Bonjour

I’m here.
Between settling into a new apartment, a new job and a new country, it’s been a pretty hectic few days. CERN is huge, much larger than I expected. Although I didn’t really know what to expect. I read Dan Brown’s “Angels and Demons” the week before I left to get some insight into the faraway place I heard about during meetings and lunchroom chitchat at Fermilab. Then I found out that like the book’s storyline, many of the lab’s physical descriptions were fictional as well. My office is technically in Meyrin, Switzerland. The site extends outward from here and across the border into France. And the 27 km tunnel that’ll be used for the LHC (a new particle accelerator that’s supposed to start up next year) covers all kinds of land. I took a tour of one of the LHC’s detectors, ATLAS, which was really cool. It’s 100 meters underground and still being put together. It looks like some of the other detectors I’ve seen, but on an even larger scale. The number of parts needed for these things always amazes me. The guide I was with described it as a big onion, which I think is a pretty good metaphor.
My apartment is in a high-rise building surrounded by a lot of other housing but not much else. From my room I can see one of the local mountain ranges, called the Jura, I think, and CERN. I share the place with Althea, a Jamaican woman who’s been here for nearly six years. She’s nice, but a bit strange. She’s very picky about keeping things super clean, and wishes people would wash their hands more often. I got a mini lecture on hand washing after coming back from the grocery store yesterday and forgetting to make a stop at the sink first. “You wouldn’t believe the things they do out there,” she said. The word “there” meaning Geneva. I’m not sure what those “things” are and how they could possibly be worse than anywhere else. I’ll let you know if I find out when I venture into the city this weekend.