The Ultimate List of Compliments from CERN :)

I took notes on the compliments I was given at CERN and it ended up being pretty amusing. A lot of these were given by people who had drunk some amount of alcohol but it doesn't make it less funny :) 

The first list includes the positive compliments:

1. I love your cheeks! Can I touch them? I need to touch them! You have the perfect cheeks... They are so... elastic!
2. Your skin is so... soft. 
3. You're like a teddy bear. I feel like I could hurt you if I hug you tighter. 
4. You have very unusual eye color. It's like... ocher. 
5. You spoke Spanish like a native speaker - by a person who unfortunately doesn't speak Spanish...
6. Your Spanish is really good - a person who actually does speak Spanish :)
7. You know, Hana is special. You don't meet a girl like that very often.
8. You smell nice.
9. I really like your blog/post! - I love this one so much :)
10. I love your haircut!
11. Wait, how old are you? When did you have time to do all these things?
12. The best of the Czech IT - This one sounds really funny to me :)
13. You are hot! - I must confess that was about my temperature after touching my neck... 
14. You are a very optimistic person. 

Ok, that was just enough of being "so sweet" and let's move on to the funny part:

1. Your pants are disturbing. The pattern is just like my grandma's carpet.
2. You had a nice ass when you came here, but now you're too fat.
3. Your jacket looks like a plastic bag. - I still hope this was just a joke.
4. You're my favorite Russian. 
5. You're not fat. - Without me asking...
6. Let me touch your shoulder. Wow, you actually do have some muscle!
7. I know what you have in common! You and your sister have the same bags under and above your eyes when you smile.

I don't want to tag you to a specific comment but I want to remember later. So I am adding just a list of you. Thank you all for telling me such beautiful memorable things :)

by Markus, Petr, David, Andre, Nikodemos, Dimitris, Ricky, Mary, Sofia, Robert, Hana, Anti, Joao, Katrin, Laura, Bartek

CERN openlab Summer Student Program: What Is It Actually?

When I went to CERN, I didn't really know what would happen there. I expected a full time internship and a lot of challenging work. But the reality was far more than only that.  So what do you do as an openlab Summer Student?

There are several parts of the program:

• Working on a project
• Taking lectures on IT at CERN
• Visiting companies and research institutes
• Random stuff
• Unofficial: traveling and social life

WORKING ON A PROJECT
Everybody from the openlab had a project they worked on during the summer. Most of us worked at IT so our offices were mostly in Building 31 and 513 and we could go to lunch together every day.

As a part of the project, we gave presentations to our colleagues from IT department about our work. It was a great experience. We had to fit it in only 5 minutes time which was a challenge but it was also a lot of fun. Check it online.

To share our work with the world, all of us wrote a report which is publicly available online. One of the CERN policies is to share all of its finding publicly so do so as well. I think most of the projects were really interesting and all of us learned a lot.

TAKING LECTURES ON IT AT CERN
You can check the lectures online if you’re interested. I attended most of them but they were sometimes too technical and sometimes too much physics :) But I think I learned a lot after all and got to understand better how CERN works.

VISITING COOL PLACES
We spent a few days visiting some exciting places. We went to Zurich for two days and visited Open Systems, ETH and Google. (Epic!) Then we went to AMS, CMS, CERN Data Center, and CERN Control Center in one day. This was really amazing. I fully realized how many various projects there are at CERN.  The last visit was to Grenoble in France, where we saw a nuclear reactor and a smaller accelerator.

I also got to see ALICE with a bunch of Czech guys independently.

RANDOM STUFF

We were asked to write a short bio for the openlab website which was really fun to write since I’m pretty young and this made me feel proud of myself. It was also a challenge to fit it 100 words. It was pretty cool anyway.

There was also a video shooting. All of us were asked to introduce ourselves and describe our experience at CERN. Being interviewed felt like a movie star :) The editing will take some months so I will try to put a link here later.

UNOFFICIAL: TRAVELING AND SOCIAL LIFE

This is what the rest of the blog is about so feel free to stalk me if you want to :) I didn't include much information from party life for obvious reasons but it was great.

Dimitris put it this way: "Basically, the majority of all the summer students live in the hostel and this makes the program much more different than a normal job. It's like a campsite where people live together 24 hours a day, share their experiences and have fun. Even if you are the most introverted person in the world, it is very difficult to avoid friendships and social life in general." True that.

OVERALL

The openlab program is super selective. There were 851 applications in the CERN level round and there were only 24 of us accepted worldwide. You need to be smart, hardworking, and lucky to get in. All of this.

I am really grateful for this opportunity. I have great friends from all over the world now and I hope we will keep in touch and see each other when possible. I still feel nostalgic when I’m writing this…

So if you feel like this sounds like a good plan for the next summer, I have a piece of advice for you. Apply. Here.

What's Next?

So I am back from CERN but this blog is not dead yet :) I came home with about twenty drafts of posts and ideas. Roughly ten of them are about the CERN experience so I think most of these will eventually appear here when I finish them. You can look forward to some funny stuff :)

I also concluded I will keep blogging once a week. I will write more about this decision in one of the posts since there are a few reasons behind.

Thank you all for reading. I would never have expected it to be such a great experience. I am looking forward to reading some posts in the future and getting nostalgic :)

A sample of the future possible posts

Big Brother Is Watching You. Muahahaha!

This post is actually about statistics :) But it's really beautiful statistics and there are picture so I promise it's not boring. I just wanted to sum up what I can see in Google Analytics of this blog and how curious and excited it makes me feel.
The purpose of this blog is primarily to keep in touch with my friends and family. So I expected there would be quite some traffic on a daily basis. And this was enhanced by the fact that I share my posts on facebook. I also enjoy the feedback I get this way, so thank you for it, guys.

In the beginning I had visits mainly from Europe and the US, where I studied, so this didn't surprise me. However after a few weeks, I was gradually getting more and more visits from surprising countries I never thought I knew anybody from. Such as Malaysia, Estonia, Taiwan, Peru,... After the post about dreams coming true, I stopped thinking about it. It had made me a nervous in the beginning, but nothing really happened so I got gradually comfortable with it.

Daily pageviews

So what are the statistics for July and August? I wrote 58 posts in two months. The blog had 3271 page views in July and 4416 in August, the total of 7687. I would never expect this to happen when I started blogging. The average visit is 1:26 long and average number of pages per visit is 1.63. The blog had more than 1200 unique visitors. The data for this are probably a little underestimated since I started using Google Analytics after 10 days.

The most fun and exciting thing for me is to look at the maps and wonder about who is reading my posts. It's interesting because some posts are more interesting for my friends from the Czech Republic and others are more interesting for people from CERN or for Greeks :) Now the blog has had visits from 50 countries and 20 US states. Wow, that sounds insane... I hope I just didn't discourage you from reading because I spy on you :)

Number of visitors per country worldwide

Number of visitors per country in Europe

Number of visitors per US state

Life After CERN

All my friends who had gone to CERN said it was the best summer ever. Oh, of course, everybody says this all the time, right? About traveling, Erasmus, internship... So I thought it would be great, was looking forward to it a lot, but didn't really believe it would be the best thing that has ever happened to me.

The summer was just wonderful. I worked on an interesting project, I learned a lot, I met many fun, smart, and inspiring people and got to know some of them well. I made a lot of good friends and I'm sure we'll keep in touch and meet in the future. I will see first of my friends from CERN in a few days in Prague, then we'll go to Oktoberfest to Munich...

The difficult thing was to say good bye and accept that everybody is leaving. I never said goodbye for so long to so many friends. And I think I did say goodbye to people I cared about several times in my life.  Our class from high school still regularly meet and we keep in touch. I also still get to meet my friends from (radio)orienteering. It's a little more difficult to see my friends from Union but I do my best and keep in touch with several of them and we visited each other a few times. And I am sure we will make the CERN reunions happen, because we are smart and rich now :)

So what's the problem? The thing is that everybody was at CERN, I could spend time with whoever I wanted to, and everybody lived basically in the same building. Do you feel like going to the pool? Hanging out? Drinking some wine? Watching a movie? Everything was super easy. And things tend to be more difficult at home. Not everybody lives with so many friends around, and has so much time and money to do anything they feel like.

Now what is the cure to the post CERN depression? Make my life back home as awesome as the life I had at CERN. Now it's super clear what's important and what makes me happy. So what do I need? I already live in dorms with my classmates and spend the nights doing sports and going out with them. I love it. I try to work on things I find exciting. And I need to start traveling more again, because it just makes me feel alive.

The life after CERN exists. It's a little weird in the beginning but it can be a good starting point in making my life as exciting, enjoyable, and meaningful as possible.

CERN Crazy Cars

I wanted to post these pictures for ages but there were so many things going on that I had no time to do it. I think I need to point out that most of the cars at CERN are normal :) I was pretty surprised how normal the cars in Switzerland seem to be compared to the BMWs and Audis all over the place in Germany. You can find pretty much anything here.

So here you are: