Experiences in Europe

This summer I was lucky enough to travel extensively in Europe in addition to my research at CERN. My internship did not start until mid-June, so I was able to travel for a large chunk of time starting in late May. I was also able to augment my study with weekend trips across western Europe.

I started my study abroad experience in London. I can speak a meager amount of Spanish which helps me with reading a decent amount of French, but I had thought that an English speaking country would be a nice place to start my experience. This ended up backfiring to a certain extent because, while everyone at the museums and sights spoke English, the people in the hostel with me were largely from France, Germany, Italy, or elsewhere and spoke mostly in languages that I did not understand. This was not a problem, though, as I spent the majority of my time walking around the city and experiencing London.

By far the most interesting and fun thing that I did in London was go to Shakespeare's Globe. A Comedy of Errors, a hilarious play centered on two sets of twins and mistaken identity, was absolutely hysterical, and the experience was only improved by the venue: a thatch-roofed replica of the Globe located right on the Thames. If anyone else spends some time in London and wants to see some Shakespeare, the cheapest Globe tickets are the best. The goundlings pay five pounds and stand on the floor in the center of the Globe for the entirety of the play. I was lucky enough to show up early, and I ended up in the center, close enough to prop my elbows on the stage.

London, I felt, was not entirely different than the United States, but there were distinctions. The age of the country was one thing. I visited Westminster Abbey and saw the tomb of St. Edward the Confessor who died in the year 1066. Newton was one of the newer additions to the Abbey in 1727. I found it interesting that when visiting sights in London, or all of Europe for that matter, the relative youth of our country becomes remarkably apparent. Additionally, the city seems to be built in one large pile of buildings, tube tunnels, bridges and people. Tiny alleys and winding streets are lined with tall, skinny buildings, built at any angle that allows them to fit into the jumble. Within walking distance of each other are modern buildings and those with smokestacks reminiscent of Mary Poppins and Sherlock Holmes. The age as well as size of the United States, especially in a sprawling city like Dallas, prevents us from needing to build in such a way, but it is certainly interesting to see. I also kept doing double takes when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a twelve year old driving a car (I know the steering wheels are on the other side, but for some reason, it always caught me off guard for a split second).

From London, I flew to Amsterdam where a stayed for a short two days. The Van Gogh museum was very nice, and I happened to be there when they had The Starry Night on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. With this piece in hand, the museum had set up an entire temporary exhibit on night works which I found to be very interesting. Amsterdam seemed to be two cities simultaneously. The north part of the city, which houses the infamous red light district and some of the other more notorious aspects of Amsterdam, was truly intriguing just to watch. Whether it was a businessman openly haggling with a prostitute, an off duty police officer taking a break in a coffee shop, or the thousands of bicycles outside of centraal station this was one of the most culturally different places from the United States that I visited during the entire summer. The south part of the city, on the other hand, is much less touristy and better highlights the beauty of the city. The canals, I'm told, are rivaled only by those in Venice, and the buildings all give off a quaint, homey feel. The parks are pristine; the weather is great; and the people are laid back and friendly.

From Amsterdam, I went to Paris. My favorite part of Paris was, hands down, the food. The Louvre: big, Notre Dame: nice, The Eiffel Tower: tall, but the food: tasty beyond words. I only had one bad meal in Paris, and by bad I mean it was more on the culinary level of a hot pocket, which in nearly any other case, is rather good. Paris taught me the difference between eating and dining. Besides treating my taste buds I enjoyed Paris because it is a great city to see while just strolling around. I spent a day walking along the Seine, browsing paintings being sold by street vendors and watching the Paris day unfold before me. Did I mention the food?

Rome was next on my whirlwind tour of Europe, and I think the experienced can be summarized by saying that one would be hard-pressed to find a type-A Italian. The Paris metro and the London underground, there were electronic signs that would count down the minutes until the train arrived. The last minute counted down the seconds, and if the train was late, it would count up the seconds that the train was late. The trains in London or Paris were never more than 10 seconds late. Rome was another story. The same signs existed, but would sporadically change from five minutes, to three, to one, stay at one for four, then go back to five. The managers the Roman subway system could save a lot of money by just posting non-electric signs saying, "Just wait, it'll get here". This was not, however, a bad experience. The trains just getting there when they got there actually did a lot to lower my stress level. I wasn't worried about missing trains or checking in to my hostel late because in Rome, late and deadline are very relative terms. I was content to just go with the flow and get there when I got there.

The Vatican museum with the Sistine chapel was my favorite museum of the trip. It was laid out in a linear fashion with a set path to take. This made it much more manageable while still being one of the largest museums in the world. The audio guide was also very extensive and instructive.

After Rome, my internship started, but I was still able to travel on the weekends. I investigated interesting ways to exit cable cars 450 feet over small lakes in Interlaken, Switzerland (by bungee proved best). I went hiking in Lauterbrunnen, a small town nestled in a valley between two Lord-of-the-Rings-esque cliffs boasting thousand foot waterfalls. I swam in the pristine glacial river that runs through Bern and visited Einstein's house shortly after. I visited the botanical gardens and eyed a $24,000.00 watch in Zurich, and I ate Weiner Schnitzel in Heidelberg, Germany.

I visited a lot of places and saw a lot of interesting things, but the things that I most enjoy taking away from my experiences abroad, separate from my research experience, are the differences between the United States and countries abroad. I learned so many things from the different cultures that I visited this summer. American portion sizes are ridiculous; there's full and then there's American full. 24/7 megastores that sell everything for cheap are not omnipresent in all countries. Moderate Americans are a bit conservative by European standards, and American beer, for the most part, is not any good at all. For all its differences, I also figured out that I greatly appreciate living in the United States. It was a fun, enriching summer, but its good to be home.

Reflections on a summer in Germany

Today is my last day in Germany. I left Marburg this morning with a few friends from the Sommer Universität program, and the whole way to Frankfurt we talked about how odd we find it that the program is actually over. It’s strange really; we all knew that the program runs for four weeks, but over the course of the last month we seem to have lost track of how time had actually been passing.
It’s not a hard thing, to lose track of time in Marburg. Many have described the Universitätstadt as a perfect fairy-tale town hidden away in the hills of Hessen, an apt description that captures the city’s relaxed atmosphere. Exploring the old, historical city, wandering along its winding, cobbled streets really gave me the sense of being lost in a traditional German town. However, the International Sommer Universität program was about much more than just getting to know Marburg. During the last four weeks, not only have I studied and spoken more German than ever before, but I have also learned much about the European Union, its role in the world and how Germany, the largest and probably most important member of the Union, influences Europe and the rest of the world. I am particularly pleased about participating in the ISU program this year because, as a beginning graduate student in International Political Economy with a focus on Europe, the scope of my seminars this summer have helped prepare me for classes to come. I feel that getting a better scope of the European Union and its policies has helped me to open up my mind more to international organizations and the kind of attitude of cooperation required to work with them.
Aside from getting to know more about the European Union and Marburg, the ISU program also included several cultural excursions on the weekends. These outings included hiking through the hills and forests of Hessen and dancing with traditional German folk dancers, taking a tour of a salt mine 800 meters under the earth, exploring Point Alpha, an observation point for both American and Soviet forces before reunification and taking a ferry ride up the Rhein river. These experiences provided a great opportunity to get in touch with German gemütlichkeit, the warm, welcoming, friendly spirit of Deutschland.
The ability not only to get to know Germany by living here, but also by exploring its history and culture, has helped me gain a greater appreciation for new cultures and viewpoints on life. Also, being away from family and friends and everything that I have become so reliant on and comfortable with has given me a greater appreciation for everything I have in my life. As much as I know I am going to miss Germany and the people I have met and gotten to know in my month at the ISU program, I am ready to come back home and get back to my life, but incorporating all that I’ve learned here.

Summer in China 2

Beijing and China's ruling Han majority portray a very specific version of China to the rest of the world. This China is homogenous in culture and creed.

I had a very different experience in China's southern Yunnan province, home to 26 of China's 55 minority groups. In Yunnan's rural lands, I ate the Bai people's distinct culinary creations, witnessed the Ni's distinctive dance, and even married a Tibetan woman after winning a strength contest and being crowned the Yak Prince. (Pictured) The marriage was for show … I think. What Mandarin I understood didn't help me in rural China, where many people speak regional dialects.

So, during my 8 weeks in China, my impression of the nation changed greatly. I don't know how I ever thought a nation of 1.3 billion could be homogenous, but I did. The reality is that while America may be the world's great melting pot, China could probably give the U.S. a run for its money. America undoubtedly has one of the largest varieties of races and nationalities living under one roof, but at the end of the day, our cultural differences aren't that great. For the most part, we're eating the same food and wearing the same clothing.

In China, the racial differences are subtle, but the cultural differences are pronounced. Each ethnic group has its own style of dress, from simple farming attire to fluorescent floral patterned dresses and hats. Each group has its own music, dance, and even musical instruments. China's varied geography and climate has left each group with its own cuisine and abodes.

And while the ideal Chinese person that Beijing portrays is a Mandarin speaking atheist, China is filled with more languages and religions than perhaps any other nation.

So, I left China with a couple of valuable lessons. Actually, I learned dozens of valuable lessons, but to always carry anti-diarrheal doesn't fit in well with this narrative. My first lesson, as cliché as it is, is to never judge a book by its cover, or perhaps more appropriately, a people by its propaganda. You can never really understand a people or culture until you've experienced them first hand. The second lesson, as corny as it is, is that with just a few shared beliefs or commonalities, incredibly varied groups can come together as one nation.

The summer I spent in China was eye-opening. Studying abroad, as harrowing, hectic, and exhausting as it could be, was one of the best experiences of my life.

ATLAS at CERN

During my freshman year as a McDermott Scholar, many people asked me where I thought I might want to study abroad, and to be honest, I couldn't decide. At times, I saw myself taking physics classes in Europe or Asia, and at others, I thought I would want to enroll in something vastly different than my major and learn about the ancient Greeks in Greece while reading the Iliad. The only recurring study abroad option that occurred to me, was to work at a large physics lab abroad, and with the Large Hadron Collider's world-destroying black holes in the popular news so often, CERN seemed like a good option.

At the time I didn't know that the 'European' in the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN with all of the adjectives switched in french, was taken pretty seriously. As the United States is not a member state, I soon figured out that CERN did not offer the gobs of American student research positions that I had expected, but instead only offered 10 spots for American students. I applied around winter break last year, and was accepted to the program, I believe, because of my previous high-energy physics experience under UT-Dallas professor Dr. Joseph Izen. My experience at Los Alamos National Labs certainly helped as well, and I definitely would not have been able to spend the summer in New Mexico without the McDermott program.

So thanks are sincere and necessary, but, perhaps, do not make for the most interesting read. For that, I'd like to take everyone on a small tour of where I've been working this summer. CERN is located about 20 minutes outside of Geneva on the border between Switzerland and France. It's a great location because you can set your watch on the Swiss trains and buses, and the great food and wine bleeds over from France. Most things above ground at CERN look like modest office buildings, somewhat reminiscent of founder's north on the inside and the art barn on the outside. There are some nicer buildings, but the truly impressive parts of CERN exist underground.

Impressive is a bit of an understatement. CERN houses the Large Hadron Collider or LHC. The LHC lives in a circular tunnel 100m underground, 26km in circumference. It consists of thousands of superconducting magnets that bend a beam of protons in a circle. The beam-pipe is cooled with liquid helium down to a chilly 1.9 kelvin, colder than the residual temperature of outer space. This system of superconducting magnets (essentially electromagnets without electrical resistance) creates a magnetic field of over 8 Tesla, and the entire beam-pipe is also kept in a vacuum with a pressure about 10 time lower than the pressure on the surface of the moon. Oh, and it accelerates protons to 99.99% of the speed of light, focuses them into small, intense packets, and smashes them together at energies up to 7 times higher than previously possible in the lab.

Located along the LHC ring at the points where the machine collides protons, are the world's newest particle detectors. One of these detectors, the one I am working on the summer and the one that the UT-Dallas high-energy physics group works on, is called ATLAS. It's a cool name, but a rather bad acronym standing for A Torodial LHC ApparatuS. ATLAS is a collusus. It is a cylinder of concentic sub-detectors seven stories tall and half a football field long. It weighs over 7000 tons, about as much as the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the entire thing has to be alligned and calibrated on the micron scale. Each level of the detector is designed to measure different things. The innermost sub-detector, the pixel detector, works simmilarly to a digital camera to measure the precise location of particles that emerge from high-energy proton collisions. The outermost sub-detector is the muon system. It is designed to snag information about a particular particle called the muon (essentially just a more massive electron), and it is this subdetector that can be seen behing me in the accomanying whoosh picture.

My job this summer has been to work on whats called the ATLAS trigger system. The ATLAS detector alone produces enough data fill a stack of CD's that could reach the moon and back, twice, every year, many Terabytes per second. This is, of course, too much data, and many times when protons are smashed together, nothing intersting happens at all. The trigger system is in place to quickly filter through the collisions in real time and save only the interesting ones, lowering the data output rate to about 300 MB/s. This is not as easy as it sounds, considering a focused group of protons called a bunch collide in the detector every 25 nanoseconds; by the time the electronics get the signal that a collision has occured, more collisions have already taken place.

Working at CERN has been very fun, but it was not the only thing that I did this summer. I was also able to travel before the internship started in mid-June as well as on the weekends. I hope to fill everyone in on some of my travels in another blog post coming soon.

A changing Chinese culture

Sitting in a music hall in Li Jiang, China, I heard the sound of two worlds colliding. The intended performance of the night was an ancient Naxi minority musical arrangement; 1000-year-old music played on centuries old instruments by 80 year old musicians (pictured). The music was beautiful, haunting, and accompanied by the booming bass of a nearby western dance club. A perfect analogy of the cosmic culture shift occurring among the Chinese youth, the bass line was unrelenting, unstoppable, and unignorable, and yet these stoic men of another China played on proudly and unflinchingly.

That has been the inescapable theme of my entire trip in China. Whether it be dance music intruding on 1000-year-old epics, Kentucky Fried Chicken replacing noodle stands, or MRIs and modern pharmaceuticals pushing out herbs and acupuncture, the conflict between old and new, East and West, is constant.

I too, find myself conflicted. The changes taking place in China seem inevitable and necessary. It is amazing and a testament to technology that even in the most rural parts of China, I can call home on my computer using Skype on a wireless internet connection. Information, modern health care, and transportation are seemingly no longer luxuries in much of China, and they shouldn't be.

At the same time, the worst parts of the west seem to be accompanying these advancements. Cars and smog are replacing bicycles. Clubs are raucous and filled with drug dealers. The modern youth are embracing consumerism and individualism, much to the dismay of their traditional parents who expect them to be their retirement plans.

So, on any given day, I've never been certain which China I would be experiencing. I've worked with patients in a traditional Chinese medicine hospital, witnessing the application of millenniums old techniques. The slow, purposeful movement of Tai Chi has been my morning coffee. I've seen the best of China's ancient Buddhist and Taoist temples carved into the sides of mountains (pictured). I've also danced to American music, eaten at more than one familiar fast food restaurant, and kept up to date with all my friends on facebook. It's hard to know exactly what I'm supposed to be experiencing and whether I'm missing out on the "real" China, or whether that China exists now only in history books.

Whatever the case, my experiences in China's Yunnan province have been other worldly and eye-opening. I've learned basic Mandarin, the principles of traditional Chinese medicine, and the limits of my digestive system. Most importantly, I have a much better understanding of 1/6 of the world's population. I can't thank the McDermott Scholars Program enough for the opportunities for self-improvement it makes possible.