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Well guys, I knocked the bastard off.
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26 February 2006 (badly written on 4 March 2006)
And at only €91 from my doorstep to the top of Aiguille du Midi, Mont Blanc and back again, it sure was a cheap knockoff! 21st century Geneva is a great time and place to live. It took 14 hours and 23 minutes, and a whole lot of effort, for Jacques Balmat to get to the top in 1786... and that was just from Chamonix, already more than a kilometre above sea level. I went there and back on Sunday, with several hours at the top to look around, and all I had to do was spend a couple of hours each way on a bus, and 20 minutes or so each way in a cable car.
You probably don't want to read a whole lot of my rambling... the most important thing about being on top of the highest mountain in Western Europe (I love how they can arbitrarily pick regions in order to make things 'the biggest', and confuse people into extending the superlative too far. Lake Geneva is the largest lake in Western Europe, or it's either the largest or second largest [freshwater] lake in either Central or Western Europe, or the largest lake in Europe, depending on who you ask. Somebody probably thinks it's the largest lake in the world!) is the view, so feel free to skip the rest and have a look at them. I was lucky enough to be up there on a day with very few clouds, so the view was great... I've heard that sometimes all you see is cloud. It wasn't even cold up there.
I had originally planned to go a week earlier. Since I couldn't find a website where I could book the bus trip to go to Chamonix, I assumed that I could just turn up and buy a ticket on the day. However, on the Thursday I discovered the website (which I would link to, except that I can't find it any more) and found that I had to book the trip a week in advance. So I went up the Salève that Sunday instead, and booked my trip to Chamonix for the following Sunday. The view from the Salève is great in the winter, with snow and without all those leaves of trees in the way. I'd show you the pictures I took from there, but they're nothing compared with the pictures from Mont Blanc, so I'll just show you my first snowdwarf (not to be confused with my snow Lilliputian from last year) modelling my Klein Bottle hat, and a picture of Mont Blanc seen from the Salève. Oh, I also took this panoramic photo of some mountains.
When I got on the bus to Chamonix ridiculously early that Sunday morning, the other three or four people on the bus all bought their tickets then and there. We were told to stay on the bottom deck of the bus, but eventually we were let up to the top, where there was a tour group, and we could listen to the sparse commentary of a tour guide.
A couple of hours later we arrived at Chamonix, and I went straight to the cable car, which took us at about 10m per second up to Aiguille du Midi, with a brief stop and change of cable car at the Plan du Midi halfway up. From the cable car there are some passageways inside the mountain, to interesting places like the toilets (basically long drops, with the emphasis on long) the ice cave (just a side passage, which happened to have walls and floor covered in thick ice... kind of weird because it felt like being in a building rather than inside a mountain, and I don't expect to find ice caves in buildings), and the elevator to the summit, 3842m above sea level.
I don't know how much of it was psychosomatic, but the air did seem thin up there, and I felt a trifle lightheaded at times. I could imagine an asthmatic getting into a panic about the lack of air, thus making the situation worse. I had a mediocre tartiflette at the restaurant, and drank some of the fizzy apple juice I'd brought with me. On the bus trip home I noticed that my juice bottle had become rather squashed, and when I opened it, instead of releasing pressure as fizzy drinks normally do, it sucked some air in. The drink was flat. So there you go, proof that the air is thinner up there. I'd love to make a joke about myself appearing out of thin air, but I'm not feeling very inspired at the moment so I'll spare you.
There's really not a lot to say from there... you only need to look at the pictures. If you look carefully you will see skiers, paragliders, sparkling bits of ice like diamond dust falling from the sky, and the things that heights were made for -- birds and satellite dishes.
I intend to make panoramas out of some of the pictures (at one point I think I took 14 photos in a row using the stitch-assist on my camera) but I haven't got around to it yet. I also haven't got around to writing up what I did in Sydney before Christmas. Sosumi.
Bern
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12 and 13 November 2005 (written 26 November)
That afternoon we went to Bern. Immediately in the train station we saw the same ads which were up at the train station in Geneva, and outside the buildings were somewhat similar to those in Geneva, particularly as there were UBS banks scattered around the place. It was clearly still Switzerland. But for all the familiarity, there was one major difference... everything was in German! That was awesome. It reminded me of varying one parameter of a complicated equation while keeping the other ones the same, just to see what would happen. You don't usually get to do that in real life though. Have you ever wondered what your country would be like if everything else stayed the same, but everyone spoke Esperanto? Of course, not everything else would stay the same, because language and culture affect each other a lot... and that would be what would make such an 'experiment' interesting.
There wasn't much time on the Saturday before things started closing, and a few museums and also the Federal building were closed on Sunday, so our options were a bit limited. We did see the parliament buildings from the outside, and I was surprised that there was no Swiss flag in sight. There are Swiss flags all over the place in Geneva, and indeed in Bern where supporters of the Swiss and Turkish soccer teams were making noise all over the place. But no Swiss flag at the government.
Bern is where Albert Einstein was working as a patent clerk, when he formulated the theory of relativity a hundred years ago. So scattered around the place are plaques pointing out places that Einstein might have walked past or sneezed at. There's also an Einstein exhibition at the museum to celebrate the World Year of Physics. We went to that on Sunday. Yes, I know there's a perfectly good Einstein exhibition at the Globe of Science and Innovation across the road from CERN, but this one is bigger, and it was worth it just for the 'bErn=mc2' keyring. That and the hall (or rather, staircase, which was reflected all over the place) of mirrors. And also Einstein's French assignment, complete with corrections. You see, not even he was perfect at French. I envy him for knowing German though. Oh yeah, and there was a good view of the town from the top of a spiral staircase in the museum. In Switzerland, it seems, if you want a good view there's always either a mountain or a spiral staircase nearby.
After that we went back to the train station, I went home, and wasted time doing random other stuff before eventually writing this up. During that time, I bought some nice new boots which ought to do a good job of keeping me upright in the snow. Five days later, it snowed... yay! Slightly more snow than the last time, and some of it has a different texture, really soft and powdery. That was a couple of days ago, but it's stayed cold so a lot of the snow is still there. There were predictions for a lot more snow but unfortunately now it looks like there won't be any more for a while.
Now this is really getting off the topic of travel, but I went to the Geneva Writers' Group today. It's about time I got back into writing things other than travel logs apronyms. Actually, it's about time I got back into writing apronyms, or at least updated the website. The group seems fairly similar to the writing classes I used to go to in NZ, only much bigger, and without Mallowpuffs (although there are biscuits.)
Lausanne
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12 November 2005 (written 26 November)
I may be pretty much stationary these days (apart from going to France three times a week) but my friends have been travelling. Weird Swiss Guy #0 (so called because I met him before I met the person known as Weird Swiss Guy) spent some time in Switzerland along with his wife, so we had time for a quick lunch at CERN together. I'd have practised my French on him, but we were talking pretty quickly for most of the short time and I'd have hardly been able to say much in French in that time.
Also, a friend I've known practically my whole life came to stay, bringing not only Mallowpuffs but also Toffee Pops from a NZ shop in London. Wow, sometimes I think people actually read my travel log! At the end of her stay we got some cheap train tickets and I accompanied her to Lausanne and Bern for the weekend. She stayed on in Bern for a bit and is now in Zurich, I believe, where it snowed about a week ago.
Anyway, back to the weekend of tourism. We arrived in Lausanne not long before midnight on Friday night, and had a few hours the next morning to have a look around before heading to Switzerland's capital, Bern. We saw a guy being photographed as he pretended to ski down the street, at least I think that's what he was doing. I have a feeling I'll see him on a billboard somewhere. Then we saw a church with impressive looking carved doors, which automatically opened on our approach, to dramatic organ tones... it reminded me of something that might happen in a cheesy movie, in a torchlit tunnel in a pyramid or something.
After some wandering around we went to Sauvabelin tower, a barely-enclosed wooden spiral staircase surrounded by the trees. The top platform is only 30.2m above the ground, but it's 700.2m above sea level and 328m above the lake, so it's 4m higher than the Eiffel tower. We had a great view of Lake Geneva covered in fog, and all the mountains I'm used to seeing but from a different angle.
More about Paris, and other stuff
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9 October 2005
I forgot that I intended to debunk a myth about Paris. I had heard from many people that the French, and Parisians especially, are particularly precious about their language, and will pretend not to understand if a foreigner does not pronounce it exactly right. Furthermore, I've heard that they refuse to speak English even though they can speak it quite well. Frankly I don't think it would be rude of them if they did... how rude it is of native English speakers to go to another country without even attempting to learn the language of the country they're visiting, and expect everyone else to speak their language!
Nonetheless, it's not true. I found that people would repeat what they said in English as soon as there was any hesitation on my part, even when I had understood and simply didn't know the answer. Not just people in the hospitality industry, but even somebody in the street who was asking me where to find a taxi rank did it. And yet, even when my cover is blown and we both know that the other person speaks English better than I speak French, they're quite happy to let me continue speaking French and to continue speaking French to me. It was great, I got a lot of French practice.
Enough about Paris, there are exciting things happening here in Geneva too. Next week I'll be going to ICALEPCS, a conference with a sneaky acronym which seems to be pronounceable at first, but once you're halfway through saying it, turns out not to be. I have no idea how to refer to this thing in speech, both the name and the abbreviation take more time to say than is becoming to an international conference on [blah blah blah] control systems.
Perhaps even cooler than that is the fact that Murray Gell-Mann is going to give a talk at CERN on Thursday. Murray Gell-Mann, of all people... if you haven't heard of him, you're not a physicist. But while he's at my work, I will be across town at the conference. Still... what a cool job I have! Do Nobel laureates give talks at your workplace? Well do they? That's the cool thing about working at CERN, I get to go to all sorts of interesting lectures. Of course it means I'm always working late to make up the time, and I never have time to update my websites, or write any of the Cocoa apps I want to write, but it's still fun.
Also at CERN, the Globe of Science Innovation has finally opened. I'll have to go have a look around when they have another staff-only day. Also, there was another Discovery Monday on (you guessed it) Monday. This one was about gases, and the highlight was getting to see all that cool stuff with liquid air which other people told me they saw in science class... freezing a rose and smashing it with a hammer, dipping fingers in liquid air, etc. Also watching balloons inflate and cold water boil inside a vacuum chamber. Great fun, I want my own liquid air!
Aah yes... I met some other travellers. For a while I've been seeing advertisements for a 'History of Science' tour in the Australia/New Zealand edition of New Scientist. I noticed that CERN was one of the places they'd visit, and wondered whether I might happen to meet any of the people on the tour while they were at CERN. Well, I did! Some people sat down at the table where I was having lunch and reading my copy of the Australia/New Zealand edition of New Scientist. They were speaking with an accent which somehow reminded me of one of the neighbours we had when I lived in Wellington. They were wondering what to do with the trays when they'd finished, so I told them, and as we got talking I found out they were from NZ, and they were on the tour. I knew the tour went to Paris so I told them about the Marie Curie museum and the science museum, and it turns out they'll be going to the Marie Curie museum.
And to finish off, a wee ramble about physics... this paper is pretty cool. I was shocked when I read the summary in the CERN Courier. All this time their measurements of the rotation of galaxies have been so weird as to necessitate the invention of a whole new, mysterious form of matter, they were using Newtonian gravity, without any relativity thrown in? Now, Newtonian gravity is still pretty darned useful for most things, and in that spirit, I'm going to use a Newton to take notes at the conference (I don't need all calculations to be made at the speed of light.) But one would think that when the measurements seem to suggest something as absurd as dark matter, people would consider checking it with the more accurate theory. It's common sense. Would you write a giant hack to get around a bug in the Cocoa frameworks [note, this is just an analogy. There are no bugs in the Cocoa frameworks] without first checking whether the latest version of Mac OS X fixes the problem? Sure, you might want to use the workaround anyway, but in cosmology there's no need for backwards compatibility with old theories, as long as there's good observation-compatibility. I will be very interested to see what happens to this paper, I've never really liked the idea of dark matter. Actually I haven't finished reading the paper yet since it's the middle of the night and I haven't had time to write the Cocoa app which would help me understand the equations. More Science (well this isn't travelling.macintosh.co.nz, is it?)
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24 September 2005
Last night on the internet I found out about the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie science museum. So on my last full day in Paris, I went there. I wish I'd got out of bed earlier, because, just like at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, I didn't have time to see anywhere near all of it. But they had a cool demographics exhibition which shows how you fit into all the statistics... you pick up a passpop at the start, enter your age and gender into the database, and all through the exhibition were 'What about me?' displays which would read your 'passpop' and say how that particular statistic applied to you.
They also have a great mathematics section. I started out watching all the videos/games etc in French thinking that I understand French when it's about maths, but eventually I switched to English because I didn't actually know a lot of the stuff. I understand French better when I already know what is being said. I recorded most of the audio with my iTalk, intending to listen to the French versions over and over until I understand them. Next Page |
