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 Joao'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