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My first snowfall
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16 April 2005
Okay, last things first... I just walked out of the library at quarter to midnight to see this. In case you can't tell, it's snow, falling from the sky just like it does in fairy tales. Here's a better picture, taken from just outside the door of the hostel. I took other pictures as well, but I'm not supposed to use the internet for personal use here so I'll wait until I get my own place with my own internet connection before I upload them all. I wonder what it will be like in the morning.
The weird thing was, though (if snow isn't weird enough) that although it was very cold and rainy when I went out shopping today, I was not particularly cold while walking in the snow. I had the same warm clothing on both times. Perhaps it's the lack of wind. My supervisor mentioned on my first day that it's very peaceful when there has been a lot of snow, as the snow seems to muffle all the sounds or something. I can verify that it seems peaceful while snow is falling, and I think it's because white things are quite obviously falling from the sky yet there is no sound of things hitting the ground.
Snow has stopped falling now. I don't know how long it was snowing for while I was in the library, as I have no experience of how long it takes for a certain amount of snow to fall. Probably not particularly long. So I'm glad I happened to be awake and outside, and snowed on, during the time when it was snowing. For all I know it won't snow again in the entire time I'm here... I've heard it doesn't snow very often in Geneva (although it did in the month before I arrived.)
Now on to boring stuff... (yes, for once the weather is actually the interesting part, and everything else is smalltalk) I managed to meet three of the other EST fellows yesterday, although I can't think of anything in particular to say about them. One does hardware, one does physics (fancy that!) and I can't remember what the other one does. I still have to meet one of the Frenchmen.
I attempted to visit the other apartment yesterday, but I didn't manage to find it. I was not given a street number, only a vague estimate of how far to go from the bus stop and which way to turn, which turned out to be insufficient due to the large number of apartment buildings in the area. I've found several agencies and residences on the internet, which I will attempt to contact on Monday. The idea of buying a place is a non-starter, according to UBS's website I'd need a 20% deposit.
Meanwhile, today I went shopping, which was not terribly exciting except that I bought a gnocchi TV dinner. I'd never had gnocchi before, but I'd read about it in this cartoon so I was keen to try it. Intriguingly, it contained the same sort of weird spongy potatoes that were in a dish I had in Regensburg.
By the way, I was able to record the moof as my ringtone on the new phone. Now that the 'for a change' formula has reached its conclusion, I can't think of a title.
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14 April 2005
Today I went to another meeting, attended by about 17 people, three PowerBooks and three other laptops. We had a lively discussion on Finite State Machines. It must be difficult for the people speaking English as a second language to understand the other people speaking English as a second language with completely different accents. Even I had trouble at times.
I went to building 567 today for the Macintosh meeting of the CERN Micro club. You'll recall that I went to building 555 for it last week only to find out they were moving. Building 567 looked promising, it even had a sign on the door saying 'CERN Micro Club', however, after a conversation in broken English and broken French with the person at the reception there, I found out that the meeting was in building 30. That's quite far away (it's in a whole different country!) and I was hungry by then so I decided to wait until next week. The week after that, Tiger will be released, at last.
Since I don't know about the other apartment yet, I'm visiting a considerably smaller and slightly more expensive one tomorrow evening. And for a change, no change!
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13 April 2005
Today was a lot like yesterday. Neither day was windy, and on both days there was a digger digging up the front of the building I work in. Both days I met somebody I know in the restaurant, although yesterday I found Canadian Carla at breakfast (as explained, I'm not trying to make a point about her being Canadian) and today Bulgarian Boy found me at lunch (I'm not trying to make a point about him being Bulgarian, it's just that I don't know how to spell his name. I'm not sure I know how to pronounce it, either.)
On both days I didn't meet anyone I didn't know in the restaurant. Yesterday a message was sent to all the Marie Curie EST fellows explaining certain things, with all our email addresses visible. Soon one of the others replied to all (except the original sender) and the five of us arranged to meet in the restaurant today. I turned up at the appointed time and didn't see anyone. Perhaps they were somewhere else, I'm not sure. It's always difficult for me to recognise people I've never seen before, which is the main reason I have not successfully met up with anyone via the French Language Meetup Group. Anyway, apart from me there's a Greek guy and three French guys.
I haven't heard about the apartment yet, apparently a lot of people are interested in it, including one of the French EST fellows.
When I saw Canadian Carla, she wasn't sure whether she'd be going back to NZ the next day. Although she'd secured the funding and accommodation to stay for another ten days doing her Important Research, she was having trouble contacting the travel agent to postpone her flights. I know the feeling... I've found that the only way to get a travel agent's attention is to actually be there in the shop, and even then it takes at least an hour to get seen to, because the few staff are busy putting people on hold. And for change, a Coke!
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11 April 2005
I used up some of my 10 centime coins to buy a 500mL bottle of Coca-Cola today. 10 centime coins are annoying because they are easily confused with the slightly smaller half-franc coins, and the slightly larger 20 centime coins. Anyway, the Coke here comes in 500mL bottles rather than 600mL. The bottles look taller and thinner... you would too if you drank 1/6th less Coke.
Well, that was some pretty useless trivia, and since uselessness is the point of trivia (although, it could be said that not having a point is the point of trivia...) I guess that's a good thing.
The last couple of days have been pretty windy, to the point where it's difficult to open and close the door to my office, and it is necessary to close the door to the office to prevent the window from opening and closing all the time. Some time today the door to the outside closest to my office acquired a sign saying to use a different door. I wonder how the building Canadian Carla (I'm not trying to make a point about her being Canadian, it's just that I have to differentiate her from Kiwi Carla) works in is doing. It has a sort of balcony thing around it about level with the first floor (that's the floor above the ground floor) to catch falling windows. Apparently the windows are prone to falling out. Well, that's windows for you.
I went to a meeting today, which was attended by ten people, three PowerBook G4s, and a Dell laptop whose only purpose was to webcast the meeting. (It seems like they webcast everything here.) There's nothing worth telling about the meeting other than the fact that at least four (including me) out of the ten people attending had PowerBooks, but this is travelling.macintosh.geek.nz so I have to mention it.
I went to see an apartment (for rent) yesterday. It seems pretty nice, so I'll probably take it if nobody else gets in first. I'm just waiting for a call from the husband of the lady who showed me around. And for a change, some particle physics!
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9 April 2005
I knew that quarks come in different flavours, but until today I didn't realise that strawberry was one of them. These were found in stable groups of two, both the same colour and flavour, which is rather unusual even if one of them is an antiquark. I also discovered today that the Canadian flag is not an elementary particle... it decays into this when kept in a wallet, with a half-life of approximately 8.5 months. Perhaps that's how young Canadians get their first pieces of wood for attacking people with.
And now, the weather in brief. Today was fairly cold, but not rainy. A good day to be alive (in 2005.) This morning the Jura mountains were invisible, this afternoon they looked as snowy as they did yesterday.
While I was investigating a possible shortcut to the bus stop outside CERN, I found a room 404 in building 2. Remembering the rumour (roomer?) about room 404 being the origin of the web's '404 not found' error, I took a picture of it. I've sent an email to the creator of this page who has been informed that there is no room 404 at CERN. There may not be anything interesting about it, but it does exist, and it was found.
I went to the shopping centre at Balexert today. I originally thought Balexert might be some sort of pun on Palexpo, but it probably isn't (though I haven't been to Palexpo yet.) Perhaps somebody called Alex found a sneaky way of getting his name into bus stop names, and somebody called Bert copied the idea. Anyway, the reason I went there was that Carla (the Canadian one) had mentioned that's where she got her Orange prepaid SIM card, which is apparently the best value. I hopped off the bus, and followed some other people down some steps which seemed to simply lead to a ramp going up to the same level as the top of the steps. It turned out there was a secret passageway at the bottom of this 'valley', which went underneath the road and came out by the shopping centre. I continued to follow people as they went along by the side of a parking building to what looked like a dead end, but also turned out to have a secret passageway off to the side, which went into the parking lot, from whence we could enter the shopping centre.
It was a pretty big shopping centre. There were even 'street names' inside the building, so that people could find their way around more easily. And, just like on real streets, people were smoking. Inside a shopping centre! I found an electronics place and looked around for a while. It was easy enough to find the phones, and a charger for my Nokia phone. I have a charger for it already, but my NZ-to-European plug adaptor does not fit into the recessed sockets here. If any of you plan on going to Europe, make sure you get a plug adaptor with a thin sticking out bit. I don't recall having that problem in Dublin or Regensburg, so perhaps it depends on the building, or the country. Some day I'll wander over to France just to see if it's different there. Luckily only my cellphone is affected, because I got a World Travel Adapter Kit for my PowerBook, and my Newton charger (which was secondhand) had a European plug on it already, with a Europe-to-NZ adaptor. Both are the right shape for the sockets here. One cool thing about European plugs though, is that if you have two devices with bulky transformers which you wouldn't normally be able to fit one on top of the other in a pair of wall sockets, you can fit them both in by turning the top one upside down. It only works if the plugs don't have earth pins, but I've never seen any that do, in fact I don't remember the other sockets I've seen even having holes for them.
Now, back to the main story, and a bad excuse for a new paragraph... I could not, however, find the SIM cards by themselves. Somebody asked if I was looking for something (actually, he said something like 'look blah you blah blah blah blah?' in French and, as the blah-to-word ratio was too high for me, I said in French that I didn't understand him, and then he started speaking English) so I said what I wanted. He said they didn't sell Orange cards any more, so I asked which was cheapest out of the other two, and he said Sunrise. When I noticed that the SIM card together with the new adaptor for my old phone cost only about 10 francs less than the really cheap (and probably nasty) phone-with-SIM they were offering, I decided I may as well get the new phone, just for the fun of it. So I'm now the owner of a Sony Ericsson T230. It doesn't have a camera or some of the other rarely-used features of my Nokia 3200, but it has a few nice features. Actually, it has just dawned on me that I might not be able to record the DogCow's moof as my ringtone on this one. I sure hope I can. However, I am eligible to participate in Sunrise's hamster bonus program, whatever that is.
Next I went to the supermarket. While last week's essentials might only amuse those of you who have spent more than a few days in the same house as me, this week's should have a larger audience. Specifically, anybody who has listened to the radio series, read the books, consulted the Earth edition, or, especially, played the online game of The Hitch-hikers' Guide to the Galaxy. I have also made a picture which makes use of a few other things I had already acquired here in Switzerland to show explicitly how that other picture was made. And here it is from the top.
I also bought a tub of creme brulee, because I've read about it in New Scientist. Apparently it has a similar consistency to the surface of Titan. I'll let you know.
I will conclude with a warning for Macintosh users who are learning French and usually use the QWERTY keyboard layout. While you might think that it's a good idea to switch to the French keyboard layout and learn to type all those accented letters the same way native speakers do, I would advise that you instead learn to type the accents on your usual keyboard layout. Otherwise you might get a nasty surprise when you instinctively go to hit Command-A to select all... the Q and A keys are around the other way. For those of you who don't use Macs, Q stands for Quit. Maybe I'll add a Q&A section to this site just to put that recommendation into. Actually, I've been thinking of adding a tips page for other travelling geeks, since there are two tips in this post alone and I'm sure there are some in previous posts. Next Page |
