A lot of the buildings seem to be afterthoughts (I guess this facility has been around for a really long time...), and the numbering system on the map is really screwy.  For instance, building 3 connects to buildings 4, 52, 53, 22, and 26.  Next door are buildings 304, 602, 100, 510, and 63.  I walk past building 2013 on my way to my office.

I'm probably going to die of radiation poisoning just for being here.  I was trying to discover some kind of short cut through the buildings between my hostel, which is on CERN property, and my temp office, and I ran into several dead endings at rooms marked RADIATION HAZARD.  So... that kinda sucks.  :)

Swiss people, as I mentioned, have no idea what to do about snow.  My boss almost drove instead of taking a 10 minute walk with me yesterday because he didn't want to walk through it.  He also informed me that Genève once had snow plows, etc., but gave them to another canton (kind of like Swiss states) when they stopped getting so much snow.  Now their plan for when it snows is... to wait until it rains.  Great.

Not much happens around CERN.  This hostel is full of visiting-professor-types, and once people go home for the evening--which tends to be early; Europe largely sticks to a traditional 8-5 workday, which makes this really unlike any other CS jobs I've had, i.e. Google where people usually come in at 10 and stay until... maybe 9--there's not much to do.  I am continually irritated by the fact that grocery stores close so damn early here, though today I learned that the closest one is within 45 minutes by walking of my room, so I could reasonably go there to procure calories when need be (as long as it's before 19:00).  I asked one of my temporary co-workers what he does after work, and his response was that... well... not much.  I guess that a lot of the grad students in this group are planning to go skiing this weekend, though, and they invited me to join them.  Hoorah!

There are multiple parts to meals here, even lunch.  I did not know this.  Apparently, one eats one's entrée, then moves to a different location for dessert, and another different location for coffee.  And by "coffee," I of course mean "espresso," since it seems no self-respecting Europeans take their coffees "long."

Now that I've had that little babble time, I guess it would be reasonable to wrap up this post.  Again, I hope to put up pictures soon, and also to post a permanent-ish address.

Cheers!

dreams

Half-sleeping, dreaming
A life. Silent snow settles
On (my) Switzerland.

Apologies for that sort of rushed blog post yesterday. Free Wi-Fi in Europe is not trivial to come upon, and I'm just not willing to pay for it very often. Even to get that connection required having a mobile phone to get an activation code... which meant making friends with random foreigners. It wasn't so bad, haha. Everyone is friendly when you meet them similarly stranded in a snow-bound airport at 02:00.

I wish I'd just taken the initiative to go into London yesterday, instead of camping around Heathrow. My flight LHR->GVA was delayed something like 3.5 hours due to a random snowdump that poured onto Europe. Everyone I've spoken with says that this is "the most snow we've seen in {20,25,30} years!" That seems okay in England, I guess, since they seemed to have 8 or so inches (I didn't actually make it outside to see, but that's what it looked like), and I don't really picture their getting snow so often. Switzerland, though, has a bit of a different story in my mind. The Geneva airport was delaying flights for up to 6 hours yesterday due to their winter work, but walking around today I saw no more than 7 inches of snow anyplace. This is the Alps, isn't it? Maybe Geneva really is more temperate than I'm giving it credit for. Someone told me that their average snowfall over a year is 30 feet, but I suspect that his conversion was just not quite right. There's no way they could get 30 feet in a year and be stumped by 6 inches at a time.

I've met a few great characters since my YOW post. I did like that British fellow who sat next to me on the YOW->LHR flight. He took a sleeping pill immediately upon seating himself, then spent the next 6 or so hours trying to watch the final 30 minutes of "Inglourious Basterds," which he utterly failed to do. One of my favourite thoughts about airlines is that they inspire such strangenesses: hot coffee all day perks travelers jetlagging West and free alcohol (I had some delicious scotch) sleep-shames the others on their Eastward trips.

Another pretty great set of people were the American family who were also heading Geneva-ward. I guess they've lived around these parts for a little while, at least, and their 8-year-old tried to teach me French in the boarding queue.

My best friend on this trip so far, though, has got to be my stuffed llama. We're buds.

Along the route I've seen some pretty amusing sights, as well. I had something resembling dinner (a fabulous veggie scramble with Earl Grey tea) during my time in Heathrow. It was behind security, but the silverware we were provided did include a knife. It was just entirely rounded, blunt, and useless. Go figure.

Swiss International Airlines has at least one plane that I suspect will never not make me smile. It was approximately the funniest thing ever when we all tromped out into the lightly blowing snow at midnight in England and were greeted by a plane bedecked with Swiss people herding cows and goats through the Alps. I laughed aloud. I guess no-one else did. Pah.

I'm hoping to score an address tomorrow. I'm actually waiting on a reply from my boss-to-be regarding exactly what I need to do in the morning. I'm checked in at a hostel right now, but I guess if I don't hear anything I'll just assume that I can find some hospitality among my new co-workers and drag all my junk to CERN on the tram tomorrow. I can always find someplace to sleep if worse comes to worst... like the airport. ;)

Ah, how I loathe cash economies. I forgot that about Europe this time, and I came here with $15 American and no recollection of my debit card's pin number. Hopefully I can survive with just a credit card until I get paid or get a hold of Bank of America somehow.

Oh! Fun fact about Switzerland: it's REALLY FRIGGIN EXPENSIVE. I was meandering around downtown today, admiring the snow, and I came across a McDonald's. Their Big Mac (here called a "Royale with Cheese", if you've seen "Pulp Fiction") was 9.80CHF, which is roughly $10 American. (Having a nearly 1-to-1 exchange rate makes budgeting a little bit simpler, hooray!) Sheesh.
I hope I don't starve over here. I guess I could always learn to lasso seagulls from the lake or something, haha.

Hmmm... there isn't so much to say. Sleeping on one's bags in an airport for scarcely two hours and then zombie-walking, foodless, around a city for a day doesn't really lend itself to curing jetlag. I got some rice stuff, and I think I'm going to go to bed pretty soon, although the hostel's promise of a movie showing tonight could keep me up for at least a couple more hours. A shower earlier today let me feel like a human again (believe me, wearing an outfit for 2.5 days straight is not the most comfortable, or the most pleasant-smelling, of ideas), and a two-hour nap in a proper bed helped a lot, too. We'll see what happens, I guess, as usual. :)

I've got to find a Windows or OSX box someplace that I can plug my camera into. Screw proprietary drivers, seriously. Maybe I just need to hack some of my own together. But photos soon, I promise.