CERN Entrance E

To people driving by, CERN is primarily a loooooooooooooooooooooong, tall fence overgrown with all sorts of plants and trees, broken in about four places by gates. There isn't a whole lot of security to get on site, but CERN IDs are required to get in. I think this is partially to keep people with confused ideas of what we do on the outside and partially to make us students feel a little cooler about working in an international lab every hour that can be crammed into a day.

The experiments and all other interesting stuff have a lot more security. Like palm and retina scanners. I am not kidding.

Anyway, having only three ways (the other gates are for goods) to get into or out of CERN makes getting to one's office a little interesting. Entrance E, shown above, has the distinction of being the only gate on the French side of the border, and lies about a fifteen minute walk from my apartment. Entrance B, the main entrance that's open 24/7. is over a kilometer away. One would think this would make Entrance E incredibly convenient.

But Entrance E has magical properties not shared by the other, mundane gates. Entrance E is a one-way gate. It allows people to enter CERN between 7 and 9:30 a.m., and allows people to leave between 4:30 and 7 p.m. And that's all. This bears no relationship whatsoever to the hours actually worked by the physicists at CERN. Perhaps the personnel this personnel gate is referring to is some other group of people. Either way, this behavior is extremely annoying when you have a meeting in this corner of CERN. The meeting lasts until 7:10 p.m. Entrance E closes. The closest open gate is over a kilometer away. What should have been a fifteen minute walk is now a 30 minute hike over that darn hill smack in the middle of CERN.

At least, it's only 30 minutes of hiking assuming you catch the bus and don't just walk home, passing back by Entrance E on the outside an hour later.

My favorite breakfast

In my humble, American, opinion, the French have an odd relationship with breakfast. It seems to barely count as a meal. The typical menu contains coffee and a pastry and maybe, maybe a yogurt. Even the name makes breakfast seem insignificant; in French, it is le petit dejeuner, as compared to lunch, which is huge and crowned with the name dejeuner. Breakfast seems to just be a placeholder to tide you over until lunch.

I find that a crying shame, since I love breakfast and the baker in me bows to French breakfast pastries as royalty amongst baked goods, requiring great knowledge and skill to accomplish. They taste really, really good, too.

There is of course the croissant, which I will probably never again be able to eat sullied with chicken salad. This is the basis and originator of all the rest, with its layers of butter carefully enrobed in a slightly sweetened yeasted dough. There is the pain au chocolat, or croissant pastry wrapped around two sticks of dark chocolate. There are variations folded around apricots, and even occasionally with ham and cheese, though I feel that savory variations are due to foreign influence. There are the choussons aux pommes, or something rather like a pie crust that somehow has far more structure in the hand, full of sweetened applesauce. There are the brioches, the queens of enriched doughs, and the tartines, fresh baguettes spread with butter or honey or the lovely fruit jams available here.