Paris, but not Cairo

Paris, Physics

Now I finally have the time to write a few words about last week, which I happened to spend in Paris. The 2011 Hadron Collider Physics Symposium was on the menu, a week of physics talks with the latest and greatest from the theory, Tevatron, the LHC and others. Quite a few nice and interesting talks and posters, a nice conference dinner on a boat on the Seine and besides all that some (too little) time to see Paris. It’s been eight years since I’ve been there, still I could remember a few places … which always feels good. I stayed in Troels’ old apartment, which a friend of his now rents, but doesn’t use all year long.

While strolling the streets at night I also came across a few Space Invader pieces, which kinda fitted well as I just watched my “Exit through the gift shop” DVD recently …

Besides all the good points, the internet was really crappy at HCP and non-existing in the apartment. Therefore I didn’t manage to do as much work as I was hoping to get done. Also I got asked whether I wanted to present our long lived particle results at a conference in Cairo next week. Though it seemed quit tempting I finally refused as I will be quite busy with the Weltmaschine Science Slam tis week and still had the non-internet problem … by now it actually showed that the decision was also quite good from a health point of view seeing all the news from Cairo these days.

My second ATLAS membership

World Wide Web

Since this week I am member of two ATLAS experiments … besides being member of the ATLAS collaboration at CERN since 2005, I now joined the ATLAS network of RIPE. While in the former one we try to answer all sorts of questions related to the fundamental physics of the world around us, from the creation and evolution of the universe to the reason(s) for  massive particles; the latter one has the slightly less ambitious goal to create a real time map of the internet infrastructure by deploying probes all around the world.

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 …

Welcome to Israel, welcome to Sabbath

Israel

Yesterday we (Simon, Troels and me) arrived in Israel for a workshop to come in Haifa on Monday. After a some initial trouble with my hand luggage, which turned out to be 1,5 kg to heavy (the max is 8 kg at Cimber Sterling, ridiculous) and had to be checked in, I had a semi-pleasant four hours flight.

In Tel-Aviv airport we cued for an hour to get passed the border check and tried to get hold of the car we booked just yesterday, creating some confusion as we didn’t which company it would be with (was booked through some broker that hadn’t told us yet). Also we were in need for some food, which turned out quite difficult as everything was closing down at about three in the afternoon … yes, we didn’t know about Sabbath! Though I quickly remembered good old John Goodman from the best movie ever … The Big Lebowsky … nothing goes on Saturdays … and apparently you prepare for nothing goes quite in advance … anyways, also the train and busses in Jerusalem didn’t work, half for the city was locked down … quite an impression. Also the Jewish robes and hats left quite an impression … just like one knows from the movies.

Still we had a little walk, some Jerusalem Kebab (which turned out to be meatballs and sorted salad on a plate), and found some activity in the non-Jewish quarters in the old town.

Today we’ll have a proper city walk/tour and head out for Jericho and the dead sea afterwards …