Category Archives: Countries

Home sweet home

Australia, Copenhagen, Sydney

I finally managed to find the time to write a few lines after returning to Copenhagen, home sweet home.

Last week we finished our (very nice) Australia trip with yet another slightly annoying two-days-without-sleep trip from down under to up here. Actually it also had it’s nice moments: on our flight from Abu Dhabi we had comforting two four-seat rows and a baby bed for the three of us. There were only in total 60 passengers on a plane with 280 seats. Dunno how this works out for the economics of the airline, but I wanna fly this way all the time now. Unfortunately our six hours stay in Düsseldorf and the subsequent flight were already much less pleasing. Well, the flight was actually fine.
Arriving in Copenhagen we actually had worse weather than when leaving in Sydney (remember it’s winter down there these days). It’s good to be back ;)
Well actually it was not all good, since I was fighting a mixture of lack of sleep and jetlag for the past days … but I think I finally defeated it today.

Maybe to add a few more lines about Australia, Sydney in particular …
We had a couple of days in Sydney after the end of ICHEP. Which we basically spent with walking half of Sydney, the Manly peninsula and various beach/costal walks.
Same as Melbourne, it’s a really nice city. The weather was quite a bit better and we actually got slightly sunburned (once again, it’s winter down there).

I put up a few panoramas in my gallery’s Cities and Nature folders … maybe I’ll add a few more later.

Destination: Australia

Australia, Melbourne, Outreach, Physics

For those that didn’t know yet, I am currently in Melbourne, Australia. The main reason is probably the 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) that currently takes place at the Melbourne Convention Centre. Another reason is the first public display of my ATLAS model in the Melbourne Planetarium during the same time (actually longer than that).

And since I am going to spend about three weeks in Australia, we decided to make it a family trip, so Heike and Erik joined in.

Flying Berlin – Düsseldorf – Abu Dhabi – Melbourne, we spend about two days in planes and on airports to get to our first destination in the centre of Melbourne. Still fighting with a bit of jet lag I went to see the folks of Melbourne University (cheers to Caroline and Dave) and Tanya from the planetarium on Friday. After getting a bit of an introduction to University and the Centre of excellence for particle physics in Australia, I went to see the exhibition and the ATLAS display at the Planetarium for the first time. Quite a nice casing and setting as well as some nice posters and videos in the installation (they also made a time-lapse video of their build in Melbourne about three weeks ago).

On the weekend we managed to get a bit out of town to see a wild life parks (with Kangaroos, Koalas and all that), some national parks (with actual ‘wild’ Koalas) and the Great Ocean Road. We actually rented a car and I had my first left-driving experience, which was quite nice due to the (at least for me) surprising fact that though everything is opposite in local cars, the pedals are the same way as in right-driving cars (accelerating right, breaking middle/left).

Today ICHEP finally started – which is the reason why I managed to write this blog as I didn’t have (affordable) internet before :( – and it started with a blast: they/we found the Higgs, well we found some boson that is compatible with the/a Standard Model Higgs, to be politically correct (or what you call it). Anyways … quite some excitement, both here and at CERN, where the results were actually presented (we just got a live feed here). But after that the reception seemed to be more exciting for most people (mainly because many people might have had an idea before the actual presentations).

One minor detail that was interesting (at least I thought so) … CERN’s press release on this issue was released already after CMS’ presentation and not after ATLAS’ results were shown as well. Also this time the release quoted only one spokesperson (CMS’) instead of both.
Hmm? But meh …

We’ll see what else this ICHEP has to offer, starting tomorrow morning …

The Italian wedding trip

Geneva, Italy, Snowboarding

Last weekend I went on a little trip to Italy to join in for the wedding party of two friends of mine (greetz to A & A). Along with the party, they scheduled some time for skiing and relaxation.

During last week, I then got the news that the skiing was cancelled due to too little snow on the slopes :(

Two days later I got an update saying that we wont ski because of too much snow on the pistes!?

A state that unfortunately didn’t change until our arrival on Saturday. This also ment that the location for the party and the dinner could not be reached :( But in a glorious re-booking effort they managed to find hotels in the lower village/town and a restaurant to fit all the about sixty people (mostly Italians). After a good night (in cowboy and indians costumes) we finally managed to do some skiing on Sunday before driving back to Geneva, from where I flew back with a two and a half hours delay on Monday morning (thanks for the night and dinner to J & J).

Westbank, Jordan river, Sea of Galilee, Haifa

Israel

Yesterday we drove from Jerusalem into the Westbank, passing Jericho again and north-bound along the Jordan river up to the Sea of Galilee. Not much variety in the landscape, but still very interesting. When leaving the Westbank we had a proper car search, with dogs and everything. One can always see the mountains of Jordan in the east, as well as the quite wide no-man’s-land. About 70m was the closest we got to Jordan though. Unfortunately the Sea of Galilee as well as the drive to Zefad was a bit of a disappointment … anyways we ended up in Haifa in the end and hame some food and drinks in the student house of the Technion campus university. And now we’re up for work …

420 meters below and 9000 bce

Israel

Just came back from a long day … the whole morning we were walking through all four quarters of the Old City in Jerusalem, passing by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Western Wall and many more places. After that and some quick lunch we drove to the Dead Sea to chill out in the extremely salty water (man it burns in scratches). With 420 meters below sea level the Dead Sea marks the lowest place on earth and has salinity of about 33% (the  Mediterranean has about 3.8%). After that, totally ignoring the warnings of the car rental place, we drove into Jericho. We walked around the city a bit, looked at seemingly the only thing to look at (a tree) and on our way back got invited to coffee and tea by some locals … after chatting for a bit I found out that one of them was housing Danish police officers training the Palestine ones recently … funny ey. Anyway now we are back to Jerusalem (so all is well with the car rental place :)) and are about to hit the old town again …