Happy Mother's Day to you mothers out there, especially my mother :). Mother's Day is celebrated in France on May 25th.
Just a quick aside to say also to my fellow native Minnesotans: Happy 150th Birthday!! Today (May 11) in 1858 Minnesota joined the Union as the 32nd state. Did you know that the history of Minnesota is the featured article on Wikipedia today?
But I'll bet you that no Minnesotans will get the day off tomorrow to celebrate this momentous occasion...
The French and the Swiss on the other hand seem to enjoy a wealth of holidays and days off. Many of them are associated with the liturgical church calendar.
Wikipedia has a list of all the national holidays split up by country. The funny and ironic thing about this list is: the U.S. list is longer than any of the others! But: the text goes on to explain that really only the "big six" holidays actually result in time off for most private employees. Federal employees enjoy a few more days off such as Veterans Day and Columbus Day.
The list for France, on the other hand, doesn't even cover all the holidays that French people get time off for. You have to click the link for "Holidays in France" that takes you to the wikipedia entry for French national holidays to see them all.
First, preceding all of the holidays in May, on the 25th-27th of April I went on a "Men's Retreat" put on by Crossroads Church. The retreat was held at a retreat center called, rather pretentiously, "Eurovillage".The lodging was serviceable...
the meals were good...
they had a nice bar/lounge area...
but of course what really makes Eurovillage excel is the natural surroundings of Lake Annecy and surrounding mountains.
Morning view:
Late afternoon view:
Lake Annecy and the town of the same name on the north edge of the lake is a magnet for tourists and recreationalists. The views are wonderful, and there are skating / biking running / walking paths all around the lake. K and I got to drive around the lake when we were here in the summer of 2006, so it was a pleasure for me to visit it again and get to do some recreating.
Eurovillage is actually situated closer to the town of Sevrier. From there several of us from the retreat rented bikes for the free time on Saturday afternoon and rode the west side of the lake.
There were a ton more of parasailers out and about (can you see them all?)...
After some intense pedaling we dove, sweaty and exhausted, into the nearest watering hole for essential liquids and electrolytes.
We watched the parasailers coming in to the south end of the lake.
This piqued my curiosity, so once we were adequately rehydrated I decided to break from the group and head further south to find the field that they were landing on.
Having discovered their hidden lair, I spent some time watching a few of them come in.
Several more pictures and movies are posted on our dropshots website; look for the Men's Retreat folder on the left. Meanwhile, here are a few more lakeside shots.
I thought it was like Calhoun/Harriet on steroids (for those of you in the know in the Twin Cities...)
The following Thursday, "May Day" is the European Labour Day. Coincidentally, the Ascension, which floats with Easter on the liturgical calendar, was on the same day this year. CERN gave its employees both Thursday and Friday May 2 off, even though the locals had to work on Friday.
K and I took the opportunity to visit a nice family destination on the top of the Jura, north of here, called Signal de Bougy. She and a few other wives had gone there while their husbands were at the retreat. I remain impressed by all the places like this in the area, family-friendly places for parents and kids to have fun together.
Being at the top of the Jura it has spectacular views of the lake and the Alps beyond (the bright yellow fields below I've been told are rapeseed crops. They really brighten up the surroundings!):
Here's a zoom-in closeup of a tour boat approaching the dock at Nyon.
The park has a self-serve restaurant; we ate our pre-packed lunch out on the patio.
Afterwards we showed B around the park and played a round of mini-golf...
But it was getting close to B's afternoon nap, so the petting zoo and other activities in the park will have to wait for another time, perhaps when B can motivate around on his own and appreciate the surroundings.
Then just this last Thursday was what Americans would call VE Day, the end of WWII in Europe. The French celebrate it by taking the day off, but not the Swiss, since they remained officially neutral during the war. We were in the middle of "CRuZeT" (Cosmic RUn at ZEro Tesla), so we kept working, even though the detector is on French territory. In fact this last week I was on shift for three straight days and helped bring in a significant fraction of a total 14 million events collected by Friday. For the first time we used the newly furbished surface control room at Point 5. We only needed one person (that was me on Tuesday at 7:00 a.m.) to go down at the beginning of the run to turn on the high voltage crates and the low voltage service power supply. The rest we could do from the surface. All subdetector systems except the tracker participated in round-the-clock shifts. Here are a couple pictures of the interior of the new control room.
Here I am with my fellow shifters Kerem (from Turkey) and Gobinda (from India, taking the picture) on evening shift last Wednesday. You can see why I prefer to stay behind the camera...
But wait, the holidays keep coming! Tomorrow (May 12) is "Whit Monday", or the day after Pentecost; this is celebrated in both Switzerland and France, and again CERN has its doors closed. K's French teacher called off classes for tomorrow and referred to Pentecost as the holiday where "a light appears on Jesus' head".
Still more stories and pictures await! But I think this entry has gotten big enough.
Take care,
-PKBD
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