Advertisement
Published: July 27th 2014
creepy kid
Took everyone on a tour of the Caillers chocolate factory. Yes, there were free samples. Also lots of advertisements showing pudgy, chocolate-smeared children greedily snatching at candy bars.The Student Prince
Technically, I'm not on vacation. Each night, when I get home from my teaching job here in Switzerland, I make dinner, and then sit down to deal with dozens of emails from my job back home. Often this keeps me up until 2 AM. I was relieved last Thursday when my lecture was scheduled for 1 PM instead of the usual 9 AM. Never the less, at 6 AM I woke up drenched in sweat and rushing for the door thinking I was late for class. It felt good to crawl back into bed. But two hours later my phone rang. One of the other instructors was calling from the train station. A student was having difficulty breathing. An ambulance had been called. Could I come as soon as possible? In five minutes I was on the metro speeding toward the train station, still dressing, still mostly asleep, struggling to remember where I was and where I was going.
I arrived at the train station minutes after the ambulance had taken the student away. Unfortunately, no one had thought to ask the ambulance drivers where the hell they were taking him. I used my iPhone
Pot Luck
Not much pot or luck, lots of computers, pasta, and wine though. That's my huge head bubbling up from the bottom of the picture. to locate several nearby hospitals. I visited each one, not wanting to call and have my embarrassingly poor French be the only channel of communication. This was a serious matter. At least if I were there in person I could augment my French with wild gesticulations.
It quickly became clear that my search strategy was inefficient and stupid. It was also easy for me to imagine some father's voice angrily demanding: where is my son? I gathered my courage and began calling hospitals. Surprisingly, it wasn't so hard. Within minutes I found him in a hospital on the other side of town, and within the hour I was standing next to his bed. A cute nurse with a pack of cigarettes peeking out of her pocket explained in halting English that the patient had had a severe asthma attack and would be discharged in a few hours.
Remarkably, I wasn't late for my 1 PM lecture!
Aside from occasional misadventures, living in the dorm alongside my students has been fun. Last week several of us went to the jazz festival in Montreux where we met a crowd of Swiss students from last year's program in San Jose.
Moleson
Took students on a cable car to the top of Moleson. I was amazed how quickly the two groups blended together. On a trip to the WC I met yet another one of my students, but there was something that my feeble brain couldn't grasp about him. As it turned out, he was a student I brought to Switzerland years ago who was now revisiting our old haunts on his honeymoon!
A few days ago my students invited me to a potluck in one of their rooms. Worried about their all-pasta diets, I brought a pan of delicious sautéed vegetables. Even the "vegetarians" wouldn't go near it. After dinner more bottles of wine were uncorked, computers were booted, and the students got busy drinking and working on my latest homework assignment. To repay the compliment, I went back to my room, drank a bottle of wine, and began grading their last assignment.
They call it stormy Monday, but Tuesday's just as bad
Between my two jobs and the near constant rain I have managed to snatch a few moments of vacation. From my room I can follow a tree-lined path to a beach on the shore of Lac Leman. (No one here calls it Lake Geneva, except for
parachute please
On the bus to Zinal this was the view out my window looking straight down into nothingness. people who live in Geneva.) I bring cheese, wine, Kindle and have a little picnic. There's a path that runs along the shore all the way to Ouchy (pronounced "Oochie"), the upscale lakefront of Lausanne. Last week I followed the path, stopping at cafes along the way. It's a long walk, so in Lausanne I boarded a train for the short ride back to the campus. When the train left the station one minute ahead of schedule, I knew something was wrong. The non-stop to Geneva was running uncharacteristically late, and I was on it!
I also managed to spend a day in Aigle hiking with my friend Rene. He's a modern-day Moliere. With his troupe of actors, he roams the countryside performing heady plays that he writes. He talked about the "rich density of life" as we walked through muddy fields past ancient Celtic obelisks.
Friday there was a more substantial break in the weather. I took a train to the town of Sierre, deep in the Rhone Valley. Sophomore year my hero was the poet, Rilke, who lived and wrote in Sierre. I took to heart the surprising last line of one of his sonnets: "...
Val d'Anniviers
At the top of the wall were vast meadows surrounded by mountains. You have to change your life." He died in Sierre supposedly after pricking his finger on a rose thorn. Maybe he's just sleeping. (News flash: late last night, without solicitation, my sifu in Santa Cruz e-mailed a Rilke poem to inspire me to keep up my kung fu practice. Coincidence? Surely not. Was I inspired to practice? Sadly no, maybe when I'm sober.)
From Sierre I took a bus to Zinal, a tiny town at the top of Val d'Anniviers (Seasonal Valley). The Rhone Valley has lots of tributary valleys carved by mountain streams that start high in the Alps. I try to make a point of exploring one of these valleys on each trip to Switzerland. I was intrigued by the claim in Rough Guide that the people of Val d'Anniviers only gave up their nomadic lifestyle a few decades ago, and then not completely. I didn't see any nomads, unless they were sleeping in their Audis.
When I boarded the bus I noticed that everyone was silent and grim-faced. As subsequent passengers boarded they made a big show of buckling their seat belts. Until then I hadn't noticed the seat belts or the big
Peaks and glaciers
A few hours by foot west of Zinal things got big, cold, and steep. sign at the front of the bus insisting that we use them. Ten minutes after departure it was clear why. The bus scaled a near-vertical granite wall by means of a series of switchbacks. Although the road was only wide enough for a single vehicle, it was, in fact, a two-way road, making it necessary for the bus to "pull over" to allow oncoming traffic to squeeze by. At times I literally could not see any shoulder between the bus tires and the beckoning emptiness that yawned below.
At the top of the wall the valley opened up into picturesque pastures surrounded by snow-capped mountains and dotted with traditional cabins made from dark rough-hewn timber. In Zinal, at the end of the road, I transferred from the bus to my feet. I walked for three hours toward the Zinal glacier. Here the valley narrows into a steep canyon. The trail crosses narrow bridges in front of rushing waterfalls. Of course there's a restaurant at the top of the trail, this is Switzerland, after all. God knows how they get supplies there. I did see a few helicopters flying over. The last few steps to the restaurant were the most
conubial bliss
Hutsul wedding scene, the couple that plows together stays together. difficult I've ever taken. My feet felt like lead ingots infused with little sparkles of pain.
Of course there have been days when lightning bolts zip by my window and the rain comes down in furious giant drops that hurt when they hit and bounce off the pavement for a second try if they miss. I chose one such day to stay in my room watching Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors on my laptop. Made in 1964, Shadows is a drama set among the
Hutsul people who live in the Carpathian Mountains, where I will be next week. It's on many people's top 10 foreign films lists. Not mine, however, mine is empty, unless Monty Python counts. I did feel virtuous watching it, and it is an encyclopedia of Hutsul customs, dress, and artifacts. Here's what I learned: Hutsul life is grim, winter is long, love is fleeting, sorcerers are untrustworthy, there are no Laundromats, and death is a relief.
CERN
Last Wednesday my students and I toured CERN, the gigantic proton collider buried 400 feet below the French and Swiss countryside. (We had to bring passports as the tour crosses the border several times.)
The tube
A rare glimpse of the CERN collider tube surrounded by a giant detector. After this tour we all had super powers for one hour. Mine: invisible to bartenders. In the tunnel below two beams of protons traverse an 18 mile circle in opposite directions. There are four places where the beams are brought together to allow the protons to collide. Huge cylindrical particle detectors wrap around these points. They capture the shrapnel from the collisions and pipe the details to laboratories above full of breathless physicists staring at computer screens.
Our guide was a CERN physicist who seemed less than enthusiastic about spending the afternoon fielding idiotic questions about the possibility of some collision ripping a hole in the space-time fabric that would swallow reality, or at least Geneva. (Okay, that was my question, but we have a right to know, don't we?) I figure if a CERN physicist leaves her Bunson burner on overnight or forgets to clean her test tubes, then the next day her punishment is to lead the tour. Two infractions in a week bring a caning, three a face branding, and so on.
In 2012, during my last visit to CERN, one of the pieces of shrapnel detected was the long sought Higg's Boson or "God Particle". (Say "God Particle" to a room full of physicists and watch them cringe.) What
Questions?
Where are our flying cars? Do you hate the pope? Will we get sucked into a black hole? is the significance of this discovery, you may ask. I have no idea, despite having it explained numerous times by specialists. I am met with scorn when I ask these same specialists the obvious question: so when will flying cars become available?
After the big discovery the lab was shut down for a two-year lube job and tune-up. They'll fire it back up in a couple of months. At first I was disappointed. But my disappointment turned to excitement when I learned that this meant we would be among the few people who get to take the elevator down to see the collider itself. If the collider was operating, this would be certain death! It also meant that we would get to wear hard hats!
The lab we visited has the unimaginative name LHCb (other labs had cooler names like Alice and Atlas). LHCb is trying to capture anti-matter. (Recall the scene from Dan Brown's
Angels and Demons when the pope's henchmen broke into LHCb, shot all the physicists, and stole the anti-matter so they could blow up the Vatican and blame it on atheists. Now that's what I'm talkin' about! Oh, did I forget to say spoiler
Big Jon
Best part of CERN tour: I got to wear a hard hat! alert?) But the LHCb physicists are fussy. They don't want any old anti-particles. They are keen to find the anti-particle that pairs up with a particle called the beauty quark. (Quarks are the stuff protons are made of and come in flavors with odd names: charm, strange, truth, beauty, and fudge. Okay, there are no fudge quarks, I made that one up, but at least it's a flavor.) In other words, they are searching for anti-beauty. If they succeed, it will be evidence that our universe has a beautiful symmetry that almost begs for the hand of an architect. If not, then our universe is simply one of infinitely many, each with random laws and particles. Ours is special only because we happen to live in it.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.224s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 21; qc: 90; dbt: 0.1358s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.4mb
D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
Switzerland
I've always wanted to go to Montreaux for the jazz festival. Glad your student is doing well. What a beautiful country.