Hi everyone,
This morning, I spent almost half an hour in line for breakfast. Although it seems like forever when you’re both sleepy and hungry, I met a number of people in line (although it still seems like every other person I meet is from Australia). After breakfast, we went to the Opening Ceremony, where we heard from inspirational woman scientist Dr. Hayat Sindi, who detailed her amazing journey working up the scientific community.
We were supposed to wear formal traditional dress from our country, so I chose to go with the traditional Canadian hockey jersey, plaid flannel shirt, jeans, hockey stick, and fur hat.
Following the opening ceremony, we wandered the streets of London for an hour, admiring the architecture and noticing how varied the local shops were. We then hurried back for a lecture from Dr. Rolf Landua, who talked about a number of recent developments at CERN. It’s amazing how much engineering goes into making the Large Hadron Collider, and it was interesting to hear from a top experimental physicist. If pure engineering doesn’t work out, I would love to work at CERN as an experimental physicist.
After the CERN lecture, the welcome party started at the Millennium hotel. Unfortunately, loud disco music wasn’t exactly my thing, so a few Australians joined my Hungarian roommate and myself in my dorm room for quieter conversation and a few games of “cheat”.
As will probably be a theme with these blog posts, I’m almost passing out with tiredness at this point, so goodnight. I’m excited for tomorrow’s site visits!