Day 30: Geneva – Cern

This morning, we woke up at 7.30 and went down to breakfast. The breakfast at this hostel goes 6.30-9, so we’ve been finding that we need to get up a little earlier then needed at past hostels. We took our own muesli down this morning so we could have it with the yogurt provided by the hostel. We’ve noticed a number of people taking 6 or more pieces of bread and packing it away to take for lunch. This is, of course, extremely discouraged, and bread only costs 1fr from the coop, so we don’t do that (though we have been known to take a butter packet or two in the past to use for cooking later on).

After breakfast, we prepared for our day, and headed out to hit the grocery store before catching the tram to Cern. We decided to have a fruit + veggie lunch, since we’d had a lot of bread with our breakfast and fondue last night.

We caught the number 18 tram to Cern. The trams around here are very fancy – they run very smoothly and quietly, and have screens inside saying what the next few stops are. We have noticed during our trip in Switzerland that most of the trams have clear markings saying that they were made by Bombardier.

When we finally arrived in Cern, we were a bit confused about where to go. There were a number of buildings around, and a building that looked touristy, but a big gate prevented us from going near it. After a bunch of confused walking around, the gates opened, so we went inside.

Back when we planned our trip to Switzerland, we had planned on getting a tour of the LHC at Cern. The website said we needed to book in advance, and that they needed 5 days to process the request, so we made note of it. Approximately two weeks ago, when we were already in Switzerland, we decided that we might as well book our tour, so we filled our the individual request form. We received an email back indicating that they were fully booked until June 21st. We were obviously pretty upset about that we would clearly not be getting the tour we had anticipated so much. Upon further investigation, we found that all the tour does for you is allow you a chance to see the Atlas control room; you don’t actually get to see a whole lot unless you are with a large tour group. So we went to Cern and saw the exhibits, and decided to be happy that we at least got to see something.

During our visit, we saw 2 exhibits – the Universe of Particles exhibit, and the Microcosm exhibit. (They were in two different buildings, and after finishing up in the first one, we asked a “guide” about where to find the second one). The exhibits were perhaps not as exciting as a tour, but they were still enjoyable. The first one, the Universe of Particles, was pretty high tech, with many touch screens and a media show that projected images over the entire room. Here, we learned about the physics behind the LHC, and what each of the experiment centers aims to learn. This exhibit was located inside a dome-like building.

The Microcosm exhibit was much less high tech, and clearly much older, as many of the electronics didn’t seem to work anymore. We learned a bit about the history of the LHC, how it came into being, a bit about all the components that are used, and saw a lifesize portion of it. A few pictures:

When we had finished up with the exhibit, it was almost noon and we were feeling pretty hungry. We got on the tram to head back and had a couple carrots while we travelled. Mary did not find this particular tram trip very present, and felt extremely motion-sick by the end, so after getting off the tram, we found a bench in a pedestrian area, and sat down until Mary wasn’t feeling quite as bad. We then made our way to the English Garden on the other side of the river to have our lunch.

Lunch today was 500g of Strawberries split between us, and the last few pieces of bread left from yesterday. We also had the carrots earlier, and apples for later (which we never ended up eating – we’ll have them tomorrow). When we were finished, we went to the coop to begin our souvenir shopping.

In the coop, we purchased 2kg of chocolate for 15.70fr. This will all be travelling back to Canada with us, and I’m sure it will be shared when we get home :). We spent another hour or so visiting various tourist shops, without much success. We both want to bring home a few things, but we’re terrible at decided what to bring, and at sucking it up and paying the outrages prices for things. We ended up walking back to the hostel empty handed. We were also partially worried about the chocolate melting as it was extremely hot today (high of 29 degrees), and we desperately wanted to get out of the heat. We were back at the hostel for an hour or so, during which Jeff read a book, and Mary played some solitaire on the computer (she’s finished both the books she brought). Once we had cooled off and planned out a few places to try, we headed out to attempt some better shopping skills.

Jeff failed at purchasing anything again, but Mary managed to get a coffee table book, with lots of pretty pictures of Switzerland, and a bit of writing that explains some of the pictures and traditions. She’s looking forward to browsing the book when we’re back home and remembering our trip.

Around 5pm, we decided to start figuring out dinner. We had already looked at the meal the hostel was going to serve, and since it largely involved mushrooms (which Mary will NOT eat), we decided to do a pizza+salad meal again. We went to the coop and got a bagged salad, bottle of wine, and salad dressing, and then headed to a nearby pizzeria (with excellent reviews) to get ourselves a pizza. They informed us that they didn’t make pizza until 6pm, so we walked back to the hostel and wasted some time.

At 6pm, we headed out and ordered our pizza with Tomato, Mozzarella, Eggplant, Zucchini, and oregano. They made it while we waited, and it looked amazing – covered in lots of toppings. We tried to talk to the people making the pizza’s while we waited, but language difficulties were a bit of a problem. They had a pizza advertised that had Tomato, Mozzarella, Cream Cheese, Bacon, Sesame, and Maple Syrup. We had never seen anything like it before, and had many questions about it. Unfortunately we didn’t get many answers, but they did show us the bottle of syrup confirming that it came from Canada. We’re definitely curious about how a pizza like that would taste, so we might end up going back there sometime before we leave to give it a try.

We ate our dinner in the picnic area of the hostel. We opened the pizza box and dumped the salad on the lid. Our hostel gave us water glasses in our room, so we brought them down and used them for the wine, rather than drinking it from the bottle (which would be a terrible thing to do to a nice, but cheap, bottle of Italian wine!). We got a few funny looks from the people across the room. I’m sure everyone thinks we’re nuts for eating food the way we do :p. However, including the wine, our dinner cost about 25fr total, which we think is pretty good considering we have no kitchen.

By the time dinner was done, it was after 7, so we headed up to our room to spend the rest of the evening relaxing and writing the blog. Jeff pulled out the 85% coco chocolate that he purchased today, and we’re having that as our dessert.

It looks like the rest of our time in Switzerland will be pretty wet, as the forecast is calling for rain. We’re hoping to get to Lausanne tomorrow, where we might hit some museums and do some shopping. We aren’t quite sure what we’ll do on Wednesday yet, but we might end up doing a day trip north from here into an area that we have been unable to visit yet.

Mary tried to play some solitaire the old fashioned way (with a deck of real cards) while Jeff sorted through the pictures on the computer, but she was getting pretty frustrated when she kept losing the game. Finally, she realized that the deck appeared to be missing some cards! Upon further investigation, it turned out that the deck had no 7's or queens, and was missing a 5. Jeff claims it isn't his fault, since he just grabbed it from his "box of stuff". Good thing we haven't tried playing any complicated games till now!