Rochers de Naye

Today I went for a hike in the mountains above Montreux, on the other side of Lake Geneva, inspired by short hike I did last week at Moléson, but wanting to go somewhere I hadn't been before, which ruled out the nearby Salève and Jura.

We took cog wheel train from Montreux up to the summit of Rochers de Naye at 2054m, which is a small ski resort in winter and a tourist destination in summer, as well as a station for the usual hiking and mountain biking.

The top is a little spoilt by being a ski resort with the lifts sitting idle, and the yurts in which people can stay overnight in summer. Not to mention the marmot enclosures. Though they meant that I now have actually seen a real life marmot, rather than just pictures and toys. Unfortunately, the alpine garden wasn't open yet, so I can't say the same for edelweiss.

We were a little unfortunate about the weather, as it changed a lot during the day. At the summit, it was windy and cloudy, though it would clear up for the magnificent view towards the lake to be seen.

In the other direction, we were able to catch glimpses of snow covered peaks, but were never able to see them.

After lunch, we started our slow descent down. I say slow, not because we were slow, but because of the frequent photo stops. The trail was quite pretty, with glimpses of the lake, and the valley towards Valais here and there, as well as the view back up the mountain.


It took us most of the afternoon to come back to civilisation, where we decided that the further effort to get back to Montreux wasn't worth the pain, since the path had become fairly steep and we were surrounded by buildings, and took the cog wheel train the rest of the way down from Glion, which had a very nice view of Chillon, the castle which I visited last year on the edge of the lake.

Eritrea

I'm a little embarassed to admit this, but I did not know anything about this country before this evening, when I went to a restaurant of their food:

Cercle Érythréen
1st floor on the left
7 boulevard Carl-Vogt
Jonction
079 348 7862

I put the details up here, because I know I'll never be able to find the place again, since it's in what looks like an apartment.

I still don't know too much about the country, except for where it is in Africa. I can't even pronouce its name. I know what the food there is like though, spicy stewed meat and vegetables served on crepes to be shared and eaten together with your hands. It is very good, but not my sort of thing, as I can't take much spice and don't like sloppy food.

Photo taken from pengrin eats

Moving Countries...

Today I moved from Switzerland to France. Which really sounds more dramatic than it is considering the apartments are only about 15kms apart. *winks*

Moving back to the Australian Apartment in St Genis Pouilly just across the border was very easy, since I've stayed there before and have a key and knew which room I was going to have this time.

Moving out of my student apartment was a little more complicated, since it involved cleaning my room and the common areas to pass inspection to receive my bond back. I must have wiped almost every surface in my room, as well as did a quick clean of the kitchen, bathroom and toilet, which turned out not to be needed since she only checked my room. So now I'm a months' rent richer. *grins*

Documentary

Just found out about Colliding Particles, an online documentary following a group of British experimentalists on ATLAS who collaborate with French theorists in Paris on a Higgs search technique. It's quite good and definitely worth a watch if you're interested in what I do and the world I work in. *winks*

Disappointment

Today was my control check up for my finger, which unfortunately did not go according to plan.

What I wanted to happen: finger would get examined and everything would be fine, and I would get all the documents in English needed to bring a dermatologist in Melbourne up to date with what has happened

What actually happened: finger got examined and everything was not fine. no regrowth of the mole or anything, but suspected regrowth of little bits of nail. for which the recommendation was another operation to remove the rest of the nail bed, since the areas where there does seem to be nail regrowth do hurt, but I just thought that that was part of the healing process. luckily, the operation isn't urgent and can wait until I get back home, and I did get all the documents and the recommendation to give a dermatologist to follow up, though they are in French, so I'll have to get them translated. so at least I won't have to waste another day going out to the hospital.

So, does anybody back home know a good dermatologist? one who could remove the rest of my nail matrix with just one operation? and somebody who can translate the documents for me? without charging me fifty dollars a page?

Gruyères

Today I had another sponsored trip by the International Relations Office of The Unviersity of Geneva. This time it was a day trip around Gruyères, in the canton of Fribourg, on the other side of Lac Geneva.

After a rocky start, with a student arriving over half an hour late and the bus breaking down, but we got to La Maison du Gruyère in the end, and did a tour of the cheese exhibit. For those who don't know, Gruyère is a hard yellow cheese made from cow's milk which has Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée status as a Swiss cheese. The exhibit wasn't all that exciting, narrated by a cow called Cherry, with not all that much information about the region or the cheese. Though we do get to see the cheese being heated, pressed, bathed in salt, and ripened on shelves, with a robot which went down the aisles flipping and wiping all the cheeses.


After the fromagerie, we headed out to Moléson , where we headed took a furnicular up to a restaurant for lunch and then a cable car up to the peak, which had a wonderful view of the surroundings, despite the layer of pollution.


We then took the cable car back down to the mid station, and walked the rest of the way. It was a lovely, easy hike down, past lots of green grass with full of alpine flowers, surrounded by hills with ringing with cow bells.

Photo enhanced using iPhoto

Our next destination was the medieval town of Gruyères, which is the most touristic place I've seen in this country so far, with a very pretty main street full of restaurants and souvenir stores, a church, all of which is looked over by a chateau.


It also contains an H.R. Giger Museum which showcases the artist's paintings, sculptures, furniture and film designs. I actually haven't seen any of the movies, but I did recognise some of the work, which was quite interesting, though kind of disturbing. There was also a themed bar next door, which was very cool.

Photo taken from www.hrgiger.com

We only got to spend an hour in the town before we had to head off for diner by the lake in Rolle, which was very tasty, though not very many of us were hungry after the huge lunch we had.

If I had planned the day, I wouldn't have gone to the cheese factory, but the chocolate one nearby instead, and definitely wouldn't have had two three course meals in the day. But it was an enjoyable day nonetheless, and actually fairly tiring.

Report Time...

Since today is between a public holiday and a weekend, I decided that I would get some long overdue administration done and actually fill in a final report for my scholarship rather than let it sit in my inbox for another couple of weeks. There are always things one has to do when receiving scholarships, and one of these is usually a report in the form of questions to be answered/points to be addressed.

This one was fairly easy, I copied the bulk of it from previous phd progress reports, with the necessary adjustments to bring it up to date and make it more relevant to the scholarship.

I was stumped for a while on a question regarding What knowledge I have acquired in Switzerland that can benefit my country? Seriously, it's such a open question that I didn't know where to start, but luckily, I was only given 1000 characters to answer with, so came up with CERN is a unique laboratory, run by a council of representatives from 20 European Member States, employing around 2500 people, where scientists from some 580 institutes representing 85 nationalities come for their research. It is located just outside Geneva, a city that hosts around 200 international organisations. Living and working in such an international environment, I think the most beneficial knowledge I have acquired is how people from all different backgrounds and cultures can communicate, cooperate and collaborate. Which is a very nice sentiment isn't it?

They also had the usual comments and suggestions for improvement at the end, in which I was very careful to be very thankful for the scholarship and all of its benefits, which I am very grateful for, except for the part that it meant spending a year away from my boyfriend, family and friends, but that's kind of the idea of a scholarship which enables you to spend a year studying in a foreign country.

The only negative comment which I had was the fact that they didn't offer me the French language course, which I know they did to other scholarship holders who are studying in English. I know it's kind of my fault that my French hasn't greatly improved from a year of living in a French speaking area, but it is hard when all I know is enough to travel, but not enough to live and I don't need to use it at all on an everyday basis. *sigh*

Bike Ride

Today was a CERN holiday, due it being both a Swiss and French public holiday, for the Ascension of Jesus to Heaven forty days after his rebirth. It's a pity we don't have these extra Christian holidays back home. There's another one in ten days for Pentecost, whatever that is.

Anyway, I took advantage of the holiday and the weather to ride downtown and around part of the lake...


...and wandered around the gardens on the other side.


Open House Day on Saturday reminded me how pretty the lake front is and how I hadn't gone further than the jet on the other side, and while today wasn't clear, the weather wasn't that bad.

Austria not to leave CERN

New rumours floating around about Austria not pulling out of CERN after comments by the Austrian Federal Chancellor Werner Faymann in respose to the worries of Science Minister Johannes Hahn. Will probably get official information from CERN tomorrow.


Random note: I can't type Austria without typing Australia and then needed to do back and fix it. It would be easier if it was spelt more like the German, Österreich.

Lots of alcohol...

The plan for yesterday was a fairly full one... Firstly, it was Open House Day for the wineries in Geneva, a day when the wine made from the previous autumn’s harvest is put on the market and most of the wineries are open for tasting. Then there was a going away barbeque, followed by the Eurovision 2009 final. *grins*

Open House Day was fun. Seriously, how could it be bad with the combination of a lovely sunny day and free transport, food and wine? It was nice to be able to try more wine from the region since the wineries are usually only open for a couple of hours on Saturday morning for casual tasting. Swiss wines are fairly consistent. It's hard to find an undrinkable one, but it's also hard to find a really good one. Doesn't really matter for a tasting day though, since they all start tasting the same after the first few. *winks*


We decided to take the Navette Pinot Noir on the left side of the lake even though there are more wineries on the right side because none of us had ever been on those villages and they probably would be quite pretty with views of the lake and the mountains. We were a little disappointed with the bus, since the driver didn't know anything about the wineries in the area, and the bus didn't stop near them most of the time. But we did go through a village where we could see a few wineries within walking distance of each other and the bus stopped every close to them, so we got off to enjoy the wine, the sunshine and the picnic food which we brought with us. *smiles*

The barberque and party was also fun, despite me not knowing many of the people there. I was kind of looking forward seeing Eurovision live in Europe, though I didn't actually know it was this week until I saw news paper articles about how Switzerland didn't make it into the final in the Swiss papers.

Then I remembered the Russian singer, violinist and Olympic ice skater last year on what was probably the world's smallest ice rink in Finland. It was kind of weird watching the show with French commentary, though we could hardly hear it or the music over all the people in the room. But really, since Eurovision is more about the spectacle than the music, I guess we didn't miss anything by not being able to hear it. *winks*

None of us voted, but it was interesting to notice that the new voting system didn't really change the well known political pattern of countries giving the greatest number of points to their neighbours, or dilute the effect of immigrants voting for their home countries. Though the fact that Norway won with points from almost every country kind of validates the change, particular because it was actually a farily good song and performance, by Eurovision standards.

Too Many Meetings

ATLAS has lots of meetings. I think, if I actually went to all the meetings associated with my work, I would average about two a week not including my two group ones (one from each university I'm affiliated with). This fact has now been recognised by the management... and a "Meeting Optimization Committee" has been formed. You would think having a committee to do this would mean more meetings, but it seems that everything here has to be done by committee for political correctness or something. Let's see if this actually improves meeting efficiency...

Monte San Salvatore

The day was a nature based one, the plan being, a furnicular up the tallest mountain on the lake, Monte San Salvatore, and hiking down to another town and taking yet a another ferry back.

The walk along the lake front from the train station to Paradiso, where the furnicular base is, was very pretty, in between rows of trees.


The ride up the furnicular was fairly impressive, as we went from around 300m in altitude to 900m, where the view over the glacial lake was magnificent.


We followed the trail from the peak through the town of Ciona and to Carona, where we tried to find lunch, but instead found a botantical garden full of rhododendrons, which was lovely.


But where we couldn't stay long as we needed to get down to the ferry, which luckily we caught and had plenty of time to catch our train back to Geneva.


It was a really nice weekend. Lugano is a lovely town, though the whole area had a resort feel to it, with lots of multistorey hotels in the town, and resorts along the lakefront. But it was very pretty with the lake and the mountains, with all the green trees and flowers in bloom.

Lugano

The day started off well, with barely a cloud in the sky, though it was quite hazy. We walked down from our hostel near the train station to the centre of town by the lakefront, which looks very different than Geneva, because of its different topology, with mountains literally rising out of the water.


Our first tourist destination of the day was Swissminiatur, which we got to by the first of many ferries of the weekend.


As I'm sure I've mentioned before, I like models, so I was looking forward to a whole park full of them. And it didn't disappoint with over 100 models of Swiss landmarks, kilometres of working train tracks, moving toy cars on a motorway, mini paddlesteamers going around a minilake and working minicable cars going up to mini snow covered mountains.


The only issue was well, the sameness of all the models. There aren't really any major standout Swiss architectural landmarks, and all the cathedrals, castles, houses, chalets, town centres, farms, while they do have their regional differences are all fairly similar. There were lots of castles in which looked like the one below, though not all of them had ducks sleeping them. *smiles*


The most impressive model, which was big enough for people to walk through, even though it was to the same scale as all the others was of a building that wasn't even in Switzerland - the Duomo di Milano, which I unfortunately forgot to take a photo of the exterior. I'll just have to go see the real thing someday. *winks*

On the way back to Lugano on the ferry, we stopped by the exclave of Campione d'Italia which has some special tax status, and takes advantage of this through a large casino right on the shore, with this fountain in the lake.


After arriving back in Lugano, we strolled around the small town centre and part of the lakefront, in which I didn't really notice anything particularly spectacular, though it was quite pretty. We went into a free art exhibit at the cultural museum, which started kind of disturbingly with photos of deer with colored snakes wrapped around them, and ended freakyly in a small room in which was a swarm of dead flies on fishing wires.

We went to the tourist office to ask for information about the hikes around the area, as we had planned to do one the next day, and the girl there convinced us to do one that evening, the so called 'Olive Tree Trail' between two towns on the lake, Gandria and Castagnola, along which there were signs about the history, production and use of olive oil. So we got on our third ferry of the day and headed out to Gandria, which is a small fishing village built into a hill and followed the markers and signs back.

We caught the bus back to Lugano in time to catch the end of the a Swiss Classic Racing time trail in the centre of town, where vintage cars were tested on a very short track for consistency.

Arrival

Just a quick entry before I try to go to bed tonight. I'm not too sure how I'm going to manage that actually, I'm currently in a sixteen bad hostel room in Lugano, in Ticino, the Italian speaking canton of Switzerland.


In addition of the many other people in the room, of which at least one will snore, the outdoor seats and tables where people hang out are just outside the door, which is next to my bed, and additionally, we are close enough to the train station that I can hear the trains passing by.

Anyway, I am in Lugno for the weekend, to see what Italian-Switzerland is like, with another PhD student from CERN. Let's hope it lives up to its hype - it is where Swiss people supposedly go on holidays, probably due to all the advertising which depicts Ticino having a tropical climate, with lots of sunshine, palm trees and cacti. It is south of the Alps, so it is probably warmer on average tham the rest of the country, though I'm not too sure about tropical.

Russian Visa

Just got back from the Russian Consulate (for the forth time *sigh*). This time however, I came back with a Russian Visa in my passport. *grins*

Austria to leave CERN

Rumours are afoot about Austria pulling out CERN, with the Science Minister citing budget concerns "The 20-million-euro yearly membership in CERN makes up 70 percent of the money available in Austria for participation in international institutes and could be better used to fund other European project. The science ministry was aiming "to enhance Austria's research profile" by participating in a variety of projects across a wide range of disciplines, and while CERN's work was high-profile, Austria's role in it was rather limited".

This of course is bad news for CERN and the laboratory would be sorry to lose Austria as one of its Member States and sincerely believes that it would be in Austria's best interests to remain a member. Austria has an excellent tradition in particle physics and world-class capability in the field today.

Let's see what happens in the coming days/weeks...

Talk

For the past week, I've only basically been working on this talk. I wanted to show more results than I have here, but I had software issues and this is all I had.

This was the first time I have presented my sliding window work in a trigger meeting, and I think it was received fairly well. Though I believe this is because I went after another talk about alternative level two electron algorithm which wasn't as well tested.