Europe for work? If you insist.

I recently returned from about 10 days in Europe for work. Sucks, I know, but it's a paycheck, and there's this recession on. My dad mentioned I ought to write about the trip before I forget the tasty details, so here goes.

I do marketing, remember?
I do marketing for UVU, which is in the unique position of having transitioned to a university after years as a state college, community college, technical school and vocational center before that. Obviously, this history makes some skeptical about the institution's ability to pull off the things expected of a university. Now, I'm the flack, so I don't blame you for rolling your eyes, but it's my opinion that the public's perception is really lagging behind what's happened at UVU. The university is doing some amazing things and has some top-shelf faculty. I went to Europe to document two of those professors.

UVU Physics Professor Steve Wasserbaech is one of a handful of U.S. scientists invited by the famous CERN lab near Geneva, Switzerland, to study particle physics at the infamous LHC supercollider. A hop, skip and jump away in Montenegro, Marketing Professor Paul Dishman is teaching one of the world's youngest countries how to pull off private enterprise when all it's ever known is central planning. Both extremely cool and timely stories, so I took a photographer and video guy overseas to document them for our marketing purposes.

In fair Geneva
If you have read Dan Brown's "Angels & Demons" or seen the film, you know CERN as the geek's paradise where scientists make the antimatter stolen by the Illuminati, who plan to use it to blow up the Vatican. If there's antimatter there, I want another tour.

CERN is about 20 minutes west of Geneva. The westbound tram line takes you to Meyrin, then you hop on a bus for the last five minutes or so. The lab straddles the France-Switzerland border, and the LHC (the lab's underground "racetrack" for particle collisions) is located hundreds of feet under the border and stretches for 17 miles.

Getting to Switzerland meant an 11-hour non-stop Delta flight from SLC to Paris. We literally had time to get through security and hop on the next flight to Geneva -- no gallivanting at the Eiffel Tower *sniff*. Steve met us at the airport and showed us how to get to our hotel from the airport.

It was snowing when we flew into Geneva, a picturesque little town built around the southern tip of a big lake (which, incidentally, was apparently the inspiration for Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water"). Our hotel, the Best Western Hotel Astoria, was right downtown across from the train station. The hotel was wedged into a row of 6-7 story buildings and couldn't have been more than 40-50 feet wide. My room was excessively tiny, and you had to insert the room key into a slot in the wall to activate the electricity. Free breakfast in the little pub next door -- runny eggs, white sausage and croissants. Can't complain.

We spent three full days at CERN. Steve showed us everything from the so-called CMS control room (basically a big computer lab where they display particle collisions on a few dozen monitors) to the CMS site (located amid grape vineyards in the French countryside north of CERN's main campus) to the cafeteria. The Swiss are huge on pizza -- every other restaurant was a pizzeria, and it was the main attraction for lunch at CERN. Our photographer, Jac [sic], tried the less mainstream offerings, such as "rabbit in saffron sauce." Saffron sauce, sitting under a warmer. Not it.

At CERN, you know you're getting close to the important instruments when you start seeing signs that read: "Radiation warning: Dosimeter required." Steve took us about 300-400 feet underground to the CMS cavern. We couldn't actually see the CMS instrument (a detector that sits on top of the LHC tube and reads the collisions) because the radiation levels were too high.

After spending all day Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at CERN, we took Saturday to get color shots of Geneva. The older part of town is incredible -- stone-cobbled streets that wind up hills and through classic old-Europe buildings. We spent a few hours in St. Pierre's cathedral, which was first built in about eh 7th century. It was a little overwhelming to think of something that old. In the states, we're lucky to see something from the 18th century.

A few other highlights/observations from Switzerland:

* It wasn't France, but we stopped at a pastry shop for an infusion of culture and sugar. I had a lovely raspberry tart.

* I kept having the desire to carry around a baguette. I seriously saw a half-dozen people walking around eating a stick of french bread. My kind of country.

* Speaking of food, pizza and kebabs were the fare of choice if the restaurants were any indication. We ate at a terrific Italian restaurant (I had eggplant penne that was to die for). We also ate at Chez Ma Cousine (specialty: rotisserie chicken), and the three of us appalled the waitress by ordering four desserts to share. Hey, they were tiny and we wanted to try them all! I had a fantastic steak in pepper sauce at Cafe du Soleil, which is known for fondue.

* In spite of all the bread and cheese, people in Switzerland are very slim. In fact, I don't remember seeing anyone I would consider obese, and rarely did I spot anyone who was even a little portly. Must be all the walking and lack of preservatives in the food.

* I wish we placed more emphasis on language training in the U.S. Everyone in Europe seemed to be proficient in at least 2-3 languages. I felt so uneducated, especially since I was representing a university.

We flew out of Geneva on Sunday, February 14 (Valentine's Day). We had a two-hour layover in Vienna, Austria, which was just long enough to make it through the excessively intrusive and cumbersome security process there. The guy in front of us was literally strip-searched, and another guy got into a screaming match with the conveyor-belt attendant, who pushed too many bins through and sent his $1,500 iMac off the edge. Flew into Podgorica, Montenegro, to an essentially empty airport. Ours was the only plane on the tarmac, and they didn't even have the lights on in the tiny airport.

More to come on Montenegro...

Senseless drivel

Sometimes it happens at night. Other times, in the commode. Once or twice, even while driving. The setting changes, but I'm always a little freaked out when I get a thought.

While I don't have much to offer in terms of original ideas, I do need a place to empty the wastebasket lest my brain overload and crash (I'm only working with about 20 gigs here, folks). Hence, this blog.

(A disclaimer: while I'll probably sometimes write about my three girlies, this is NOT a family blog. My wife does a great job of that with our family blog here. It's private, but send a request and we'll add you as long as you aren't a dirty old man in a van.)

I blog, therefore I am. (Or is the other way around?)