ESHEP and Romania

Particle physics is a very, very international field. If you don't consider travel a perk, you will have struggles with this field. CERN's experiments involve physicists from hundreds of countries. So, when it comes time to have a conference or school or something, it isn't too difficult to find a colleague from a very interesting place to host said conference or school. Our conferences can turn up in some cool places to visit.

Oh, and in Paris, because judging from the posters around CERN, Paris hosts a disproportionate number of conferences. But who's complaining about that? To share my current favorite quote about the city of lights, "Paris is always a good idea" (Audrey Hepburn).

CERN also hosts schools for students throughout the year, some based at CERN and some that migrate around a bit. I had the awesome opportunity to be part of the European School of High Energy Physics this year, held in Romania. So I with many other CERN physicists flew out to Romania in September for two weeks of physics lectures, mountains, castles, potatoes, and limited internet access. It was awesome. We were at a resort in the Carpathian mountains in Transylvania. I could see why vampire legends would flourish here The country was wrinkled with little valleys and crevices that you could miss walking over some plateau you thought was the lowest land. It would be easy to miss something there.

But, seriously, we mostly had physics lectures, three or four a day, on the standard model and beyond standard model theories and neutrinos and cosmology and quantum chromodynamics and statistics. We had discussion sections where we the students picked our lecturers' brains about topics. I appreciated the chance to get such a rapid review of things; it was a good reminder of the larger picture of what we're trying to do at CERN.

I also somehow spent the two weeks surrounded by Germans, and began picking up some vocabulary beyond bremsstrahlung and kuchen. There was 'katze' and 'taschentuch' and 'wirkungsquerschnitt' and streichholzschachtelchen.' There was also some debate about appropriate vocabulary to introduce someone to a language with.

We also got to take a few excursions from our resort in the middle of nowhere and see some of the sights of Romania. We went first to Brasov, where we visited the Black Church and the old city walls and I got to see a few Eastern Orthodox churches for the first time.
We also saw at least five brides around the city. I guess September is a very popular time to get married there.
For dinner, we went to a restaurant that specialized in traditional Romanian decor and food. We ate freshly roasted lamb for an appetizer and then bear and boar for the main course (with potatoes) while listening to some traditional Romanian songs. That food seems to me to be very representative of traditional Romanian cuisine; it's not a country that lends itself well to vegetarianism.
But most of what we got to see were castles. I am completely a silly American when it comes to castles and have wanted and wanted to visit a few beyond Versailles for forever. Romania had several examples of different types of castles within easy travelling distance of our school. There was Peles Castle in Sinaia, which was of the summer-residence-of-royalty variety, with all the modern conveniences of the time (late nineteenth century).
There was Rasnov castle, which was of the putting-a-chunk-of-the-city-on-a-freakishly-steep-hill-in-case-of-attack variety.
Clearly, Rasnov hadn't needed its castle much in the last century or so.
There was Bran castle, which really had been built by knights to defend a mountain pass, and therefore was closest to what I think of when I think of castle. This is also the castle often associated with Dracula/Vlad the Impaler, but as the tour repeatedly pointed out, there is no historical reason for that. Romania has the castles were Vlad lived and worked, but Bran castle is mostly known for matching the descriptions in Stoker's book.
Personally, it reminded me of 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarves' for some reason.

And, when we finished with the school and returned to Bucharest to fly home, I had the chance to visit the Parliamentary Palace, which is something like the third largest building by square footage in the world. It was a really, really big fancy building. That's a castle right?

Because if Versailles is a castle, this one should totally count, too.

So, I happily collected a few more stamps in my passport and avoided any real work for a couple weeks, and can now say 'effective cross-section' in German. It was worth the math.