Kasekuchen

Baking projects tend to come in twos for me. The first project is to produce a birthday cake or scones for breakfast or candies and petit fours for a certain red dominated holiday in the recent past, the project that was planned out and ingredients purchased for and a final home pre-determined. The second project is then found to be necessary to use up the leftover cream or spare egg whites or spare egg yolks or abundance of butter that take up residence in the fridge and threaten to invite their fungal friends to visit if allowed to grow bored. These second projects have the benefit of requiring a fair amount of creativity to use up what random and perhaps mismatched ingredients were left by the first project, and they also give me a fun chance to test the type of recipes I might never otherwise make.

And, if the experimental second project bombs and lands in the garbage, I haven't really lost anything compared to throwing the offending ingredients away directly.

Anyway, there was in the recent past a holiday devoted to chocolate, and so I opted to celebrate one of my favorite ingredients and the birthdays of a few friends by making a tray of goodies. I make chocolate-covered candies and petit fours iced with mousse. It was all quite good and eaten quite quickly. But the mousse had required heavy cream, and after my previous sad experiences trying to get French cream to whip properly, I had bought rather too much. Downsizing the butter and egg populations in my fridge didn't look like such a bad idea, either.

You Know You're In Switzerland When . . .

Yup, that would be a weight-loss cereal with flakes covered in dark chocolate. The caption on the bottom translate to something like "our program for your weight." There is another version with a higher proportion to chocolate-covered flakes to not-chocolate-covered ones, and a milk chocolate one as well.

Truth be told, I compared calories per serving, and this version doesn't do worse than the honey and almond or fruit and nut versions it was sitting next to.

A Year After Arrival

On February 4 2010, I arrived to a gray, cold morning at the Geneva airport to start my residence in Europe while working at CERN. I spent the next month hunting for a decent apartment. Finding housing in Geneva is a pain for everyone right now, with how expensive the city is and stiff competition for any and all housing. Luckily for me, CERN isn't in Geneva, and it is much more practical to live just across the border into France.

I wasn't looking for a particularly nice or fancy apartment. I really only had one criteria: I wanted one with an oven. It turns out that that can actually be a fairly specific request around here. In the realm of tiny single bedroom or studio apartments, a stove-top is considered necessary for a kitchen, not an oven.

A Year After Departure

On February 3 2010, one year ago today, I boarded an airplane bound for Geneva, Switzerland with only a one-way ticket in hand. I have now spent a year living outside my native country. When I left, everyone called it an adventure, this experience I was about to have, and they were right. It has been an adventure, as long as one keeps in mind that often the heroes of adventures spend a lot of time tired and confused and working like mad.

So as I sit in my cozy apartment and reflect on what I've learned in the last year, I thought I would record a few of the lessons I've learned on living in on the Franco-Swiss border.

0. French survival phrases
S'il vous plait = please
Merci = thank you
Je ne parle pas francais. = I don't speak French.
Parlez-vous anglais? = Do you speak English?

1. Dress up for any and all business dealings with other people.
It is hard enough to ask for help in a foreign country, where you know you are about to slaughter someone's native language and probably need to ask for someone who speaks yours. Holey jeans and worn out shoes make it much harder to stand your ground, make your request, and not feel like an idiot. So dress up. The confidence boost is well worth the extra time it takes, and you will probably be taken more seriously, too.

2. Be agreeable, but don't always agree.
I believe it is the natural tendency for Americans to agree rapidly when we want to avoid a possible confrontation and make whoever is trying to speak to us go away. The desire to quickly kill conversation only grows when it is happening in languages and accents one doesn't comprehend well. I would recommend fighting the inclination to automatically agree unless you are positive you know what the person is talking about. So smile, be pleasant, and say no. He's probably just trying to get your phone number, anyway.

Along those same lines, sometimes playing dumb and a strong American accent work wonders at ending conversations. So does not having a phone number at all.

3. On opening doors
The two most useful verbs in the French language are not "etre" or "avoir" or anything like that. They are "pousser" and "tirer." Pousser means to push, and tirer means to pull. Since roughly half of the doors around here open the opposite way of what an American seems to expect them to do, you can spare yourself some embarrassment by scanning the door for forms of these words. If it says pousser or poussez, push; tirer or tirez, trying pulling. It will make your entrances and exits a little easier and more graceful.

That being said, it is still preferable to try both pushing and pulling just to be sure that a door is really locked, to tugging at the thing for five minutes in the cold and giving up only to have someone walk past you and push it open without a hitch.

Tour of Emotions

Vexation: Spending two days staring at a maze of code packed with classes and structs you've never heard of before, full of vectors in two different coordinate systems, one of which you cannot find a definition of, in an attempt to track down a sign error. Your desk is slowly buried under scratch papers marked with arrows projections, and possible coordinate axes.

Elation: Finding yourself staring at a sketch that makes the error obvious. You found the problem! And you didn't make the mistake!

Frustration: Being unable to find a fellow grad student or post-doc or supervisor on this project ( you'd really prefer the grad student or post-doc) with whom you can check your brilliant conclusion to make sure it really is brilliant.

Trepidation: Realizing that fixing that error may well require informing one of the best muon experts you know that the code he wrote five years ago is wrong.

Image taken from www.forumgarden.com.

A Word of Advice on Phones

When buying a phone in Europe, one requires two pieces of technology. The first is a phone of the type that most US citizens are already familiar with; the second is a SIM card, or a small microchip-like object that comes attached to a plastic card roughly the size of a credit card. The SIM card must be placed inside the phone in a special receptacle near the battery, and I believe enables the phone to work across country borders. This ability is of course necessary around Geneva, with country borders a scant handful of kilometers away.

First, one's new phone will also come out of the box fluent in the native language of the country, regardless of what language the original box or contract or owner's manual is in. For Switzerland, that would be German. Looking up the words for "settings" and "language" in whatever that native language may be will ease that first meeting with one's new phone, until one and the device are on speaking terms.

One should also observe that the little plastic card the SIM card was attached to is marked with several cryptic numbers, and is the case with all such scraps with cryptic numbers, should be guarded zealously. Otherwise, when one returns to the US for Christmas and must shut down the phone for the flight, one will find that one's phone is demanding a PIN number that one doesn't have. Upon failing to accurately recall the PIN three times, the phone will then demand a PUK number to reset the PIN, giving one a total of eight tries for that before some more extreme measures will be taken. Thus, one will be rendered without a phone for three weeks after returning to one's current abode, while one methodically gathers up every scrap of paper that as squirreled itself away into every corner of one's tiny apartment in the process of looking for that little plastic card.

Image taken from www.technonix.com

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

I know, I'm a little late. But I've been busy. I had to make my way past the storm that closed the Northeast's airports to get back, before dashing across the country. I spent New Year's Eve at a huge dance on the outskirts of Paris, and some time on January 1 wandering along the brilliantly lit Champs Elysees. Notre Dame was lovely.

And then I went back to CERN and back to work. It's amazing how much one forgets after taking a couple weeks to not think about one's code. One wonders how it ever worked in the first place.