CERN: European Center for Nuclear Research

I'm back from Geneva! It was fun to go to a get away from London for a bit. Even being there for that short of time, it felt more like Europe that London does. That makes me excited for my travels and to get out of here. I also liked it because it is a very clean city. Even the huge lake the city surrounds is clean. You can see straight to the bottom, I don't know for how deep, but it's crystal clear! I wonder how they do it...But it was cool, I bought myself a new Swiss Army Knife! FROM SWITZERLAND!!! Neat right? I think so. I was however confused about money. I could not keep the conversions straight in my head, even know I don't know how much stuff cost. The Swiss franc and dollar are about even, but menus seemed really high. So when I was walking around looking for a restaurant, I finally had to say forget it and just picked one. It didn't help that I've been thinking in pounds for the last 2 weeks...

So my flight out there was flawless, I took a bus to the airport and got there in good time. After I checked in and walked though the doors to get the through the security check point, my jaw dropped a little because there was a line of 100 or 200 people. I was like "crap, this is gonna take forever!" But it didn't and for the amount of people, it went really fast. The US should take some advice from our foreign friends. When I got there, I took a cab to my hotel which ended up being really close and literally 1 block from the France Swiss border. So that was cool. Then that night I was going to try to walk to Geneva Center but didn't know how far it was and didn't have a map, so I started to walk. Then it was starting to get dark and I was like, "I'm not gonna make it any time soon, and if I do, I still have to walk back." So I found an Italian place and ate there and walked back. It wasn't a bad walk except that I ate a lot and then walked back fast so my tummy got a little upset, but I told it to calm down and it did. There was really only one scary part on the walk and that was just before I got to the hotel I had to walk though a pitch back section of the walk. It was DARK! Fortunately, I had my little LED light that showed me the way!

My hotel room was nice enough, it was a 2 star hotel and yeah, it was. On the pamphlet in the room, it said you could rent DVDs and after channel surfing, I found of the 10 channels, 1 was English and it was CNN...But they didn't have any DVDs anymore, that was an old service. So I watched something French for a while. Then when I was going to go to bed, the Pursuit of Happyness came on and it was in English with French subtitles so I was like sweet! and watched that then went to bed.

In the morning I got up at 8 because when I picked the hotel it said it was close to CERN and I wanted to get there early to be sure I was at the right place and all. I asked someone where it was an he directed me to it, and said it was about 8km away. I know that 8km is a long way, about 4 miles or so, so I walked, and walked, and walked. There are no signs around the said I was going in the right direction. And there were no buses on the road I was on. Finally, after walking for a while, I saw a bus that said it was going to CERN. Awesome, I'm on the right path. So I kept walking and found it and found where I needed to be. But it was 3 or 4 hours before my tour! So I walked to France again and found a little place to eat. When I got back, I went though the little Microcosm mini museum they had. There was some neat stuff in there and some that I learned about last semester in Modern. That was cool. It worked out very well that when I was done with that museum, my tour was about to start!

I have decided that I really don't like tours very much at all. Even something like this that I'm interested in. They are not interactive enough for me. I don't want to go a see stuff not working, or something that I can't play with. Going places and hearing someone talk about it is not my cup of tea. There was some cool stuff, of course, but eh, whatever. Anyway, we saw a few different particle accelerators which was cool. One of them is where the first 9 anti hydrogen particles were made. Cool huh? I don't really know how they did it, but I took a picture of the plans! haha! Then we saw a few sections of the LHC (Large Hydron Collider). It's weird to think of protons spinning around in little packets in there, but they do! The LHC is a particle accelerator that is a big circle around Geneva, 27km (that's 16.7 miles for you American folk) in circumference. Quite large. The point of it is to recreate the environment seconds after the big bang to see if they can recreate any atoms. So it has to be really cold. 1.9 Kelvin I believe he said. 273K is room temperature and 0K is absolute zero. Cold. They cool it down with liquid helium and recently, part of it broke and let loose a lot of helium, nothing bad really happened, except that they have 2 months work to fix it before they can do any more experiments. So it was still a neat tour, but I would have liked to had more interaction, but that's just me I guess...

After the tour I took a bus to Geneva Center and walked around there and saw the big fountain. That thing shoots high. And it's a very pretty city in general. I also realized on coming back that I think fewer people smoke there. Not something I thought of there but when I came back to London and started to walk around, the person in front of me was smoking and then it clicked that that never happened. Maybe I was there for too short of time. After dinner, I took the bus back to where I knew, because I didn't feel like getting lost on the bus, and walked back the rest of the way. Again, I had to go through that dark place, but I still had my flashlight!

Now, remember how the flight in went great? I can't really say the same for going out...I got up in the morning, showered and packed and checked out because I wasn't sure when I needed to check out. My flight was at 5pm and check in was at 3. So I had some time to kill. I started off by finding the airport because again, I wanted to know where it was before I got lost. Unfortunately, there isn't much to do around the airport...so I pretty much stayed in there and read until I could check in. Then at the gate, our flight said it was going to be late and leave at 17:10. Not a bad delay. Yet. They announced that they would be boarding but stopped because they said that they didn't have clearance for take off anymore or something like that. So we waited till we could board. Then, they told us that there were no flights into or out of any London airport because of a major problem with communications. Finally we got to board and fly out. We ended up being delayed 3 hours I think. Fortunately, my book was long (The Hobbit). I took the same bus back into Paddington. The bus company and airline work together so it was waiting for us, how nice. Originally, I thought I would have time to get on the internet when I got back because I didn't have a room booked for that night. We were scheduled to arrive at 17:45, but now it was much later. So I went to my hostel and asked if they had room. Since they were filled when I first booked, I thought maybe they would have had a cancellation. They didn't. So I went down the block and they were full too. Down the block again and they had a bed for the night so I stayed there. Thank goodness I found one and pretty cheap £13.

After I checked in, someone at the pub started talking to me, just general information and what not. Then she asked if I wanted a drink so I said uhh sure. So she bought me a pint and we went outside and talked to her friends. I ended up talking to them for a while. They were all slightly older than me, late 20s early 30s but we had good conversations. I mentioned I didn't really like London and one guy kept trying to think of what I should do because he did not want me to leave London or England thinking that I didn't like it. So he suggested I go down to Devon or Somerset (by the coast?) and spend a few days there because London is not England. So I might do that for a few days to see the "real" England.

Today, I went to the Wallace Collection's library and finally did some research. I do not like reading facts out of a book...Boring! Whatever, I need some information but I'm trying to set up a few more contact meetings cuz I've sent out a bunch of emails to various places (Leeds, Edinburgh, Ireland) so hopefully I'll get an email back saying "come here" and I will.

Tomorrow I have a meeting with our group leader so hopefully he will be able to give me some advice. Only one way to find out though!

That's all for now, hopefully it's enough for you.