GVA -> PRG

I am so exhausted that I am not even sad about leaving anymore. I said goodbye and hugged so many people in the last days as probably never before. I know I will probably see most of my friends again, but I doubt we will ever meet altogether...

So my flight to Prague was at 7 am. I ended up sharing a taxi with Stathis at 4:30. It took 15 minutes to go to the airport and cost about 35 francs. Plus I bought the flight ticket for 25 francs (low-cost Swiss Air) and paid 80 francs for an extra piece of luggage. So it was 120 francs for everything which is nice I think.

My backpack ended up being 17 kilograms heavy, which made my back really sore after the whole day. I put the beds next to each other again and left. I was really happy to go to the airport with Stathis, I would have been way more nostalgic by myself.

When I arrived to Prague, it was 15 degrees and raining. Even worse than the weather Geneva. But it's home now. And it will be for some time. I will stay in my hometown for a week and then I go back to Prague and to my "normal" life.

My super heavy luggage

Proud of myself for making the beds

Back to Czech

My Last Working Day And ALICE

So this amazing summer is officially over now. I finished coding and said goodbye to my supervisor Luca and my colleagues yesterday. It feels so awkward. I feel like I came here yesterday. How come it's almost September?

Luca was a great supervisor. But I will elaborate on this later. Now I want to just mention the gifts I got from him. He got me the CERN helmet! And a book about CERN in French. I need to practice French more :) I wish I could stay here a little longer.

Wearing the CERN helmet!!!

After I returned my key and CERN card, I joined a group of Czech guys from CERN and other Swiss cities who visited CERN and ALICE. The visit to ALICE was great. It's older and smaller then CMS and it is designed to study a different physics, more about the Big Bang. We had a great barbecue afterwards and I ate way too much... I met a bunch of interesting people who work and study in Switzerland and it just made me feel like I want to go back at some point. We'll see what happens...

My own dosimeter

Old-school buttons

ALICE is so pretty!

Underground

Helmets, helmets everywhere :)

The Most Expensive Thing I Have Ever Payed For: Swiss Housing

So I just payed almost 1800 Swiss francs (41500 CZK, 1500 EUR, 2000 USD) for housing at CERN. It would be enough money to pay for almost year and a half back in Prague. I must admit that the rooms at Strahov are not as nice though :)

Some rooms are cheaper here. It depends if you have a shared room and a bathroom. The point is if I lived in Geneva, I wouldn't get to spend so much time with the other Summer Students. Living together with everybody is a great thing. Just like back home in Prague or at Union in the US. It's so much fun and you can spend a lot of time with your friends, which I think is great.

So much money!

Greek Traffic

Oh.My.God. So this is what happens to your blog traffic when you write a post about Greeks :) I had like 10 pageviews from Greece before that. I'm really happy you liked it. Too bas that I don't have any more crazy ideas. As Dimitris said, that is best post so far.
I mean look at the top countries list and you'll see.

The Greek Invasion

There are Greeks everywhere at CERN. I've been so lucky to share an office with two of them: Dimitris and Antonis. The first thing that probably comes to your mind is the stereotype of the Greeks being lazy. Are you curious what I think about it? :) I think they are in general loud, friendly, and fun to be around. They do wake up and do almost everything later then the Germans though. But my point is they are really nice and I loved to spend time with them. I will miss you guys...

Crazy Greeks are a pretty big subset of the Greeks here

Seriously, I know so many Greek guys now... Besides my colleagues I got to know: Alex the great singer with a cut off ear, Nikodemos the Cyprian, Dimitris the handsome :) from openlab, Anti the Albanian Greek, Stefanos who spends all his money on food, Stathis the sane Greek, Maria the mean, Mary who can calm me down, Mary and Kostas from openlab,... I'm pretty sure I must have forgotten somebody. They are too many :) As you can see, I even know a lot of people with the same first names. Or maybe they are just not creative in Greece :)

You can have a look at my dear coworkers and their most famous quotes, to have some idea of who I worked with here :)

Dimitris, the worst singer of all time and master of all bugs in Geneva

A "cernfie" made by Antonis

I Am Too Lazy To Write A Proper Post Today

We went to a festival in Meyrin last night as it was Joaco's last night at CERN. So we went out with Luca, Julia, Mathias, and Anti. The whole place smelled of weed. It was so nice just to chill out, have some Chinese food, see some weird local people.

Luca was pretty sad about his roommate Yigit leaving and was asking everybody to sleep in his room so that he's not alone. After we came back to CERN Anti found out his hostel key card was not working, because he exchanged it for the working one by mistake. And I managed to break my key card by sitting on it. So after all the three of us slept in Luca's room.

It still feels weird that everybody is leaving this weekend but I'm more fine with it now. I think we will meet with the people who we want to meet.

Luca walking back to CERN

Summer Student Choir And Concert

I waited to write this post for a few weeks because I wanted to put the concert and choir together. And now I am super tired after the goodbye party last night and a little confused because my friends started leaving and it feels so weird. Ok, so I made a separate post about that.

One of the great fun things Summer Students do at CERN is starting random stuff. This includes dancing classes, playing games and instruments, giving lectures to each other on various topics, cooking events, traveling, partying, and singing. And I must have forgotten something for sure.

Eva started a choir. There were people leaving early and joining late but it was a great fun. I think it's always funny when you're bad at something but you enjoy it and work on it. And that's what happens when you learn a new song. You make weird sounds, struggle to remember the lyrics, make a lot of mistakes, try to remember how your voice is supposed to sound... I think we had a great time :)

Then Eva had the idea of organizing a concert and people joined and it ended up being a pretty decent performance. By the way, it took place in the main auditorium, where the Higgs boson discovery was announced two years ago! Other guys were playing violin, piano, a random Iranian instrument, jazz. The jazz guys even made a special Summer Student version of Summertime! It went along like: "Summertime, and the living is easy... You work at CERN... And your code doesn't compile... " Just amazing.

And our choir performance was also really good I think. Compared to what we sounded like in the beginning :) I promise I will add a link to a video of our performance later. There are some pictures from Adrian for now. Thank you everybody involved! It was really a pleasure.

Eva, Bartek, Beni, Marta, Laura, Johannes, Alex, Chiara and I

Time To Say Goodbye (Or See You Later)

So people actually started leaving. It feels so surreal. My roommate Sofia left in early morning. I will miss her even though she's crazy :) Or maybe because of it :) Take care and see you my dear! And there's only one Greek in my office now. My life is so lonely. Actually not, but I feel like it right now.

And so many friends left today or are about to leave... I really hope we will see again. And often! With all you crazy, less crazy, cool, and just great guys. Thank you for being awesome. Yes, I mean you if you're reading this.

Of course I know that people just sometimes disappear from your life and that it means there's place for other people to get closer with. But the knowledge does not help much really. I could probably write a post about how great this summer has been and make it sound more like "Don't be sad it's over, be happy it happened". But I just don't feel like it now.

I think I will just go to my room and cry now.

Nerds Or Cool Guys? Let‘s See!

Post by my little sister Pavlina and her friend Hana (Thank you!):

My sister Hana asked me and my friend Hana to write a post about people at CERN. The reason is simple. We are neither physics nor IT people so we can see the Summer Students from a different point of view.

So we made a few observations. It´s not any deep analysis, only some ideas that came to our minds. Of course we had some expectations based on stereotypes about people who work in a centre of particle physics research. And of course we expected lots of nerds hanging around. So are there nerds only or actually you can see a cool guy in data centre or at ATLAS detector? Well… You can make your own opinion after reading this :)

• At first, when Hana the friend and I arrived at CERN, it looked like an empty place. There is actually 5000 people working at CERN and also 300 Summer Students and openlab guys during July and August. This is how I imagine a melting pot. Thousands of people from different countries and no racism. All the nations working side by side. Maybe it's because Higgs boson has the same color in China or USA :-P
• Stereotypes say that at CERN, there should be much more guys than girls. It is true. A brief observation suggests 20-25 % of girls among summer and openlab students, which is still a good ratio. So every girl can have up to three admirers (so that the girls won't envy each other). Even though there could be a rough battle about women, the guys are mostly very nice and treat the lady with respect.
• Like in every other group there are different types of people: leaders, jokers, critics and so on. 
• They work and study at CERN! That means everybody is smart and kind of an expert qualified to present his opinion on every issue discussed. The fact they‘re smart (and aware of partners smartness too) is making their discussions nicely assertive even though they disagree in many points. 
• Among Summer Students there are guys with extremely high self-esteem, average self-esteem and really low self-esteem. Some of them also present themselves as gods and some of them keep their know-how in private.
• Even though physicists and IT guys could be considered as a possible target of bullying, sometimes they are engaged in similar behavior too. As always it‘s part of "fun." 
• Maybe you wouldn't expect this, but they're funny! The jokes are sometimes really good, sometimes really bad, sometimes smart, sometimes stupid, sometimes sarcastic and sometimes there's only one person who thinks it's funny. Of course they make jokes with numbers (0, 1 and so on), particles, computers and other stuff in a way normal people don't understand.
• They for sure like what they do and find it interesting. It seemed they mostly really enjoy their time at CERN as much as possible.  It's possible to see sparkles in their eyes from time to time. I still can't forget how enthusiastic they were during our trip to the tunnels. Pure childish joy :)
• It was interesting to learn what brought them to CERN in the first place. They're opened to new experience. They want to learn, move forward, do something. And they're not afraid of such things like living in foreign country or participating in such a big project like research at CERN. 
• I always imagined IT guys and physicists like people who don't go outside so that they're pale and skinny. Actually they mostly do go outside and some of them even have a tan! 
• Last, but not least – they look good! Girls are pretty, guys are more than ok too, sometimes even having muscles! They wear nice clothes and take care of themselves. You wouldn't say they're "special" in any way by their appearance. But beauty is subjective. In the Czech Republic the media asked a young woman marrying an older fat ugly politician why she was going to get married with him. She replied: „Because he has a sexy brain!“ Girls, if you're a fan of sexy brains too – at CERN there's lots of fish in the sea ;)!

To conclude, there is a bunch of young people at CERN who love to have fun but also love what they study and they´re really good at it. Despite of that, I feel like they're like everybody else.

PS: We did some facebook research and found some nice photos and videos which can show you what kind of people they are. What do you think? Nerds or cool guys?

Openlab guys in tunnels 

(There are 2 non-nerds, can you spot them?)

Hana doing whatever

Love is all around

Large Hadron Collider makes you dance so... 

Clap Your Hands!

And another dancing one. There's a horse too!

Giving Lightning Talks

As a part of the openlab program, all of us gave a 5-minute talk about our projects we've been working on here at CERN. I think it was the shortest presentation in my life. And it made it surprisingly difficult since there was so much more to say and you didn't have time to go into too much detail.

I was so lucky to be the first one to present so you can actually see only the second half of my presentation, because the microphone was turned on but on mute which I of course didn't notice at first. We actually had a practice session last week and a lot of people took this opportunity to practice really seriously. Or practiced a lot more during the next days. Overall, I think we did a really good job. All of us managed to be pretty close to the 5 minutes limit, and learned something useful.

The best presentations were given by Harry, Benjamin and Sneha. I really enjoyed the opportunity to learn from others in such a short time. You don't usually get to see 23 presentations in one day. It was another good experience from CERN. Oh, and you can watch the whole thing if you have the time to do so :)

Dimitris the handsome practicing his presentation

Morning Runs

So I started running on Sunday again. I had some cold and was tired before... you know. So I went running three days in a row now and what's even better is that I actually go in the morning! Isn't it great? I even took my GPS watch with me on Sunday to have a proof :) It felt really great considering it was after two weeks of doing nothing.

Here it is, my weekend course. I usually go to the vineyards behind CERN on the Swiss side, but the gate is closed over the weekend so I go to this little forest in France instead. It's just next to a golf course. I find it pretty cool to go running to a different country :)

And I hope I'll keep doing it daily. I always feel like I can do anything because I managed to go running in the morning and there are not so many more challenging things in the world, right? :)

I went running!

French Modern Art

Since I fell asleep at 9 last night, I didn't write any post yesterday. I apologize. What I wanted to share is a great masterpiece made by Florentin, a promising young French artist. He specializes in work with metal. I was so lucky he gave me one of his early works as a gift :) My plan is to keep it and I can sell it for a ridiculous amount of money when he gets famous :)

This is French art

Night in Zurich

Basically all of my crazy (mostly Greek) friends left for a road trip to Italy and I thought I would work on Friday night. However, my friend Roman was supposed to take a plane to Switzerland and we originally thought we would meet, but he flew to Zurich and I thought it’s a little too far for me to go there just to see him for a few hours.

I’ve felt tired or a little sick in the last days but Roman persuaded me in the last minute to take a train and go to Zurich. So I went to Geneva, took a super expensive Swiss train for the first and hopefully last time, saw a few ridiculously beautiful lakes, vineyards, and rainbows on my way, and came to Zurich at 10 pm.

We had a great time and the crazy money for the ticket was worth it.  Next time I can take a plane to Prague, it would be probably cheaper :)

Temple in The Tunnels

Another post made by my dearest sister Pavlina:

CERN is a pretty large complex of buildings. Normally everybody uses sidewalks and streets to go from one place to another but there is also another option. And it´s really cool! Actually there are tunnels under CERN for moving between buildings and for utility purposes. So we decided to have a little trip through the CERN underground as the rumor has it that there's a mysterious temple down there!

The tunnels are full of pipes, shelves and ladders. There is also a lot of welcoming boards, signs and warnings such as "No smoking, drinking, eating", "Danger of radiation", "Turn back now or you’ll die!" or "Break this in case of zombie apocalypse". Time to time you can also run into a locked door. (Most of them possess one of the welcoming signs). And then you continue anyway.

It was raining outside in the time of our underground visit but we found water in the tunnels as well. Going through them included crossing two pools of water, hundreds meters of floor covered with mud, hearing a waterfall, finding newspaper from 1989 and finally – finding the TEMPLE!

The temple wasn't actually as mysterious as I expected. There are no signs of religious rituals. In fact, it is a dirty place (little room at the end of a corridor) in every meaning of the word „dirty“. Obviously we weren't the first students visiting the place. It was filled with names, quotes, equations and advice how to survive everything written on the wall. On the ground there were various bottles, papers and other things I won´t describe here.

We left some signs of our presence there and went for other adventures. After finding two other smaller temples some of us were tired, so we took the first ladder out of the tunnels. It lead to an unnoticeable trapdoor somewhere in the middle of CERN's lawns! I have to admit it was a cool end of this remarkable evening with my friend Hana and the openlab guys! Thank you so much for sharing this experience with us as if we were one of you!

The tunnels of CERN

Green Peppers Overdose

So I've been actually working on my pre-thesis project today. Instead of eating something salty and unhealthy, Benjamin brought some green peppers and we ate an incredible amount of them. I think anything is addictive when it can distract you from work :) It's fun to get work done while eating vegetables. Or possibly fruit: "Bell peppers are botanically fruits, but are generally considered in culinary contexts to be vegetables."

More posts to appear soon, I just need to get some pictures.

Small Area Estimation in R and a lot of green peppers...

Salsa Classes etc.

To be honest, I am super tired today. Fortunately, I have a back up plan for these situations. Pictures instead of stories. My sister Pavlina and her friend Hana left yesterday but we went to dance salsa with Sofia when they were still here. Since this is CERN, there are more guys than girls which is usually not the case when you go dancing anywhere.

One of the great things about CERN is that nobody is actually at home here. That implies people have a lot of time to do fun stuff after work and feel like sharing it with others. There are salsa classes, swing classes, student lectures, cooking events, trips, etc. Oh, and parties as well :) No, seriously. I love the fact that you can do so much here and it's actually organized by your friends and colleagues.

And now I'm really tired. I think it's because I realized I need to start working more seriously on my pre-thesis if I want to graduate next year. I also gave a mock presentation today but I'll elaborate on this more next week and probably upload a video or a link to it. I hope it won't be too embarrassing :)

Sofia, me, Pavlina

Sofia, Pavlina, Hana jr.

Like a Movie Star

I feel like a movie star now :) We shoot a video for the openlab Summer Student program today. Each of us was interviewed in the morning. It was pretty fun. I had to introduce myself, describe my project at CERN, what I liked about the openlab in general, and what I would advise students who would want to apply in the future.

The whole interview could be five minutes long but it took ages, because there was so much noise around that I had to introduce myself seven times. I was a little nervous in the beginning, but after five attempts I was amused and relaxed and felt really good about the rest of the talk. 

The shooting continued in the afternoon, when we took videos in the data center. No more talking involved, you can hardly hear somebody talking in there anyway. The cooling is too noisy. Nitin and I were asked to just "naturally" walk around and pretend to check the racks :) It was so interesting to see how the communications team who took the video thought about the space and how they designed everything.

The girls were also so nice! They told me how good an actress I am :) At least when I don't speak and just walk around. But I thought it was easy and it's maybe even more difficult. You have nothing else to think about... So I was adding numbers in my head to keep myself busy. I am not sure if this what the actual actors do though.

The openlab video will be ready maybe in October, so I will put a link to it later. But I would really love to make a short video with only the embarrassing and funny moments from the shooting. It would be a nice memory for all of us I think. A great experience again. I'm so happy to be here. Maybe I should stop being so positive all the time.

Video shooting in the CERN data center

Trololo!

Who the hell is trolling us in our own room, guys?! We just found this scary message in front of our door!

Trololo!

We will catch you! These are the observations of my psychology friends from Czech (based on the picture): The troll is heterosexual, scared of holes, he has unfinished business in this world. He's a bit girly. Maybe he's ashamed of his feminine part. It might be a woman who's pretending she's a guy! Or a guy pretending to be a girl. And he/she does not feel loved for sure. His favorite color is purple.

Did you see anybody like that around 38?

Dreams Coming True Too Fast

Well, this is going to feel weird anyway. I hope I got your attention by now :) So during the last months my life got crazy multiple times. You know those days when everything is going great? Me too. And I just had a few months that felt like that. The funny thing is that when something outrageously awesome happens, you actually need to give up some lesser dreams to go for the big ones...

As any other good story, this one starts with a failure. Actually a few of them. I applied for CERN Summer Student Program in 2012 and was rejected. I went to the US and worked as a researcher at Union College over the summer in 2013. Then I came back to the Czech Republic and graduated.

So I applied again this year for Summer Student and almost accidentally for openlab as well. And I got a rejection email in April. It felt weird because I really thought I would get accepted this time. I felt like there was not much more I could do to be a better fit.

At this point, my friend Roman who works at McKinsey in Prague encouraged me to apply for an intern position. It took some time to polish my resume and motivation letter but I made it and was invited to take a first round written test assessing my analytical abilities.

How surprised was I when I got an email from CERN saying that I was accepted for openlab. I couldn't believe it. It was like winning a lottery. There are thousands of people applying and only 24 students from all over the world get accepted. I was just so lucky. Working at CERN has been one of my dreams for a few years and now it would come true.

Then I broke up with my boyfriend who was also going to CERN as a Summer Student. This is probably the most unlikely thing that ever happened to me. Whatever. I was stressed and confused and I needed to go to the interviews at McKinsey. I felt bad because I wouldn't have time in the summer but I thought it was so unlikely to get in that it was useless to worry about it. I worked like hell for a few weeks, did well in the written test, and then I got terribly nervous before the interviews. So brainwashed myself with TED Talks about mistakes, failures, happiness and hard choices. And it helped! I got an internship offer. Just to be clear, this is a dream job. I won the lottery twice in one month.

To be able to work at McKinsey, I needed to cancel Erasmus in Spain I'd been looking forward for several years. That was pretty difficult and interesting, because I had to give up a big dream but just to make something even better happen. I feel better about it now. There is more thinking behind but that would make this post even longer than it already is.

The last change was to give up being an editor-in-chief of a student magazine Corpus Omne at my home faculty after three years. I never realized how much I cared about the magazine :) I found a perfect, young, smart, and beautiful editor-in-chief Jana and she'll be even better than I was :) I'm so happy for this and it also makes me feel old or something. I was used to being always the young one.

And here I am. Working at CERN, blogging about my life and drinking French red wine. I was stressed and confused because I thought I suddenly became a different person. Then I realized it's still me, just the other people will see me differently now. I have no idea what will be the next crazy thing that will happen to me, but I'm pretty sure it will be an awesome experience. Just as it has always been.

A piece of the accelerator and me

Geneva with My Sis and One More Hana

My sister Pavlina and her friend Hana came to CERN for a few days. We drank Czech beer and watched a very interesting and very underground (creepy) movie yesterday with Jakub from Slovakia. It was rather disturbing thing to see before you go to sleep... Fortunately, Robert showed up just in time to soothe our feelings by a crazy video with drunk actors :) It was so comforting. Thank you, Robert!

We could also see the super expensive fireworks in Geneva from his room which was really cool. We could even hear the firework even though it was rather funny because the sound was almost half a minute late compared to the lights we could see.

On Sunday, we went to Geneva old city center. I haven't been there so I was really happy to go there with the girls. It was a nice sunny Sunday (Sun-day, that never occurred to me) and we really enjoyed walking around Geneva. The city center feels like a completely different city. Unlike Prague, the old town is less crowded and great for a nice walk.

We called these green sofas "quarks",
it just seemed like an appropriate name

Chess players all over the place

The shade under the trees felt sooooo good. 

Peut-on vivre sans smart phone?
Is it possible to live without a smart phone?

Epic flowers in the middle of the city

I found out this is the famous Geneva flower clock today :)

Chill out time by the Geneva lake

An Addictive Game from CERN: Particle Clicker

All sorts of things happen at CERN. Last week, there was CERN Webfest, where the guys created a lot of crazy great stuff over the weekend. Check the website for more information. The people here are just so cool. And my sister Pavlina and her friend Hana arrived to CERN today. These two things combined resulted in this post :) The winning project of the webfest is a great game called Particle Clicker. Pavlina studies psychology (not physics), played the Particle Clicker and found it amazing. The rest of the post is written by her. (I love her for this.)

A short story by Pavlina:

How I Met Particle Clicker

I found this cute game thanks to my sister’s post on facebook. At first I thought it generates a name for my hypothetic lab from chaotic clicking on a special colorful circle and my lab was called “PC violation”. And I was proud because it felt like the Internet knows what kind of person I am – a violator of all the technical stuff. But the truth about the website is a little bit different.

The big disappointment came when I found out that I am the one who gives the name to my lab. Also the PC violation was actually CP violation and it turned out to be some technical thing which is probably good to control or research. Other important facts gradually came to my mind and I realized that the website is actually a quite fun game in which you can try to be a scientist at CERN. At CERN, you can do research and discover new particles and parts of these particles and divide the undividable atom. Divide et impera.

The cool thing is that you can pay other people to do your job! Getting new data enables you to research and discover new things and particles. New research gives you greater reputation in the world (not only the academic one) and reputation guaranties you more generous funding. Then you can hire new workers for your research and upgrades. The more workers the more data you get. That’s cool, right?

By the way I already got five Nobel Prize winners to work for me :)

Sisters

Money Money Money

Is it expensive here? The short answer is yes. Geneva is one of the most expensive cities in the world. The great thing is that CERN actually pays you enough to live comfortably even here, eat properly, and also have some fun.

As an openlab Summer Student, you get 90 CHF (2050 CZK, 100 USD, 75 EUR) per day plus some travel allowance and insurance. I pay 29 CHF (third of the thing above you know) per night in the hostel at CERN. I could have gotten a cheaper place to stay but I would not be in touch with the great people who I get to meet here.

Then you spend some amount of money for eating in the restaurants or you can cook in the kitchen in the hostel. There are fridges, dishes, everything. And then you probably buy some wine, chocolate, cheese, etc. Summer Students have enough money to live comfortably and travel around Europe over the weekends and just enjoy their time at CERN. Especially if it's someone's first time in Europe, it must be amazing.

By the way, my sister Pavlina and her friend Hana arrived today so you can look forward to a post written by my little sister tomorrow ;)

The average monthly wage in the Czech Republic is just like one of these bills

Watching Angels and Demons - at CERN

So once you work at CERN, the cool thing to do is to watch movies about CERN :) Which we did the other day with my beloved crazy Greek and almost Greek friends. We watched the famous Angels and Demons. It is about Vatican conspiracy and the bomb in the movie is actually a piece of antimatter kept in a jar with batteries that need to be charged every few days :) What an idea, right?

To be honest, the best part of the movie was the first ten minutes when the antimatter was stolen from CERN. It was just epic and ridiculous and funny :) I had a great tour around CERN the day before and I pretty much felt like I got what actually happens here. There's a lot of stuff going on, many experiments in different places, and it was really confusing at first.

CERN looked like a really cool, exciting, and maybe dangerous place in the movie. They mixed all the experiments into one and the scientists were talking to each other in French and Italian to show how international and European this place is. It's hilarious to see the place where you work pictured like that :)

Anyway, the point is that there actually is an official CERN website angelsanddemons.web.cern.ch explaining the stuff from the movie. There are scientific answers to some questions you get to ask when you watch the movie: Does CERN conduct secret research? What is the God particle? Does CERN create black holes? I just loved reading it. It made my day :)

"European" English

Since I studied in the US I got used to the American English. We had an interesting conversation about a phenomenon called "European English" with a British professor at Union. It is somewhat British, but not really.

I was thinking about it a lot before I chose to go to the US instead of Erasmus in Europe. One of the reasons for going to the US was that I wanted to speak English with native speakers and avoid learning for example "Spanish English" in Spain.

Like I'm not an expert or anything. After all, the point is to be able to express yourself with what you know at the moment. But I find this fascinating so I'm sharing a few observations I made at CERN :)


Observations:

• People wait in "queues" instead of "lines".
• Prepositions are one big mess. Don't pay attention to them. When somebody says they were "in the lake", they don't necessarily mean swimming. It might mean they just walked along the bank.
• I feel like most of people have either Greek or Italian accent. I'm afraid I will get the Greek one by the end of the summer :)
• Surprisingly, it is easier to understand native speakers for me now. Non-native speakers sometimes sound as if they were speaking their first language and not English, which is confusing. A great example is French English. The melody of the speech sounds completely French, words that have the same spelling in both languages are of course pronounced the French way, and you need to pay close attention to find out whether it is actually French or English. There are exceptions of course, but I met quite a few people who spoke like that. It's really funny :)
• I love it because you can make fun of each other for the way you speak or the funny things you say unintentionally. 

Not to mention the signs in French and English. They are epic. The picture is from the bathroom in the CERN Data Center. I feel like a software user rather than a bathroom user :) Or maybe it's just me. I need to find some more and take pictures. By the way, I find some of the accents super cute :) 

Orienteering at CERN

Jan is one of my colleagues from the Data Storage Services team and he does orienteering, which is highly unlikely for a German. The first day I came to CERN, I was surprised and happy to find out that he does orienteering. I've been pretty busy since then but my advisor Luca left for two weeks and Jan is taking care of me instead. We got to talk about the maps around here and Jan told me he would get me some. There actually is an orienteering club at CERN, but there are unfortunately no events during summer.

So today morning, I walk into my office and I see I have some new mail and it was orienteering maps of like ten different places around CERN! There is a map of a forest where I already went running twice, another one close to CERN by some stream, maps of old town in Geneva and then CERN of course. I'm so excited about going running there!

The map of CERN

Working at Data Storage Services: EOS Cockpit

If you want to get an idea of what I work on here, you can have a look at EOS Cockpit. (Greetings to IT Architecture Team at Raiffeisen Bank in Prague and especially to Ivan! :) After we killed our poor Cockpit, I got another one here! :)) So... There is a large data storage system called EOS. It provides services for all the LHC (You know, the Large Hydron Collider) experiments: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb.

Cockpit itself is a monitoring tool for EOS meaning it shows the users from the experiments how much space and how many files they have there. I work on several tasks. I am basically cleaning up the python scripts that generate the javascript and html for the website and adding some historical data plots. I will also simplify some scripts that get the actual data about how the system is working. These are used by other monitoring services. I hope that what I wrote it makes some sense :)

My desk

I Feel So Free aka Short Hair

I wanted to cut my hair numerous times but I usually had a boyfriend who didn't really the idea so I never did. The point is I never spent much time taking care of my hair anyway. I just washed it, didn't really use a hairdryer or hairbrush and I usually made a ponytail to keep things simple. I really don't want to spend unnecessary time in the morning caring about how I look. I prefer getting more sleep :)

When my roommate Sofia cut her hair on Thursday, I remembered I actually wanted to try it as well. By the way, she looks terrific. So I did some crowd-sourcing and asked my friends about what they thought. Thank you for all the compliments on my long hair guys! :) I really appreciate your help and I'm happy we got in touch with some of you who I don't get to see often. 

I asked two almost professional hairdressers from CERN, Ana from Spain and Eva from Germany, to cut my hair. We went to Restaurant 1 and did it just in front of the part of the accelerator. How classy! :) I originally thought I would shave it really short but we needed to cut it first anyway. In the very beginning we cut my ponytail off. It took like three minutes to cut it by the great scissors we had.

Somewhere in the middle of the process of randomly cutting my hair, the girls said that it actually looked like a pretty decent haircut like that. And they were right. So they just polished some details and you can see the result in the picture. I feel like I should have done it ages ago. It feels so great.

I think Eva and Ana will now basically become professional. I already met three guys who wanted haircut from them in last two hours. Oh, and I need to go running as soon as possible. I'm so excited to find out how it feels now!

Why Do I Always Work on National Holiday When I Work Abroad?

The first of August is the Swiss National Day but it doesn't mean people at CERN don't work. At least Summer Students including me. I don't know what I do wrong. When I worked at Union last year, it was the same with the Fourth of July (US Independence Day). We worked and just had a barbecue after work.

The picture of the day is a bird in the data center. I'm just wondering if it really lives there or just got lost :)

A bird in the data center