Venice

A problem with staying in the middle of Venice is that I arrived sweaty and exhausted and then had to haul my suitcase over what seemed like an infinite number of charming arched bridges and cobbled pathways. Once I got to the hostel and dumped my stuff I went to bed early and despite all the lights being on and the bass thumping from the next room passed out immediately.

Everywhere looked like this

I could just swing my camera about wildly

Yum!

All there really is to do in Venice is look at the beautiful architecture and the beautiful tourists and eat nice food. There are a lot of tourists, but they tend to trudge around one circuit of the city with wider paths (there are no cars, no room) so as soon as you veer off into a sidestreet you are alone. And it's impossible to find a part of venice that's not beautiful; the whole place is almost suspiciously charming.

The best pizza I've ever eaten

Venice is cool because it is also a functioning town wih locals walking around, who I found not at all jaded and sick of loud english speakers but happy and friendly. A lot of them have dogs! I tried to photograph every dog I saw but soon gave up; I still have a lot of blurry photos of dogs if you want to arrange a viewing.

Cane!

The afternoon got brutally hot so I headed back to the hostel, where I got chatting to some cool people: A baker from Portland who ad just been building a straw bale house in Croatia; a guy from Chicago who was working for google in Paris; a business student in Madrid originally from Hong Kong; a Californian who had quit her job at whole foods to go on a dance course in Austria. We hung out for the evening and the next day. 

Picturesque

A journalist from New York

scallops, spaghetti, cheap wine and good times

Paris

Paris! It's smelly and it's seedy and it's wonderful! I arrived in the evening and stumbled my way to Netta and Fionn's lovely and tiny studio apartment in the 12th arrondissement. We bought bread and cheese and cider and wine and went down to the Seine.

I'm worried this blog doesn't have enough lonely planet vibe so: Great times for under ten bucks tip: Drinking 2 euro wine from a plastic cup on the bank of the seine is pretty close to perfect. After a little while Fionn suggested a walk - Paris at night is just so wonderful. The buildings are beautiful and lit up and the people are happy and the air is warm. We stumbled about and finally home clutching nutella and banana crepes.

Casual brass by the Seine

Paris!!!

 

Good times

Next morning was more crepes (home made this time) then the city. Paris has a huge number of bike stands which you can hire out - Netta lent me her card which meant I could pick up a bike, ride it for half an hour, return it to another stand and go for a wander or get another bike. Since loads of Parisians leave town for the summer the traffic was easygoing and biking was lovely. I gawped at all the standard and most magnificent sights - that big ol tower included - and came back to meet fionn for lunch. He works as a bike-taxi mechanic beside Notre Dame. While buying amazing falafel (ten buck tip, people) he struck up a conversation with the next couple in line and one of them turned out to be in the same punk band as his workmate! We ate together in the park, where we met the most lovely and cheerful homeless guy - Fionn reckons it's harder to get the grimmer sorts of drugs in Paris so the homeless tend to be less terrifying and sad than in other big cities, which I certainly noticed. 

A goat chillin' at the Champs Elysees

OHH MAN I KNEW I FORGOT SOMETHING

Velib station in Paris

When Fionn went back to work I followed our new friends along to the Pantheon where I saw the Curie's graves (wooo!) and some guy "Voltaire" who is a writer or something I think. They went off to shotgun beers at Jim Morrison's grave but I decided to get some culture. Netta had told me if I was going to a gallery to go to the P and she was totally right - it is in this amazing building and the modern art collection from 1905-present is really class. It's arranged by time and movement which is helpful if like me you're kind of an uneducated yet enthusiastic creten. By this point it was getting late and I was le tired but pretty happy with the quantity and quality of my day-tour.

Pompidou

We went out for dinner and had: CREPES. With smoked salmon and cream cheese and lemon. Walked around a little but I felt pretty brutal so we came home in order for me to get up a bit too early for comfort to catch the train to Italy this morning. The view has been amazing though - castles on clifftops, rural towns, rivers and forests. 

One of the many sites at which crepes were consumed

Paradise

In the last two days in sheffield I became obsessed with seeing ALL THE SIGHTS so made Sophie go on a mad dash to all the museums and art galleries. Sheffield is famous for spoons and horrible working conditions.

Fascinating

It's lovely now though! We also found the best and coolest pub, called "the wick at both ends" so I have a lot of photos like this:

Woooo

Friday afternoon I hugged Sophie and caught a train to Manchester. I went to high school there for a year and I have a bunch of people who are amazingly welcoming and cool despite the fact I have seen them once in the last 8 years. I stayed with my mate Lav and her bloke Jay, who have two SUPER CUTE kids. Immediately Lucas, who is 3, took me around the whole house and showed off items such as "the couch", "pictures", "table" and "my pants". Sunday is the only day Jay and Lav don't work so they usually go somewhere - this time Jay picked the Eden Project - which is this amazin garden with the world's biggest greenhouses. The only problem was it's in cornwall, which is 300 miles from manchester. Jay didn't really see this as an issue "well, we'll just get up at 5am." We got back about 2am Monday - Lavern started work at 4am. Totally worth it though.

BIODOMES!!!

Cornwall beach

WOO SUNFLOWERS

Horsie!

The greenhouse (also known by the much cooler term "biodome") had a big metal platform suspended from the roof with a see through floor. Luckily there was one woman much more terrified than me that distracted the cool people from my nervous stumbling and quiet moans. It was amazing to see the whole place - unfortunately all my photos are hurriedly taken while I try not to think about plummeting to my death in the greenery.

The terrifying platform

From the platform

I caught up with a few other old mates and had dinner in the curry mile -  more the 70 curry houses in one stretch of road - and the trafford centre, which is a ridiculously huge and tasteless mall. Well worth a visit even if you're not much of a mall type, it's still an amazing spectacle. One of my friends was having a weekend holiday - in the mall. Extreme.

I'm writing this on the train - be in Paris tonight.

London

Far be it from me to dictate what you do, but I think it will enhance your consumption of this post if you listen to this while you read it:

Sophie and I took the coach to London! It's a big and exciting city and it was full full full of people because of those running jumping swimmin games they have. The coach station is in Victoria so I had to put up with Sophie singing Victoria by the Kinks THE WHOLE WAY DOWN. 

Nelson was really getting into the spirit of it

We trundled to Speaker's corner in Hyde park where people who have something to say get up on a soapbox (or stepladder) and say it LOUDLY. There was an African Englishman talking about racism, there was a guy talking about a guy who had gone to hell. There were a lot of hecklers. Apparently Karl Marx and George Orwell used to hang out there! Probably not together. 

Like an internet forum but in real life

As Sophie found (to her despair) it's quite a lot harder to get sushi in England than New Zealand. In London you can buy it by the individual cellophane-wrapped piece. Ridiculous! We carefully unwrapped and consumed them in Gosvenor square.

DELICIOUS

Do you know what London has? The BIGGEST TOY SHOP IN THE WORLD. Do you know what Sophie and I are not? Grown-ups. So we were quite excited.

Like a kid in a toy shop

Hamleys (the toy shop) has got 5 floors. The top one is filled with lego! It had a life-sized lego queen which was mostly realistic except for the way she was smiling.

The real one would have just been a disappointment after this

That night we could have gone to the olympic closing ceremony except we were not organised enough to get tickets months in advance. I'm not upset it's better on telly anyway. I'M GLAD. Instead we went to Leicester square and watched improv comedy with the comedy store players (including Paul Merton!) who were so professionally hilarious I almost wept. We eventually limped back to our incredibly cheap and grim shared dorm room and slept fitfully on disposable pillowcases.

London at night!

London is full of marvels, like a 3-floor M&M shop with every colour that exists in the visible spectrum.

I wanted one of each but Sophie wouldn't let me

Next day we went to the national gallery (which was stunning and HUGE) and giggled at the many painted bottoms and exasperated Christs. We were both wearing brand new shoes so walking became slight agony but we stumbled to the natural history museum. We reviewed their earthquake room (as Sophie said, a lot more like being smoothly moved by hydraulic machinery than an earthquake) and looked at some rocks and skeletons and things. It was also huge and impressive, and all the galleries in london are free thanks to it being a socialist paradise :)

Slightly pained but the shoes look so good!

London is just full of beautiful buildings. We spent a lot of time wandering around posh areas looking at designer shops in our rumpled tshirts and enormous backpacks. Then onto a coach and back to Sheffield.

Bye London!

Sheffield

Tuesday night I got up at eleven, completed my experiments, got on a delayed plane to England, realised at border security I didn't have Sophie's address, called my mum at 1am NZ time to get it, ran through Heathrow and got to my coach just in time! On the coach I met a photographer who has just been on a painting course in Southern Italy and was going to fly to Oz to paint the outback next week. He told me all about how brilliant India is. Turns out talking to the person you're sitting next to is a gamble that sometimes pays off!

When I got to Sheffield I was so glad to see the ancient camp stretcher in the spare room that I immediately broke it and had to make myself a pile of duvets and sleeping bags to collapse into. 

My nest of sleeping bags

I was also quite pleased to see SOPHIE!!! She is living with her dad's mate. He is an interesting fellow who has spent the last couple of days cleaning motorbike parts in the kitchen sink and telling me about avant garde composers.

SOPHIE!!!

We went into Sheffield town centre yesterday. Sophie entranced a child with her bubbles, but gave the kid the bubble mix rather than luring them away and making them work in a steel mill. It's been amazingly warm and sunny and Sheffield's full of friendly people with delightful Yorkshire accents. Most importantly, you can get a pint of local craft beer at a pub for less than $5.

Chillin' in the Shef

We stumbled across a fair in the middle of the city. Sheffield's about as far as you can get from the sea in England, so they had got around this problem by setting up a small seaside, including tiny beach and tiny sea and a terrifyingly rickety helter skelter. The higher I climbed the more I wondered about OSH regulations.

All British towns must have a helter skelter by law

portable beach

WHEEEEE!!!

Sheffield has a lovely old cathedral. We had a poke about and then some lunch outside, where we got to witness the UK tradition of a "chav picnic." This is where rough types take their shirts off, drink cans of Stella, chase their exotically-named children and piss against the cathedral. The police turned up but disappointingly there was no fracas.

The serene interior of Sheffield cathedral

The less serene exterior of the cathedral

Sophie had to pretend to be taking a photo of me outside the cathedral to get that last photo, so you better appreciate this intimate glimpse of British culture.

Science (and cheese)

While in Germany I have been:

• Working hard
• Eating a sausage-based meal a day. 

Going to Germany with a Eurasian has been really good, because rather than trying to buy and cook the same things I would in New Zealand, he buys things that are delicious and German. So: Sausages, black bread, mayonnaise, cream cheese, goats cheese, hard cheese, mozzarella, chocolate. As it turns out you can eat these foods many many days in a row and they are still delicious.

A day's supply

DON'T WORRY: I'm eating lots of blueberries as well, which add a million health points to every meal.

I thought that doing night shift at the synchrotron might be accurately summarised by the second option on the coffee machine I relied heavily upon:

 

Highly inaccurate

but actually working at DESY - an amazing scientific facility enclosed by a particle accelerator - makes everything okay! I am surrounded by awesome high-tech stuff and have met and played table soccer with a bunch of neat scientists from Estonia, Spain, Russia and Holland.

Looking through lead glass at some hardcore x-rays

The outside of the particle accelerator PETRA III

The particles were hidden by huge concrete blocks to stop people nearby getting superpowers

They are building the world's biggest free electron laser at DESY - the XFEL. It's going to be 3.5km long (!!) and open in 2015. Konstantin and I have agreed we're definitely going to work there, as cleaners if necessary.

I don't think this is actually the tunnel for the XFEL, but it COULD BE

Konstantin showed me the control centre for PETRA III. There were a lot of clever-looking men who had 6 computer screens each. When I get back to UC I am going to take all my officemates' monitors and arrange them in an awesome semicircle, and pretend I control a particle accelerator.

Okay - my flight to England is about to board! 

Doris the Synchrotron

The synchrotron we are using is called "Doris" which makes it sound more like a nice old lady than a DEADLY RADIATION SOURCE.

Wires and things!

The next week I will be working somewhere in this tangle of wires from 11pm-11am every day. I might not have much to say on the blog, unless you like hearing about how confused and frustrated/elated I am by little electrons and how good it feels to drink awful filter coffee at 4am.

 This building is filled with very fast electrons.

In the morning before the first shift I had a look around the DESY campus, which is encircled by Petra, Doris' big sister, a 2km circumference particle accelerator. They grow tomatoes on top of it:

They looked a bit sickly though.

 The campus is this awesome mix of huge old bits of technical apparatus and secret paths and staircases into little wooded areas. Brilliant for exploring!

What are these huge blocks for?

A friendly-looking monochromator from the eighties.

 

What is this supposed to detect? I DON'T KNOWW I JUST CAME ACROSS IT AND I WAS TOO SHY TO ASK THOSE PEOPLE.