Last Friday and Saturday was the annual Lemanic Neuroscience meeting in les Diablerets. This year I was a student organizer and got to go up a night early to help set up for the meeting. It was a lot of hard work, but also a lot of fun to do. I even got to hang out with the two women guest speakers and talk to them about their careers and how they balance science and a normal life. Even though they're both very successful, it's nice to see that you don't have to be a superwoman (like my & Joe's advisors) to be a good scientist.
-organizing committee & the 2 guest speakers Thursday night at dinner
As a student organizer, I organized a trip up to the newly opened Alpine Coaster at the top of Glacier 3000. It was really fun! I took five guys from EPFL and the University of Geneva up to the top and we had an absolutely beautiful day. After riding the coaster, we then took a chairlift down to the glacier and walked around for about half an hour. It sucks that it's so expensive to get up to the glacier or I'd like to go again with Joe before it closes for the season.
-Johannes & Christian in their sleds
-the coaster and station from the bottom
-Ullrich, Johannes, Ruthger, Christian, me, Gijs on the glacier
-Here's a movie of the coaster. It's a bit bumpy because I was sitting in the sled waiting to go down the coaster myself.Living in Switzerland we don't get to celebrate Labor Day, but we do get a random Monday off in September for the Jeûne Fédéral holiday. It's some holiday that has to do with fasting for a religious reason and most people eat prune tarts. To take advantage of this holiday, we went for a 6 hour hike in Ovronnaz, which is in the Valais. Jan suggested the hike to Adrian as a 'nice hike', which it was, but it was more agressive than we expected, especially since this was the first hike for Stephan in his new hiking boots. Once we saw the 500m assent, we remembered that Jan is Swiss-german and of course, he considers that 'nice'. Even with all of the climbing, we managed to finish the hike in 5 hours instead of 6. A lot of the signposts didn't have times listed, so we weren't sure if we were on time or not, and since the chairlift stopped running at 5pm, we hurried to get back in time. It also started raining quite hard about half hour before the end, so we were all soaking wet... nothing like hair product leaching out and running down your neck.... ewwww.... If you want to see where we hiked on a map, we started at Jorasse, walked up to Fenestral, around the mountain past the lakes to l'Erié, to Lui D'Août and back to Jorasse.
-Joe, Adrian, Stephan & me about 2 hours into the hike (I learned how to use the self timer on the new camera!)
-back at the chairlift, soaking wet, and surprisingly smiley
1 comment:
We were actually moving so slowly on the hike that we were passed by a boy carrying another boy on his shoulders and Swiss military carrying lumber on their shoulders. Damn Swiss. That all reminded me of a time a few years ago when I was waiting for Carolyn to catch her breath and this old Swiss woman, no longer able to navigate amongst the rocks on her wheelchair, stood up, threw the wheelchair on her shoulder, and climbed past Carolyn and I the remaining 200m to the summit (I'm sure her ride down was awesome). Carolyn always denies this happened... but it did... and who you gonna believe?
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