Geneva, the first weekend in June

When I began working with my adviser, it was a foregone conclusion that I would eventually move to Geneva, Switzerland and work at CERN. Every grad student at my university who worked in my experiment did. It was only the details of when exactly I would leave and how long I would stay that were undecided. Truth be told, I was in no particular rush to pack up and move. Yes, living in Europe would be awesome, but one to two years is too long to just put life on hold behind you. On that time range, I would be leaving behind friends and habits and hobbies that would require rebuilding in a foreign country, and then rebuilding again when it was over and I returned to the US.

The decision of when exactly I would go was lurking on my mind when my adviser emailed me into his office for a chat in February or March 2009. After checking up on my current research and my progress towards my preliminary exam, he asked me if I was interested in traveling during the summer. Particle physics is an international field, and grants often include funds to let grad students travel to schools and conferences once a year. I was already going to a summer school, but my adviser suggested an additional trip. He wanted me to go to CERN for a week or two, to complete the paperwork registering me a researcher there, meet the half of the group stationed there that I hadn't met yet, and sit in on a few meetings to get acquainted with things. Plane tickets and accommodations would be covered by my university.

A most-expenses paid trip to Europe for ten days? I went.

So on the last day of May I arrived in Geneva, seeing continental Europe and CERN for the first time. I spent the week filling out forms and learning my way around CERN and writing computer code, but the weekend I had free. I tagged along with my adviser as he caught a train from Gare Cornavin, and I spent a few hours wandering around downtown Geneva.

The city of Geneva sits on the tip of Lac Leman, the very corner of Switzerland that juts into France, where the Rhone River leaves the lake. Along the shores of the lake are parks and wharfs, statues and fountains, a giant clock set in the ground planted with flowers and the Jet d'Eau shooting water into the air. On that first weekend in June, somewhere in between spring and summer, I walked along the east side of the lake and watched the ducks and swans and admired the beds of roses coming into bloom, red followed by yellow followed by pink followed by peach.

This past weekend, I went back and did it again, to commemorate the one year since I had first come to Geneva.