Kon-Fetti
On Saturday we went to Bern, the capitol of Switzerland. It was the last day of their carnival season, and so there was a lot going on. The people dress up as everything you can imagine and the children run around throwing handfuls of confetti at strangers. The confetti throwing is both cute and kind of annoying because you have to be on your toes the whole time looking out for little elves running around wreaking havoc.
It was a wet rainy day, but the festivities continued.
We got to go into the famous clock tower and look at how it works on the inside. It's cranked up every day by hand and has been running since 1530.
The ground was covered in confetti and there were bands marching up and down the streets playing an astonishing variety of songs. They would switch from medieval folk music to songs you hear on the radio, all on tubas, bells, and drums.
Bern is also where Einstein lived when he was working at the patent office and developing relativity. We went to the house where he lived ⇩ and got lectured to by a guy who looks suspiciously like Einstein himself. The house is on the main street in Bern where the parade was taking place, and consequently it was very very loud. It was comical and pretty difficult to pay attention to the derivation of the time dilation formula while All Star by Smash Mouth was being blasted on the trombone right outside the window.
We tried Swiss street food. Pretty good. 8/10.
UN
Another significant organization that is based in Geneva is the UN. The building is called le palais des nations and was originally built for the league of nations after WW1.
I don't really know much about it, but it was pretty cool. A lot of important stuff has happened here.
Bebe Foot
is how you say foosball in french.
Ben organized a petition to get a bebe foot table for rue Muzy. He wrote a cover letter outlining why we wanted it and he went door to door collecting the signatures of every single resident (57 students and 3 RAs). Two weeks later there was a table in the basement!
We had an inaugural tournament, the "Foosball Friend-zy," on Sunday.
Botanical Gardens
We went into the greenhouses at the botanical gardens. When you open the door there is a thick organic smell that blows back your hair and fogs up your glasses, lenses, etc... I'll say it, I miss humidity.
It's like they dug up a portion of the jungle and stuck it in a glass box.
Nyon
Nyon is nice. It's quiet and has a small town feel, but there's really nothing it has to offer over Geneva, so I'm not sure if I'll go back.
I finally got to see the part that I am working on. Usually it's 100 m underground with protons flying through it at the speed of light, but right now it's hauled out for LS2 (long shutdown 2) and they are running all kinds of tests on it.
The purpose of this machine is actually to suck energy out of the beam. It does this with little devices called couplers that you can see on the sides. The couplers target electromagnetic resonances at high frequencies. These high frequency resonances (HOM) cause the phase velocity of the proton bunch to exceed the speed of light, which is undesirable for acceleration. This machine removes them and reduces the phase velocity.
