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.

hunting and gathering

Basking in the glow
Of SCIENCE, mes amis, one
Can stand to learn much.


So the whole someone-else-will-get-an-apartment-for-me thing seems to have fallen through, and I'm neck-deep in French and English websites, trying to find a damn room for four months.  If you know of anyone who is looking for a temporary roommate, do let me know.  Interesting fact: roughly 80% of the people who live in Switzerland rent their homes/apartments because it is so damn expensive to buy them.

I am learning more and more about CERN during my time here (surprise!).  There's a lecture tomorrow morning about the LHC that I'm thinking I'll go to.  The LHC is definitely off right now; my team and I were talking about it at lunch, and I guess just that machine draws 20% of Genève's power, so it is off until springtime when human beings don't need energy for doing things like... heating their houses.  What else... oh, yesterday I got to see CERN's server farm, including the backbone of the Internet (for this region of Switzerland)!  That's pretty sweet.  It's a bunch of fibre-optic cables in a really obnoxious yellow case.  There are huge cooling units in the room with all those servers, and one of my friends who works there said that if the cooling units go down the temperature can rise 1 degree Celsius per minute.  That's hot!

One of my lovely coworkers, Jan, has offered to lend me one of his bikes for the time I'm here.  I got to ride to the grocery store!  It's super fast!

I also got my first letter from home today.  Hoooooooray.  Seriously, y'all, feel free to send things to my desk.  Or, if you want a postcard from lovely, mountainous Suisse, send me your address.  :)