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This way to the Eiffel Tower
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18 September 2005
I went to the second closest Metro station to find that a Sunday market was on, so I bought some cheap bits and pieces. Nothing particularly worth mentioning but it was certainly interesting. I'd recommend going to a market to any tourist who wants fashionable French clothes, handbags, perfumes, or cheeses, at a decent price. Out of those I'm only interested in the cheeses, and I can get plenty of those in Switzerland. To be honest I'm not really a cheese connaisseuse either, but I'm willing to learn.
I bought a one week ticket for the public transport, but it wouldn't be valid until Monday, so I walked to Champ de Mars and took some pictures of the Eiffel tower, Ecole Militaire, and the peace monument there. Then I bought a five-day ticket to the batobus, a hop-on, hop-off tourist boat which stops at eight attractions and has slightly more commentary than a piece of toast should have Marmite. I did the complete circuit on that without getting off anywhere, intending to go again some other day and check out the sights. I took pictures of the undersides of bridges, since I wouldn't be able to do that without being on a boat. I could visit all the other sights easily enough via the Metro.
I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around by the Seine and the EIffel tower. I was amused to see a sign on the other side of the bridge pointing out the tower. It's really quite difficult to miss from that distance, so it's sort of like having a sign saying, 'mind the step' by the grand canyon. I took a picture of the tower and the sign.
Marc went on a Segway tour when he was in San Francisco, and I played on Woz's Segways when I was in San Francisco, so I know how much fun they are. However, having a rather scientific mind, I had to rule out the possibility of them only being fun in San Francisco. Just before leaving for Paris I checked the web to find out if there was a Segway tour of Paris, and there is, so on Sunday evening I booked a place on the night tour on Monday. Paris
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17 September 2005
I went to Paris by TGV (which is supposed to stand for 'Train à Grand Vitesse', but could equally mean 'To Great Vacations' or something.) It's a great way to travel... no take-off or landing, which means there is no time when I can't get out of my seat, or use electronic equipment. I didn't notice that on the trains between Regensburg and Frankfurt because the start of both journeys involved dragging my suitcase through several wagons trying to find my allocated seat. So, I had three and a half hours in which I finally made a start on the new organisation of my personal website, which I have been planning for months. Another advantage over flight is that the TGV is a lot quieter, so it's actually possible to listen to music without having my iPod at full volume. There's no exhilarating acceleration, though.
My first impression of Ideal Hotel was 'small'. The reception was small, the lift was small, the room was small... but there was really no reason for it to be any bigger. It had everything I needed, except the wireless internet access was broken.
That night I walked to the Eiffel tower to see it do its hourly twinkling. I've always thought the Eiffel tower looks like a big power pylon, but I have to say, at night it's the prettiest power pylon I've ever seen. I'd put up pictures of it looking pretty, but according to the Eiffel tower website we're only allowed to publish pictures of it during the day, not at night. The pictures on that site are better than mine anyway. Mathematics is the universal language!
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5 September 2005
Wherever you go, people won't understand it. I just went to another Discovery Monday, this time all about Einstein's theories and the many experiments that probe them. I was amazed. Not by relativity etc, I already knew about that and keep it as part of my normal background level of amazement. But by the fact that even when people were explaining things in French, I understood almost every word. Now, my French is far from perfect... it's a long way from even being good. But when they talked about physics, computers, and mathematics, I understood perfectly. Probably because I knew the stuff they were talking about, most of the technical terms are the same in French (just pronounced differently) and half of the presenters weren't native French speakers themselves. But even with all those factors, I was surprised, since I'm sure I couldn't understand that well at previous Discovery Mondays. I must be improving, somehow, in the absence of French classes. Well, I have been listening to French songs and reading the forums on WordReference, and I've almost finished reading the bilingual (and very much abridged) version of James Joyce's Dubliners. But I don't think I understand ordinary conversational French as well as I understood all of that stuff about Einstein@home, relativity, gravitational waves, black holes, dark matter, etc. It was the best Discovery Monday yet.
Funny things happened on the way to the forum
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4 September 2005
Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of Forum Meyrin. I knew something would be going on from 7:30p.m, so about ten minutes after that time I finally got around to leaving the apartment, intending to take the bus the two stops to ForuMeyrin, and found that there was singing and dancing right across the road from my place. After watching some musical, and amateur-circus-like performances, the crowd moved on in a parade toward ForuMeyrin itself, along the way somehow magically acquiring other 'chars de carnaval' (That's French for 'float' but I think that 'float' is a weird word for a thing that goes along in a parade, and I've only ever read about them in American books. As there have been three parades since I got here, it seems like I'm going to have to refer to those things a lot, and frankly I'd rather call them 'chars de carnaval' instead of 'floats' even though a float generally has more precision than a char.) It was pretty weird. Among the procession were:
- Somebody pretending to sneeze while sitting on a huge fish mounted on giant wheels propelled by people doing the hamster thing inside them.
- Two giant skeletons, smoking cigars, with birdcages for chests. The birds therein looked pretty dead as well. If you needed another reason not to smoke, this is it.
- A carriage drawn by two halves of a giant zebra, and steered with a steering wheel.
- A mermaid sitting on top of a ball-shaped metal frame held up by giant hands
Once we got to ForuMeyrin, some of these were hoisted onto a huge frame to create something like a giant mobile. They proceeded to perform trapezoid acts (like a trapeze, not a trapezium) while some men in dresses with giant cowbells where their tits would be played music and ate cheese, and people danced around in circles. One of the men who was wearing a dress mooned us, thus demonstrating that he had no pants on.
Yeah, Switzerland is pretty crazy... and I like it that way. After the performances I wandered around various stalls where people were selling food and other stuff. They actually had Swiss rolls, the first I've seen in Switzerland. I just had some kind of tart and a croque monsieur, which is a really fancy way of saying a ham and cheese toasted sandwich.
Also, a couple of times over the last few weeks I went up the Salève and took pictures of Geneva from above. Unfortunately, both times it was cloudy, and apparently also windy, since the famous jet d'eau was turned off, so my pictures aren't exactly postcard quality. There's a couple of nice cafés up there though, one of which offers parapenting lessons. The second time, there was a little boy going up in the cable car at the same time as me, whom I was sure I heard say 'sugoi' (that's Japanese for 'great!' and also the brand of Canadian Carla's jacket) to a man who then responded to him in French. The kid seemed to understand, and responded with 'kawaii' (Japanese for 'cute') and I began to think that I was not imagining the fact that the kid was speaking Japanese. The man continued to speak to him in French, so I assumed that the boy was just being extra sociable and did not actually know the man. He went to the other side of the cable car and spoke Japanese to a women, who seemed to understand him but also spoke to him in French. Man, woman and boy exited the cable car together, and I heard the kid say in Japanese that he wanted to see the mountain. I was pleasantly surprised to conclude that the boy was in fact French/Japanese bilingual (what an interesting combination! At least he'll never get confused about the words for 'bread' and 'persimmon' which are the same in both languages) but preferred speaking Japanese no matter how much the people I presume to be his parents spoke to him in French. I was even more surprised that I understood everything this kid said in Japanese, even though I've forgotten most of the Japanese I learnt at school, and I can't understand much of what even very young kids say in French or German (but German-speaking kids sound so cute!)
Aah yes, on the way to the cable car I took a picture of the road sign for 'New Zealanders' Way' which looked like it might possibly have been a more difficult way up the mountain. On the subject of New Zealand, I've booked my flights to go back there for Christmas, and also visit Chris on the way. You can see the details on my itinerary page.
I even took videos of the ForuMeyrin thing, with my new camera, but I haven't uploaded them yet. For now, here's my first panoramic view of Geneva and neighbouring France. Don't forget to scroll sideways.
Fêtes de Genève, and more travel coming up
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18 August 2005
The next day the festival was still going, of course, so I wandered around doing typical carnival things like eating candy floss (which they call barbapapa, from barbe-à-papa, which means 'dad's beard') taking pictures, and riding on a ferris wheel, and the biggest portable roller coaster in Switzerland. On the ferris wheel I met an English family, the father of which works at CERN. On the roller coaster I realised I'd never been on a roller coaster before.
I took a few pictures of the scenery. My favourite is this one of the Jet d'eau with the sun behind it, but then, I always prefer pictures with the sun in them. I think the best picture I've ever taken is this one of the Saugeen River. Perhaps it's my habit of pointing my camera at the sun that has caused so many of its pixels to die... which is one reason why I bought a new camera the other day. It's better in almost all respects than my last one, and that was actually quite difficult to find... it seems like the majority of digital cameras still only have 3x optical zoom.
This paragraph is for geeks only... I also bought a new iPod. The old one was working until I got a Swiss credit card, celebrated by buying music from the iTunes Music Store, and promptly filled my iPod just far enough to make it write over the bad blocks. That's happened a couple of times since the last time I dropped the iPod on the floor, but the other times I was able to reformat it and use it again. This time it took several days and several restores before iTunes could see it. During the time when iTunes couldn't see it, I installed Linux on it so that I could get some music on it with not much more difficulty than normal, but I had pretty much given up hope of continuing to use it as a music player. So I bought a fancy new colour iPod, and intended to use the old one, with Linux, as a portable multilingual dictionary and general reference book -- using the file browser and a little Cocoa app I wrote to split large dictionaries into small, iPod-readable files in folders, like this. Unfortunately, since I got that working poor old I/O Silver has not even mounted as a disk. I thought about using the Notes feature on the new one for the reference idea but it can only handle 1000 notes. Perhaps I'll install Linux on II/O Silver (the new iPod) but since it's not yet officially supported on the new ones, I won't do that just yet.
Last night the Summer Students put on a 'Big Bang Show' featuring a very amusing play called 'A Physics Carol'. It was all recorded so I assume it's webcast somewhere but I'm not sure where.
Everyone else at CERN seems to be going on holidays, mostly to their home countries... how boring, just going from one home to another! The Greeks just got back from Greece, a couple of the Spanish guys went to Spain and another is about to go there, an Austrian left for Austria today, Bulgarian Boy just got back from Bulgaria, and I don't know where the German went but I think I can guess. The Italian who works in my office went to Italy a few weeks ago but is currently in New York. They ask if I'm going to New Zealand, but I think it would rather miss the point of a summer vacation. Summer vacation in itself is a novel concept for me, since I'm not used to 'summer holidays' and 'Christmas holidays' being separate. I'll go back to NZ for Christmas.
Anyway, since I went everywhere I ever wanted to go, and a few other places, last year, and I still feel like Geneva is a holiday, I couldn't think of anywhere to go. I could go anywhere in Europe so easily, but every place has something interesting about it, and nowhere particularly stands out. You might have noticed that I tend to travel to see people and incredibly geeky things like WWDC and CERN, rather than the places themselves.
Well, as it turns out, there is somebody I know whom I haven't visited yet... the weird Swiss guy from Zurich, a.k.a. Marc Liyanage. I was planning on visiting him in Zurich some time, until he mentioned he might be going to the event I so narrowly missed when I was in Paris for a day last year... the Apple Expo! Well, that's just the sort of thing I travel for. So I've registered, and booked the time off work, and I'll be going to Paris for a week in September. Perhaps I'll get to the third floor of the Eiffel tower this time.
Closer to home, I'm thinking of going up the Salève on the weekend, to take pictures of Geneva and France from high up with my new camera.
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