This is probably where the real blog begins. I have come to understand that most people blog on something specific they do. Like how they cook all the recipes in a cookbook in one year. Or their trial and error while practising for the marathon without any hope that they will ever finish one. I have a different, nonetheless ambitious, goal: I will move to Geneva in three months and work at CERN for a year.
Within a couple of months, everybody who wants to move to CERN can use my blog as a reference. I will write about our search for a house, what to bring for work and what books on Geneva are good. But, my first piece of advice is on hotels. My colleague R and I travelled to CERN last week for the ATLAS software tutorial. The tutorial was to begin on Wednesday at an inhumane 9 am. Coming from Amsterdam, you will need to take the plane before 6 am to make it in time. There were no flights available at that time, so we flew in on Tuesday. Tuesday evening, to be more precise. And here is the tip: phone the hotel if you are arriving between 5 pm and 6 am. Basically all French and Swiss hotels are fermé at “night”. With some luck, you are assigned a no-show and your room has been booked by a random CERN person.
We arrived at the hotel, romantically situated next to a high way, and found nobody at the reception. In the agenda we saw “no show” next to our names. By that time it was 11 pm and we already saw ourselves sleeping on the bathroom floor, our head resting on the reception carpet, because the bathrooms are tiny. We were saved by a CERN physicist, who phoned one of the other hotels in the village and drove us there. We spent the night in a real bed, and on Wednesday morning we could check in our rooms. Who says the LHC is cursed?
It is time to go to sleep in the high way hotel. There is a meeting of the local government in the restaurant, so I can dream about French cuisine while not training for any long run.
