July 9

The cars here are much different than the US. I see an occasional Ford, but by far, the biggest type of car I see is Peugeot. All CERN vehicles are Peugeot, but there are many privately owned ones as well. There are car brands I've never even heard of, but there are also Volvos, Toyotas, Suzukis, and Volkswagons. The cars are also much smaller, much like a Smartcar (which I've seen plenty of as well). They take energy conservation much more seriously here than at home.

Today was a full day, and another warm one. It is 93 degrees right now, about 5 pm. As I was wiping sweat from my face earlier, Gioke from Mombasa, Kenya was telling me that he is cold. We started out having to move because our training center room was double booked, and we moved to the 7th story of another building. It was a beautiful view, but because it is hazy today, pictures aren't that clear.

We started by talking about anti-matter and getting information on an anti-matter teaching module. I think it looks really good...it incorporates Angels and Demons as well as Star Trek, and we can calculate all the information they give in the shows/movie to see how accurate they are to what CERN can do with anti-matter. If you are interested, I can send the link once it's posted for us.

We ate a quick lunch, and then we divided into groups for our afternoon and rotated tours. My group went to the CERN Control Center first. It is the main control room for the Large Hadron Collider. There is a glass wall to look into the center which they tell us most people can't get past, but we got into the center to look around a little more closely. There is a shelf with bottles from champagne that they've had...one for each time the LHC has been started up. We learned how to read some of the displays now, so when I'm sitting in the cafeteria, I can watch the monitors and know what they are doing. It is also available as a live feed on the internet, so I can watch it from home and show my students.

After that, we went to the Superconducting Magnet Test Facility. There we saw them test the big magnets in the tunnels and learned more about how they work. We sae one magnets cooled down to about 4 K (that's REALLY cold, almost as cold as anyone could possibly get) to test it. We also saw a cutaway of a magnet that was damaged in "the accident" last fall. We aren't allowed in the tunnel to see the actual beam pipe because the magnets are supercooled by liquid Helium and should another leak happen, it is unsafe.

Following that, we went to a teacher's lab. We performed a couple of quick experiments that we can do at home if we have the equipment, or possibly we can get an appointment with a CERN physicist that will do the experiment with our students by teleconference. There are a couple of different options of doing things by teleconference with a CERN physicist, and I hope to take advantage of at least one of them this school year.

Meals here are wonderful, with more choices than you can possibly imagine. For breakfast, there's pastries, cheese, fruit, yogurt, fruit smoothies, parfaits, some things I don't recognize, some hot selections, and wonderful coffee. For the afternoon and evening meals, there's cold sandwiches, 6 or 7 hot selections to choose from (roast duck breast was one selection yesterday, as well as a seafood linguini), a full salad bar, fruit, breads, ice cream (either dipped flavors or packaged ice cream bars), chocolate, beer, wine, fruit drink, and Coke. The fruit drinks and Coke taste a little different than home because sugar is used as a sweetener instead of corn syrup.

Tonight a group is going into Geneva, but I need to stay back to do laundry. We're leaving early tomorrow morning and I will run out of clothes otherwise. If you watch the Tour de France, look for me near the finish line with a brown tank top on a huge smile on my face!

Week one down, two more to go...