Updates! (CERN, snow, and life)

Haven't made a post for a while- I have already been here for nearly two months, and the final month is coming up. I had always been hoping that I would spend my time in the most effective and memorable ways, and looking back the last two months, I think I am half and half; I know that I could not have gone different ways, but still I feel regrettable a bit.

My life pattern every week has not changed much. On weekdays I work from nine to five (though it somewhat depends on me.. lol) and I mostly focus on having proper meals three times a day and having enough sleep at night. Wednesday is the grocery day for me- after work, I go to Coop on Rue Caroline with my eco grocery bag. I had been to another Coop on the opposite direction, but it was too small and they did not have everything I wanted. Enough food to sustain myself for a week is worth about 28-35 Swiss francs. Sometimes I buy something extra, like a pair of earphones or occasional sweets, but the total amount never exceeds 50 francs.

The photo below is an ordinary sample of my groceries from about a month ago - a pack of butter toast, carrots, apples, cherry tomatoes, sweet potatoes (although they are gone now..), yogurts (Perle de Lait, my favorite label. In a family pack!), salad greens, and a box of fig cakes (imported from Serbia.. haha). Plus two *free* yogurts from a promotional sales booth.

On October 27th (Saturday), I went to CERN, or Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucleaire in Genève. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN) H.S. from the church was working there and he proposed he would give a tour of his workplace for people who sign up. So I signed up, and on the Saturday morning I headed out to Gare Cornavin to meet two other people. From there, we took Tram #14 and descended at the last station (CERN).

The place had appeared in the movie "Angels and Demons" as a secretive lab doing some kind of top secret research. But unlike in the movie, the place itself was a serene building complex with ordinary scientists doing their work. It was really huge so it was impossible to take a look at everything they had. Nevertheless we visited the exhibitions, labs, and control centers, and listened to H.S.'s explanations on the work the lab is doing. The research was so multifaceted and in a humongous scale that it took a while to process everything in my head haha.

"The Globe"- the most famous building in CERN open to the public as an exhibition & convention center.

Cafeteria in CERN! There were so many options...

The main control center for the accelerator.

Inside the Globe.
There are speakers installed inside those sphere-shaped chairs so you can listen to explanations in various languages.

Impressive questions posed on a wall, inside the Globe.
Where do we come from? What are we? And where are we going?

The first WWW server! WWW and HTML were first invented in CERN for research purposes.

At the very lab where WWW was invented.

In another lab on the French side.
Because the accelerator was 27km in diameter, we had to drive about 15 minutes beyond the national border!

The original plan was also to take a tour 100m beneath the land surface and get as close as we could to the accelerator itself, but somehow we couldn't. The tour took about three-four hours in total, and after we had come out, it had started snowing!

The snow started out as a mix of raindrops and snow, but the flakes started to get bigger and bigger as I approached my home back in Lausanne. And finally, as I descended from the métro in front of my house, it was snowing like crazy!

The sky became dark as I got home so I couldn't take a good look at the snow, but the next morning I could not believe my eyes. The world was literally snow white! It was actually a snow "storm"- overnight I had actually woken up to close my window panels because the snowstorm was so strong and kept shaking the windows so hard.

And then, this kind of sight right in front of me! In the middle of October! I felt so blessed because I so longed to see the snow while I was staying here :) hahaha. Snow all around- that is how I wrapped up my October here in Lausanne.

On the last day of October, my friend J.L. (who is attending Haute École de Musique in Lausanne) was having a semi-solo performance in Conservatoire de Lausanne, so another friend and I went to see it! After the performance we spent the evening chilling in a bar inside Lausanne Palace, a hotel in the city center. My friend from Genève slept at my place for the night, and the next day we all met again and went to Ouchy to hang out. It was a refreshing two-day break :)

This is about it for updates! November here is getting colder and colder, and I already took out the thickest clothes and winter garments I brought. Last week the temperature had gone below zero Celsius, but it is a bit warmer now, thankfully.

I am still making plans for this month, but right now I am thinking about visiting cities farther than those I've been to, like Strasbourg, Milano, Zurich, Lyon, or Basel. I know I can't go to all the places I have on my bucket list, but I am gonna try as much as I can!