Kristen's birthday, UFOs & climbing

What an adventurous weekend! Friday night was Kristen's 25th birthday party at the Great Escape, of course, and then some of us went out dancing afterward. Around midnight, Joe & Adrian left to walk home and shortly after they left I got a call to go outside and see these strange lights over lake Geneva. After clearing everybody in our party out from the bar, we all stood in the courtyard completely freaked out watching the UFOs hover and then fade away one by one slowly over ~20 minutes. Then we left to go dancing, but of course, Arnie was still freaked hours later when we were in the nightclub dancing. Saturday, Joe submitted a UFO report on some website where he found an extremely similar sighting from 2006. Who knows, maybe they were aliens, maybe they were just flares.

-Joe, Arnie, Kristen & I at Great Escape (why do the girls always look better than the guys?)

-aliens or flares?-Arnie, Nathan & Stephan dancing at Buzz

Sunday, I went climbing with a group of people for the day at Pierre de Moëllé high up in the mountains. We had a beautiful view over toward Diablerets and perfect climbing weather. I did some really cool climbs and Kristen has a bunch of cool pictures of me. Once I get them from her I'll post them here or on flickr. I also did a lead-climb for the first time yesterday! Even though it was rated fairly easy, I was still super nervous. In the end I did it- didn't fall and made it back down all in one piece completely full of adrenalin! It's a totally different feeling than just top-roping. Can't wait to try it again! I have a feeling that I'm completely addicted to climbing... how strange....

-Kristen starting up the wall

-Super hardcore Kristen!

Slow week & more climbing

This past week was very quiet, especially since Joe wasn't around to instigate going out. He was in the states all week at his 10-year high school reunion and then to a conference in Milwaukee. He even squeezed in a couple days in Chicago with Jacqui and Amine before they headed to the conference. They even went to Gibson's Steakhouse...I'm so jealous!! Especially since I only got to eat out for fondue this week. Adrian's friends from college were visiting, so we went out for fondue Monday night and then to Lutry Tuesday night. The rest of the week was very tame... stayed home most of the time and watched 3 movies and cleaned up the apartment.

On Saturday, Stephan, Rikki (a PhD student in Joe's lab) and I went climbing in Collombey. It wasn't the prettiest of places, with tons of rock dumped on the site and a view of a power plant, but it was in the shade all day long... very nice to know about in the future if it's ever super hot. It wasn't too easy to get to either (train & 2 buses) and the climbs aren't used often, as seen with the plants everywhere and lots of spiders. On one of the runs, there was a huge nest-like thing of orange-bodied daddy long legs... just hanging there bouncing in the wind. Super creepy, but I managed not to freak out too much, only came off the wall for a minute or so to get over the initial shock before climbing around them. Stephan even warned us since he climbed first, but I wasn't expecting that many of them. And on another run, I had to swat one off the wall because it kept trying to get into the handhold I wanted to use. After the spider runs, we moved to a different part of the wall and met these really nice english-speaking climbers. Turns out that they run a treking/climbing/alpine excursion company, explains why they were so good at climbing! They were so nice, they even drove us back to the train station, which saved us so much time with the buses.

-here I am at the top of the spider run. I'm so tiny up there!

-here's Stephan climbing his first 6a. (6a is the difficulty grade, I've only climbed 4s and some 5s)

The rest of the pictures are on flickr if you want to see more action shots of our bums.

My first day rock climbing!

On Sunday, I went climbing for the first time with Stephan, Kristen & Arnie. We went to an old rock quarry on the outskirts of Aigle, in St. Triphon. It was so much fun! We did a bunch of different climbs around the quarry, I think about five. Surprising to me, the quarry was full of people. We had a beautiful day, you'll see in the pictures, which made it a lot more rewarding to check out the view once you got to the top. Unfortunately, I didn't have any pockets in my pants, so I couldn't take any pictures from the top of the wall. Next time! Of course now, my butt, arms and torso are sore, but it's not as bad as the day after Parc Aventure, and thankfully I'm not covered in bruises. I did slip and fall a bit once, but it wasn't that bad, especially since I was wearing pants.

-Kristen at the top of the wall

-Arnie nursing his hangover, Stephan belaying Kristen

-Me looking totally confused about where to go next

For more pictures from climbing, here's the link to my flickr site.

Back in Switzerland & exhausted....

Yes, I'm alive and I survived sleeping in a dorm room and eating dining commons food for a week. The conference was a lot of fun, but it was also an extremely intensive learning experience. I met a lot of really nice people who taught me a lot about electrophysiology, something I know next to nil about. But, there were a couple of talks that were extremely interesting and comprehensible. Maybe people to work with, maybe not, depending on whether I'm going to stay in academia or not. The last night of the conference, we had a lobster bake, which was really cool! I ate my first lobster out of a shell... I must admit that the lobster, while dead, did scare me once when I caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye... yes, how pathetic!

-me and the lobster -the chef & the lobsters

After the conference, it was a whirl-wind trip home and then right back here. Being at home, rushing around, was no vacation at all, so I'm now exhausted and wishing I could sleep all day! But in other cool news, while I was gone, Joe booked us on a cruise in the western Mediterranean! how cool! The first week of October can not come soon enough!