Which country are you from?

Its time to go and be horribly stereotypical! In the best of British xenophobic traditions I give you my own insight into the common traits of the worlds nationalities. Starting from the most northerly.

Russians - Ah, what a wonderful folk. Surprisingly, not amongst the biggest booze drinkers but really, really like a good party. Despite seemingly never being in the bloody office, manage to do their work with seemingly little effort. Likely suspected to not sleep at all and programme using reliable text to speech engines. Strange abundance of skinheads.

Norwegians - Ah the Norwegians, the teddy bears of the world. Seriously, these guys are amongst the friendliest, laughiest, generally happiest folks in the world. Imagine the West Country, but easier to understand and not smelling of farm. You almost want to take one home with you to keep in a cupboard as an instant pick-me-up.

Finns - Oh the Finns... the Finns. I have to sub-divide the Finns really into the stereotypical and the other. The stereotypical were... shy? Quiet? Reclusive. I'm told there were 7/8 Finns at CERN in the summer student programme. I met 2. One due to being one of only 30 other students there at the time, the other because of a damn near total cross over of interests (250 people and only three like poi? Fucking criminal I tell you). The former was quiet, like mouse quiet. And loved coffee. By the gallon. The later liked to talk, for hours. See, strange contradictions. I blame an insufficient sample size. More Finns needed for sampling, report to the station for summary examination. On the otherside, when observed the others drunk obscene quantities of vodka. Like water. May have explained the lack of contact. And the fire alarms.

Swedish - Riding the British anologies, travel north from Cornwall off into Wales. Those quiet but friendly guys that sit around in groups chatting, but looking a bit lost and confused when outside familiar surroundings. That said they have 3 modes. Working, sleeping and hiking, with most seemingly spent in the later mode.

Lithuanians - Mental, that is all.

Polish - An interesting group of folks the Poles. I'm starting to realise why they get jobs everywhere else in the EU. I don't think they sleep. Take one fine fellow named Piotr. Seem at 7am having breakfast. Being his usual bubbly self he was eating bread and jam (as everyone seems to. Buggers need a good bacon sarney. Atleast they would if you could buy bacon). 30 minutes later he was at work. At lunch he was having a good traditional wine and frogs legs (seriously hardcore was this man). Next seen at about 10pm, having dinner. "Where've ye been?" I inquired. "At work." was the response. Damn man, do you have no fun? 2 hours of discussion and much listening to Dimmu Borgir later and that was corrected and explained magnificantly. Likewise, the guy liked running up and down mountains. Frequently. Also had a good taste for fine wine and good vodka. And good soup.

Quebequois - Seperate from the rest of those freaky Canadians. Ok, this is going off of a sample size of one but it was a cool sample. Introduced to the funny world of the francophonie, with weird punk and a somewhat excessive quantity of pasta and fish consumption. And best sense of humour so far - "There's something inherently camp about the French. Even they're manly men just sound... gay."

Americans - Loud... very loud. Also like to express their opinions on anything and everything, great for a laugh, but possibly don't realise that sometimes they are the fun, not part of it. Ok, maybe that's a bit harsh, but ultimately felt very accurate. Something about them seems to shift from confidence in speaking to a conviction that every bugger in the world needs to hear about how awesome they are, which annoys my British-ness. And they haven't learnt why tea is better than coffee.

Germans - Ah, the Krauts, Huns, Germans whatever else you want to call them. Now I reckon if anyone's misunderstood its the Germans. The UK has this image of them being steely emotionless automatons, working away to outproduce the rest of world to oblivion with well made cars and other bits of machinery. Most experiences have pointed to this being mostly bollocks. For a start, all attempts at passing strong magnets near them produced no strange behaviour at all, not even near working electromagnets. Now they might occasionally move in a somewhat static, disjointed manner akin to something in need of oiling, but other than that they're quite nice folk, friendly, chatty (although the speaking in binary gets a bit much after a while) and with a fine knowledge of card games (although not much to match blunt gaming skill). I dare say the underestimated titan of the international world.

Chinese - These folk like partying, drinking and ever so often working. Ok, interactions may have been restricted to talking at parties, but that's as good a sample as any.

Ukrainians - See Russia but with a lot more vodka.

Dutch - They didn't get called the 'Social Backbone of Summer' for no reason. I don't think there was a single one of these guys that wasn't drinking beer by 7pm every night of the summer, apart from Organ lover. But he drank whilst playing the organ, so it still counts. The sheer quantity of beer consumed was immense, as were the practical jokes played after the consumption of said beverage. If I still had a copy of the photo of the table pyramid, I'd still be laughing.

Belgians - They're... Belgian I think is the best description.

French - Oh the French. They're an interesting mix is they. I think possible because CERN has French as one of their two official working languages but because 90% of the people speak English this causes a bit of a friction between populations. And by that I mean they rarely talk to anyone who doesn't speak good French. Ergo, zero sample size. Therefore determined mostly as likeable but odd.

Slovaks - Oh god the vodka. Oh god the beer.

Austrians - These would be my vote for teddy bear of the international community. To a manimal they were lovely folk, with an excellent taste in greasy deserts (fried potato pastries, not a dish to be missed). Even better than that they share a strikingly similar sense of humour to British people and likewise consume tea by the gallon.

Japanese - Like dancing (classical dancing, not crazy body wobble known from the dancefloors), and throwing people. Also somewhat creepily fast to latch onto anyone resembling a teacher of somekind. But always up for crazy adventure which is a plus.

Hungarians - To give a short summary - Mountaintop, vodka/whiskey and camp fires. In Winter.

Italians - Fun loving crew. Well more specifically, love their brand of fun and balls be it if your way is different. This is great when you match phases and then party for literally hours and hours on end. And then die, but still party. Not so much fun when they do a lot of whining about how you party but offer no better idea. That said, they know their shit about just about anything they do (fun fact, Italy has the second biggest group of people as CERN after the US), from cooking to techno/electro (and damn do they like electro). But this can be forgiven as they tend to hate Berlusconni as much as any right thinking person does.

Serbians - These are a very interesting group. Ok, so I only met one, but it was quite an eye opener as to what growing up in a war zone does to you. Speak to one if you get the chance.

Spanish - See the Italians, but more on the fun side and less of the whiney. Also strangely like folk music a lot.

Portugese - See Spanish but drink more wine than should be humanly possible. Best summed by a short three line skit:
"Can I have wine?"
"Here you go." Hands bottle of wine.
Lady walks away whilst turning bottle upside down and letting it run out without noticing. Drunks are funny.

Greeks - Industrious little beavers that party hearty. I think possibly the southern European equivalent of the Polish.

South Koreans - Possibly more computer obsessed than healthy. All the same, good party animals.

Ok so most socialising was done over either dinner or with a bit too much booze involved, but that makes this all totally accurate!

Let me show you my lab...

Time for a sneek peak at the dark bowels of CERN here. Situated in the darkest depths of building 9, Meyrin site lie two dark and dusky rooms. Filled with cruel machinations and horrible lairs. They are, my office and the AB-ABP-HSL lab! Oh yeah, even the acronym leaves you... confused?

A momentary aside here. CERN loves acronyms. You name it, they've got it. Want to see the LHC? Well you can follow the beam from the H- IS, down LINAC2, up to the PSB, with splits to the PS and LEIR, PS leading to the SPS, which flings shit off to HI-ISOLDE, Gran Sasso, LEAR and the LHC. Around the LHC you have ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, LHCf and TOTEM. That not enough? You have you AB, ITC, HR and others. Within the AB you have ABP, PO, RF, ATB. CC3, HSL, BBQ. Enough acronyms to kill a buffalo, or just require a permenant glossary. All the funnier when you realise about 90% of the staff work in the AB group.

But anyway, office and lab. The office first. Now you'd imagine CERN, place of wonder and sparkly stuff, to be filled to the eye balls with shiney new equipment and futuristic layouts right? Well, for a part you'd be right. The areas which the general public might see are filled with space-age designs, extravagant chairs and quite few nice paintings. Likewise, the computer centre is very shiney (for anyone curious it houses the Tier 0 LHC grid), and sounds like a 747 due to all the cooling. The rest of us poor plebs are situated in the dark beating bowels of 60s' era offices and work desks. There's more muddy brown coloured desks in this place than the rest of the world combined.

To give you a quick overview, CERN is not a science lab. Its engineering works. The scientists rarely live here, the engineers that build the machines do. Its all practicality, big machines and loud tools here, with the occasional building given over to visiting scientists (fun fact, of CERN's ~ 3500 permanent staff, probably less than 200 are physicists per se, most build shit).

To this background, it adds its own oddities. For instance, the lab I was working in, normal dry lab, with racks, electrical meters, giant bog rolls, a palm tree (!). Don't believe me? Here *will* be a picture (blasted bluetooth connectivity).

Like I said, somewhat strange. Even better, when I did experiments I did it by propping this tiny thing on top of a toilet roll about 2 ft wide. Epic!

CERN, it is quite a silly place.

Watching the stars at night

"I've got a fantastic idea!" She said.
"What would that be?" we said.
"We should go watch the Perseids at their peak!"
"Sounds like an awesome idea, could get a picnic or something and sit in a field." We thought.
"Well, actually I was thinking of somewhere more exotic..."
"On a building? Different town? What?"
"Well the Jura are only half an hours bus ride away..."
"And 1700 metres straight up..."
"There wouldn't be any cloud or light pollution. And we could say we'd spent a night on a mountain."
"Where it's cold, dark and we might get eaten by hungry cows?"
"Yeah!"
"So... when's the peak?"

Slightly paraphrased this maybe, but that's essentially the planning that went into one of the most awesome things ever devised by mankind, or climbing a mountain for the night for short. Just to cut short any hopes of enthusiasm of fantastic pictures of this night, almost everyone going up the hill forgot their cameras, to a man. Yeah, we were well prepared that night. Apart from man with the awesome camera that took some photoes of the sunrise. But alas, the plan was simple; turn up at a bus stop at 6pm, get bus to base of mountain, climb like mothers to get to the top before it got dark, seal selfs in sleeping bags and blankets to avoid freezing to death. Stages 1 and 2 completed without a problem. Stage 3 took a mild amount of time and the correct use of lots of swearing. For the uninitiated, hiking up a mountain 101 the rushed version.

3.1) Put on sensible shoes for walking long distances. Sandels are not acceptable. Walking boots are good. Barefoot fine, although don't expect any feet left at the end.

3.2) Point self in direction of path.

3.3) Follow said path until you start going downhill.

At this point you are at the top of the mountain. This is all well and good, unless you don't follow 3.2. We were provided with the directions of "Follow this path by a farm until you get to the top." When we came across our first 3 pronged fork with all routes going to the top, secret pacts of murder and ritual sacrifice began to be made (to be fair, these instructions were given by a guy with hair longer than mine and that one night went swimming wearing a toga. I rest my case.), and we started aggressively exploring the natural surroundings, i.e. getting lost.

Several badly chosen routes and about an hour later, we found a car park (Yay!) and some other climbers (double yay!) and some signposts (triple yay and a swig of rum!) which all kindly pointed us in the right direction to get up the bloody mountain. Turns out you can drive 3/4 of the way up it. Hiking, now even for the permenantly lazy. But alas, the rest of the walk up was thoroughly uneventful with clearly signed paths everywhere. Then we found a nice area of greenary, with a convenient copse of trees to block our the wind and keep us sheltered. Perfect we say, perfect!

Until about 12.30pm. For the uninitiated, the higher up you get, the colder it gets. Quite substantially colder actually, especially at night. Back to that lack of preparation; so at an early hour we realise just quite how fucking freezing it gets! You'd think 4 layers would suffice, but the world is insistent on proving us very, very wrong. But the French, the somewhat surprisingly prepared folk they are plan for this kind of stuff. The walkers amongst you will know about the tradition of mountain huts around the world. By crook or by hook, we'd managed to bunker down about 200metres from one. What's that convenience, you've given us a silver platter? Why yes, we will take it with excessive abandon. With a small smattering of French from our resident francophones (from Quebec and Sweden nonetheless) we managed to get the guys left in there to let us crash in the sleeping area, and they even gave us some cheese and wine!

A brief aside about these awesome people. They were an office-full of people from Geneva up here having a party. On a Wednesday night. On a mountain. And as a one up, after having quaffed 2/3 bottles of wine between about 8 of them, they were going to climb back down the mountain. At 1am. And people call me crazy... But they gave us cheese (Roqueforte if I remember correctly) so we can't complain.

But back to the point, hut, roof, walls, stove, cups, water, kettle, tea bags(!). You could call it stereotypically British, but there's nothing quite like sitting at a mile up, with a clear sky, watching a meteor shower whilst drinking tea (Yorkshire blend if you're interested). And what a meteor shower, peak rate of 2 per minute, running from SW to NE right across the Jura. A small part of me might have gone to the warm fuzzy place permenantly along with the giant bunny rabbits. About an hour and a half later, a lack of body temperature forced a retreat in doors and quick attempt at sleep.

You'd think that'd be enough awesome for one day, but of no. As mentioned, the mountains sit NW from Lake Geneva. That'd mean that the sun rose right over lake Geneva. I'll simply say, its a sight to behold, especilly with Mount Blanc just visible in the distance.

For a nice end to the saga, we decided to see how fast we could get down the mountain. Apparently you could run. We tried it. A couple of barbed wire fences and a an angry cow later, we found that it could be done in 30 minutes. Given it took 3 hours to get up(!), I'd call it a step in the right direction. One bus ride later and I was back in the office, only 15 minutes late. Passing out on the desk at 3pm suggested discretion was the better part of valour, and to bed it was.

Proof positive that entertainment can be cheap, and cold.

Wandering the darkened tunnels

For those that don't know, CERN is huge. I don't mean building huge, but HUGE. Think large town huge. On a good day there are some 20,000 people there. Well, I say people, 20,000 physicists, so a close approximation. As with all large places with people, you have to have the essentials of modern life; electricity, water, heating and network connections. This means tunnels to connect them... many many tunnels. Let me reiterate just quite how many tunnels there are here; alongside the 27km of the LHC tunnel, there are the tunnels for the SPS, PS and PSB accelerators, connective tunnels to every goddamn building in the Meyrin site, and a couple of random ones to old building sites. There're miles of them, and best of all, you can walk through most of them.

Now, students being students everywhere in the world decided to have fun with this and hide something in the tunnels one year. And then decided to tell the sucessive years about it. Taking a wild guess, this caused masses of us young whipper snappers to rummage around dark, wet (torrential rain has to go somewhere. Did I mention these tunnels house part of the drainage system too?) and none to fine smelling places to try and find a bottle of beer. A couple of bashed heads later, we found something. A scrap of paper (barely) stuffed in a plastic wallet. With a riddle, as always. Scribed on it with vaguely the following:

"Down the darkened winding passage, Beneath the humming ring,

Under the electric guard, The Holy Grail lies."

"Yay!" we could all think, "Another trek through the dark." So of course off we went hunting for... something, somewhere. We went down a dark winding passage (although of them are dark and winding...), went beneath a humming ring (you don't know stupidity until you see a sign pointing to a particle accelerator, a "Danger Radiation!" sign and then start wondering if you have to go past it), and found something electric (electrical supplies to the SPS, underground and with a tiny key lock to guard it) and..... no bottle of beer! Yeah, good times guys, good times. We managed to dig our way out of the tunnel, finding a not so suitably contained ladder.

Obviously some bastard had stolen our beer! But we'll come back to that. Now you might notice something from this tale, no mention of security. That would be because there was none. That's right folks, you can walk right next to some of the biggest pieces of machinery on the planet without having to pass security apart from the front gate! This would be one of the awesome things about CERN. Once you get past the front door with an ID (proof that you're smart enough I suppose), you can get just about anywhere that isn't an office. Want to see an ion source and the attached LINAC? Sure, just through that door. Climb to the top of water cooling tower? Sure, just 20m of stairs to ascend. Quite an amount of trust to put in a group of 250 students that regularly got trolleyed. Their assumption that we wouldn't break anything was astounding, and look what it got them ;).

Back to the tunnels. They contained many things, including a wonderful variety of shortcuts. If you knew the right path it was possible to jump out of people that thought they'd just passed you. This extending to security guards too until they started voicing their displeasure. Best of all was that there were entrances everywhere. If you knew where to look. Small bunkers by the road? All contain an entrance. Those little drainage covers? Entrances. Flights of stairs going in a building below the ground floor? Entrances. Best of all was the entrance right next to the main entrance. Walk down it, then run like a bugger to another exit, and then walk back towards the entrance with everyone very confused.

But anyway, that wonderful bottle of beer? Did we find it? Yes! On my final night there, on one final venture through the rambling tunnels with a couple of chums we found the goddamn thing! Wet (filled with run off from a thunderstorm, lovely), with a glass and completely drunk. Kind of a downer for the end, but eh, can't win 'em all.

I'm back, and I have a plan

Kind of. Right, I meant to use this as a diary of my times at CERN, but that failed spectacularly. I then subsequently meant to use it to keep tabs on my Master's project, which again went down in abject failure. So, I'm going to make one more attempt at using this thing for... something.

So, if I get around to it I'll have stuff from the summer (a couple of dumb projects and a trip to Scandanavia), and a diary of my PhD. And in the mean time, some old stories of the things this was originally meant to be about. But first I need to remember the bleedin' stuff.

Bananarama folks, bananarama.