Paris, and some other stuff
This is going to be a long, two week update, so buckle up.
Paris
On Friday March 22nd at 11 pm we hopped on a particularly full night bus to Paris. I'm not going to put a map because everyone knows where Paris is. At the Swiss/French border we were stopped two times by the border control, once by Switzerland, once by France. Each time they checked everyone's passport/luggage, and didn't even find anything interesting.
This slowed us down by about 1.5 hours, but we still arrived bright, early, and full of energy at 6:30 am.
First, we went to St. Chapelle. St. Chapelle is located in the middle of Paris, and is next to the palace that the kings of France lived in until the 1300s. It's very beautiful, and considered one of the greatest triumphs of Rayonnant gothic architecture.
Each panel of stained glass is a biblical story. There are so many of them and the detail is absurd. I wish I knew more about it so I could have followed along.
Paris is large. It was nothing like Venice, where you can walk from one side to the other in less than an hour. Using the metro was a must, since all of the things we wanted to see were miles apart. I'm not sure why they didn't just build all of this stuff in one spot.
We looked at a lot of art
After St. Chapelle, we went to the Louvre.
We saw the Mona Lisa, of course. It's such a famous painting, but not because it's particularly beautiful or profound. Leonardo Da Vinci painted it, but he has lesser known works that are far more interesting. Michael asked one of the security guards why this painting in particular causes such a wake of interest, and she also did not know, but said that it started getting popular when it was stolen in 1911.
The Mona Lisa was entirely underwhelming, but here I am talking about it, so I guess that it has in fact captured my interest in the end.
The marble sculptures were very impressive. Apart from their perfect detail, most of them are created at roughly 1.5 or 2 times true human proportions. This gives them a presence that would not be there if they were human sized or smaller, and it definitely conveys the grandeur of whoever it was being sculpted.
Something that struck me, and that may seem a bit obvious, is that the artists who created these sculptures were so accurate in their rendering, that the marble faces we're looking at today are nearly identical to the real faces 2000 years ago.
We could have spent weeks in the Louvre, but had a lot more on the agenda, including food.
On the way to the restaurant we stopped at a very cool place that I would definitely recommend on rainy days, or days that you think it might rain.
We ate lunch on Saturday at le Café du Commerce. It was a fun experience and the atmosphere was very French. They sang joyeux anniversaire (happy birthday) to two different tables, and we were kicking ourselves for not "having a birthday" today, because when they sang, the whole place erupted.
Yes, we ate snails. No, they weren't good.
We saw the sights, but there was still plenty of time to chill. I would say that Geneva is more visually impressive than Paris, but Paris is immersive and rich in ways that Geneva is not.
On Sunday we woke up early (again) to go up the towers of Notre Dame. A lot of Notre Dame was covered in scaffolding for repairs. The basilica is 856 years old, so it makes sense that its falling apart. My favorite part was the gargoyles, whose purpose on the outside of the church is still not entirely clear to me. Some have pipes in them for redirecting runoff rainwater, and someone mentioned fending off evil spirits or something of the sort.
The inside of Notre Dame was impressive. Sunday mass was in session as we were walking through the arcades with hundreds of other people. Somehow with the massive amounts of people, it was still tranquil and compelling.
Even though it was an hour outside of Paris by train, and the line to get in would be another hour, we decided to go to Versailles.
Versailles has got to be the biggest display of wealth ever. This building is absolutely ridiculous it terms of ornamentation and scale. Just looking at it made me want to scale the walls and behead Louis the 16th myself.
We didn't have long, so we made sure to visit the most famous parts, including the hall of mirrors.
Of course we took the obligatory hall of mirrors mirror selfie. These mirrors have seen a lot of important stuff. The treaty that ended WW1 was signed in this room.
Next we went to the Orangerie to look at more art. The Orangerie is most famous for having 8 of Monet's waterlilly murals. They are breathtaking.
We finished the day on top of the Arc de Triomphe with the sun setting and the Eiffel tower in the distance. It was a nice way to end, and it gave us time to mentally prepare for the night bus back to Geneva.
AMS Control Room and the Dune Experiment Prototype
On Friday, before Paris, we got to visit two experiments at CERN.
The first experiment is a cosmic ray detector looking for antimatter and dark matter, but it's actually not at CERN. AMS (Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer) is attached to the International Space Station. We unfortunately weren't able to schedule a visit up to the ISS to see AMS in person, so we went to the control room located at the Prevèssin site instead.
In the above picture, you can see astronauts on the ISS suiting up to go on a spacewalk. They were going outside to change batteries on a solar array and some other astronaut stuff.
We could hear them talking and getting ready through the transmission. It was awesome.
The guy who was talking to us has worked on AMS since its conception, so he knew all the details, and highlighted all of the engineering and technical challenges that they faced in putting a particle detector in space. It's very complicated, and as a result AMS was not finished on time. This was a problem, because it was supposed to go to space with the Space Shuttle program, which was supposed to be finished before AMS was complete.
In the end, George Bush commissioned one last shuttle launch to take up AMS in 2011. Since then it has been up there sending data to CERN and many other institutions.
Next we went the the DUNE experiment prototype building. DUNE stands for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, which sounds incredibly bad ass. Neutrinos are the second most abundant particle in the universe, second only to photons. Just as a reference, there are about 10^11 (100,000,000,000) neutrinos passing through your body every second. They are incredibly common, but don't like to interact with matter very often, and consequently are difficult to study.
The detector we are sitting in above is a prototype detector that will eventually be filled with liquid argon. The detector takes advantage of extremely strong electric fields (we're talking like 300,000 volts), and the fact that Argon is a noble gas (or liquid) to detect neutrinos more efficiently.
For Argon to be a liquid, it must be cooled to -186 degrees Celcius. That's pretty cold. So cold, in fact, that with normal fluctuations the air around the argon will freeze. It's mind bending to think of the air we breathe as being frozen solid.
This experiment will actually take place in the USA, underground in South Dakota.
Château du Crest
On Saturday afternoon we toured a vineyard in a nearby town called Jussy. It took only 20 minutes to get there from Rue Muzy, but it felt like we were in a different place entirely. It's crazy how seamless and quick the transition from city to country is here.
It was so nice enjoy the day and passively listen to someone talk about the history of wine making.
In addition to wine, they also raise pigs. The pig farm was smelly and a little bit sad, but they treat them relatively well (compared to US standards).
Switzerland is so beautiful.
Keep an ear out for Me and Tolu's next mixtape.
Apparently the circus is in town, so on Saturday night we went to Plainpalais and rode the rides. It was a great time.
If you've made it this far, impressive. Thank you for caring.