05/06 Chaos CERN Trip
After a short flight out at a civilised time of day from Bristol Airport to Geneva on Monday 26th June and a 10 minute journey on a double decker train into central Geneva, apart from the melting 30°C temperatures, we had an easy walk to the Geneva Youth Hostel. Everyone spent Monday afternoon and Tuesday exploring the city. There's loads to do in close proximity to the youth hostel, which is in the middle of the city, including bars, restaurant, museums and the usual touristy bus rides and stuff. One thing that we really enjoyed was taking the 30 minute bus ride out to the suburbs of Geneva to Veyrier where we took a cable car ride up one of the mountains 1,380 metres and the view across Geneva was stunning. Wednesday bought the trip to CERN and we were privileged enough to go the 100 feet underground to see the ATLAS detector, part of the LHC, being constructed. It's a very strange experience, it looks just like all of those pictures that you see on lecture slides except that it's huge and it looks so industrial it's hard to believe how high tech it is. We were guided around the detector and given loads of unbelievable facts and figure about how fast and big and how energetic the whole process is. It truly is an absolute genius feat of physics and engineering combined and well worth a visit. Thursday meant the flight home but everyone seemed satisfied that it'd been worth the effort.
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