CERN Wife

Halloween in Japan

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Sat, 31 Oct 2015 04:56:00 +0000

Spouse and I spent two weeks in Japan, from September 28 until October 12. While Spouse attended two physics meetings, the first in Kobe, the second in Osaka, I toured Shinto shrines, Buddhist temples, a few museums, and shopping streets.

For an outsider like me, Japan seems like an art form. Sweet shops abound, and small cakes are packaged as if they were jewels. Little things, like socks, are placed in small paper bags that are taped closed and handed with both hands by the sales clerk to the purchaser. Dry napkins are hard to find in cafes and restaurants, but I didn't miss them, because the moist ones sealed in plastic seemed luxurious to me. Streets and sidewalks are free from litter, but we couldn't find trash cans when we had something to throw away.

I knew that Japan is a country that celebrates festivals, like the Cherry Blossom Festival in the spring, a children's festival and a doll festival, as well as New Year's, and other seasonal holidays. After World War 2, Japan adopted and adapted Christmas. What I did not expect were jack o'lanterns, witches, and "Happy Halloween" signs in stores, malls, buses, and hotels.

In Kobe, Kitano Meister Garden:
an old elementary school
turned into a crafts and food gallery

Sweet shop in Kitano Meister Garden with Halloween decorations

Entrance to the Mitsui Garden Hotel, Osaka

Lobby, Mitsui Garden Hotel, Osaka

Lobby: Mitsui Garden Hotel, Osaka (reflection of CERN Wife in sign)

Flower shop, Osaka

Bus, Osaka

Preparing Halloween display, Kyoto train station

Another 100 yen store, in Kyoto

Shoe store, Kyoto mall

Halloween shoes, Kyoto

Although I'm not in Japan to see what happens on October 31, from what I've read, kids don't go trick-or-treating (that's American), but teenagers and young adults dress in costumes and go partying and carousing around town. But from the Halloween decorations in stores, I would assume that merchants are pushing gift-giving on Halloween, a festival that's been in Japan for fifteen years or so.

Have a Happy Halloween, and may the ghosts and witches bring you candy, donuts, apples, and all things pumpkin.

P.S. - I think blogspot is spooked: It wouldn't let me edit the photos, and kept putting frames around pictures around pictures. So I gave up. It's Halloween. Nothing I can do about it.

My Melancholy Birthday

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Fri, 11 Sep 2015 01:01:00 +0000

Today's my birthday. This isn't a contemplative gaze-at-my-navel post to lament the aging process. Or to bemoan all the months that have gone by since I blogged last (I cringe: 8 months). I'm pleased to celebrate this day. But I'm feeling sad because my treasured friend, Laine, passed away exactly two weeks ago. This is my first birthday since the age of 9 without a long phone call from her.

Laine (R) and me 2012

The first time I noticed Elaine was at our kindergarten Sunday School Purim party. I walked over to a group of costumed children who were standing in a circle. There in the middle was Queen Esther sitting on a chair, wearing a long white dress, her chestnut hair cascading down her back and her head crowned with a rhinestone tiara. Her smile illuminated the room. That was Lainie.

The two of us became friends in kindergarten, although we were in different classes at W.W. Smith School in Poughkeepsie, NY. I remember one noon when we were dismissed for lunch. We held hands and skipped down the sidewalk and noticed our shadows skipping along with us – silhouettes of 2 little girls with long braids and slips of curls surrounding our heads like wispy halos. Our shadows were identical twins.

From 7^th grade through high school, we were inseparable. We’d go home from school and then be on the phone with each other for a minimum of 2 hours nightly.

As 14-year-olds we became Candy Stripers, volunteering on Sundays at Saint Francis Hospital in Poughkeepsie. One of the white-garbed nuns, whose face was imprisoned with a wimple, once asked us if we had gone to church that morning. Laine and I looked at each other. I replied that no, we’re Jewish. The nun said, “Oh…that’s nice.” Another woman working in the room came over to us and peered at our heads. I knew she wouldn't find horns.

In high school, we’d take the train on a Saturday from Poughkeepsie to Manhattan, and shop for clothes at stores like Orbach’s and Alexander’s, gaze with amazement at overpriced accessories displayed in Bergorf-Goodman’s windows, and flip through art books at Brentano's, where we'd feel sophisticated and refined. Then we would eat lunch at Lord and Taylor's, like grown-up ladies.

Something else happened in high school. We sat with 5 other girls for lunch every day during our senior year. Once at an assembly during National Brotherhood Week, we looked at each other – a motley group of girls of different backgrounds and identities - and realized that that’s what we are: a Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood, 1985
Nancy, Betsey, Donna, Laine, Jan, Me, Jule
and Becky (Laine's and Howie's daughter)

One thing that always amused the two of us was how people who didn’t know us that well got us confused. We didn’t look alike. In high school I had short hair. Hers was long. In MY high school yearbook, one acquaintance wrote under his name, “Elaine, I hope you have a great time in college.”

During our last high school reunion in 2011, Laine's name tag had my photo on it.

Our classmate, Dell, and Laine with a name-tag with my photo, 2011

Laine's high school reunion name tag - with my high school photo

Even during Elaine’s and Howie’s wedding, the rabbi, who knew the two of us forever, came over to me, the maid of honor dressed in a long yellow gown, and asked me how I had met Howie. “From Elaine,” I responded. The rabbi walked away with a baffled look on his face.

We took separate paths starting in our twenties, with Laine a married woman settled in Albany, NY, and I a wandering anthropologist who lived in Iran, Israel, Boston, San Francisco, and France. Laine became a graphic designer. I became an academic and then an ex-academic. She - my bff before bff became a term of endearment - was the matron of honor at my wedding in Berkeley, CA.

Laine, Howie, and me in Albany - September 2014

This past July 4 weekend I visited Laine and Howie. Another Brother, Jan (and her husband, Dovid), joined us for the day. Laine was her animated, funny, vibrant, and optimistic self. People who did not know her would not have guessed that she was ill. Her kindness, wisdom, humor, and tact – as well as that glowing smile – drew people to her. It was that positive nature of hers that refused to let cancer define her and made her the person we all loved.

Jan, Laine, and me, July 5, 2015

At the end of the weekend, Laine drove me to the train station. When we hugged our good-byes, I told her that I want to come back to Albany the last week of August to see her. We’re joined at the hip, she said. Yes, I responded, we are.

I did go back to Albany the last week of August. To kiss my beloved friend goodbye. Now Laine's memory is a blessing. And my birthday is melancholy.

#Je Suis Juive, #Je Suis Charlie

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Mon, 12 Jan 2015 08:08:00 +0000

This afternoon (January 11) I attended a vigil at San Francisco's Civic Center to demonstrate solidarity with the French people, to commemorate the 17 murdered in Paris this week by Islamist terrorists, and to support freedom of the press.

Police closed off the street in front of City Hall in order to accommodate the 2,000 people who came from different parts of the Bay Area to attend the rally. Participants - most of whom were French - stood on the steps of City Hall in front of the gilded doors and held "Je suis Charlie" signs and pens (as symbolic of press freedom and Charlie Hebdo, the satirical paper whose editor, cartoonists and writers were killed on January 7 by Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, French-born radical Islamists who also killed Charlie Hebdo's maintenance worker and 2 policemen).

Hand-made signs stood out, such as "Je pense donc je suis Charlie" (I think, therefore I'm Charlie) and "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" (in French) held on a giant pencil, and one small "Je suis Juif" (I'm a Jew).

I had thought more Bay Area Jews would be attending this rally and not seeing anyone I knew from the Jewish community disappointed me, although I did meet two people from San Mateo, south of San Francisco, who held signs made by one of them, a French Jew named Michael. One side said "Je suis Charlie" and the other side read "Je suis Hyper Cacher" - in reference to the kosher supermarket where another Islamist terrorist, Amedy Coulibaly, killed four Jewish shoppers on Friday, January 9, as well as a policewoman named Clarissa Jean-Philippe.

France has seen its share of anti-Semitic incidents which have been carried out by Islamists, many who were born in France to North African immigrant parents and who live in the banlieus, the suburban slums where gangs, drugs, delinquency, and despair rule. These young men see no future for themselves, are not integrated into French society, and fall prey to the preaching of Islamists. They are the perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence in France, such as the murders in Toulouse in 2012 and the attacks on a synagogue and Jewish shops this past July.

This violence is frightening. I wish that the hundreds of millions of Muslims who are embarrassed and appalled that ISIS, al Qaida, Boko Haram, the Taliban and others are hijacking their religion would stop shaking their heads and saying that these terrorists aren't Muslims, because they are. My wish is to see hundreds of millions of Muslims marching in the streets wherever they live - France, Germany, Denmark, the US, Egypt, Iran, India, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Mali - to condemn the terrorism that has been plaguing their religion.

In Paris today over a million Muslims, Christians, Jews, and atheists marched against terrorism. And in San Francisco today one young Frenchman held his unique hand-drawn placard that expressed hope for humanity.

May peace be upon us all.

The Appropriation of CERN Wife

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Sat, 06 Dec 2014 14:47:00 +0000

CERN Wife in Ferney-Voltaire apartment, April 2012

Curiosity poked me: where is “CERN Wife” in Google’s search engine? I checked, and there it was, on the very top of the first page. But what is THAT? Below the listing of my blog is www.lifeasacernwife.blogspot.com. Life as a CERN wife? Couldn’t whoever this is have thought of something other than CERN Wife? That’s MY blog name! And she uses it on blogspot, no less.

I clicked on this usurper’s URL and found the title of her blog: “A Year in France: Life as a CERN Wife”. This is not quite plagiarism, but my blood pressure rose to the top of my head because my original blog title was “CERN Wife: Spending a Year in Ferney-Voltaire” – the town in France where we lived. My first blog post was February 1, 2012. Hers was September 3, 2012, less than two months after we had returned to the U.S. from France.

Her blog set-up is similar to mine as well. Although fonts and template design are there on blogspot for the choosing, she selected the same font for her text, but a lighter color than the one I’m using, and her photographs, centered in the middle, like mine, are outlined in grey rather than black. I don’t have a photo on the top of my blog. She has one – a scene of undulating hills in autumn, which I suppose was taken in the nearby Jura Mountains. This blogger’s content, as a young wife and new mother, is different from mine – so in reality she didn’t plagiarize, but still…

One can’t copyright a title, whether naming a book, blog, or business. The rational me has convinced the creative me that there is no reason to be perturbed that someone has appropriated my blog title. I suppose I should be flattered that I am an original, and she (in all likelihood intelligent and pleasant) is derivative.

The Last Shah's Penultimate Birthday: October 26, 1978

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Sun, 26 Oct 2014 15:48:00 +0000

I am in the process of revising my memoir, Phantom Iran, which is about life in Iran during the political turmoil of 1978-79, when the Islamic Revolution was brewing. Today I am posting part of a chapter from the memoir which describes an event that occurred exactly 36 years ago:

Thirty-six years ago, in the fall of 1978, I was an American graduate student doing research in Iran during a time of frequent anti-Shah protests. One of these protests, on October 26, 1978, was the day of Mohammad Reza Shah’s sixty-ninth birthday.

I remember seeing photos of the Shah and his third wife, Farah Diba, perhaps when Life magazine covered his 1967 coronation. To me, the two Persian royals appeared dignified and glorified, he in gilded military regalia, she swathed in jewels, both draped with gold-embroidered cloaks. Farah Diba’s green velvet cape, with its extended train, was embellished with diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. On their heads rested crowns heavy with gemstones. Between them stood the seven-year-old Crown Prince Reza.

Coronation of Mohammad Reza Shah, October 25, 1967

This official coronation occurred twenty-six years after Mohammad Reza Shah had taken over the throne from his father, Reza Shah, during World War II. The Allied forces, afraid that Reza Shah’s policy of neutrality during the war made Iran too close to the Nazis, forced him to abdicate in 1941. Mohammad Reza, then just 22, became the monarch of Iran.

During his opulent 1967 coronation, Mohammad Reza Shah took the title “Shahanshah” (King of Kings) for himself. He rendered its translation in English as “emperor.” The Shah designated Farah Diba—his other two marriages had ended in divorce because the wives did not produce a male heir—the “Shanbanou,” or Empress. He also had himself referred to as “Aryamehr”—“Light of the Aryans.”

The Shah enjoyed being the center of opulent pageantry, the most pompous of which took place in 1971 to celebrate 2500 years of Iranian monarchy, from the rule of Cyrus the Great of the 6^th century BCE to his own sovereignty in the 20^th century. The Shah invited world leaders to a hundred million dollar lavish festival held from October 12 -16 at a 160-acre tent city created at Persepolis, the ancient capital of Iran’s Achaemenid dynasty (550-330 BCE). French chefs prepared exotic dishes for the guests, who ate off Limoges china and drank from Baccarat crystal. The villagers in the vicinity lived in mud-brick huts without electricity or running water.

Tent at Persepolis tent city

Parade in front of Persepolis 1971

By October 1978 anti-Shah political turmoil was spreading, and the Shah realized that public ceremony celebrating his birthday that year was imprudent. Gatherings to glorify him had been revoked. Instead, the Shah said he would contribute money meant for his birthday festivities to the 2,000 survivors of a 7.8 earthquake that had occurred six weeks earlier in the town of Tabas. That earthquake had devastated the town and killed 15,000 people.

Tehranis I spoke to that week in 1978 had anticipated trouble on the Shah’s birthday. Demonstrations, many said. Overthrow of the Shah, some professed. Formation of a constitutional monarchy, others hoped. I didn’t know what to expect.

I was staying in central Tehran at the hostel of the American Institute of Iranian Studies, whose function was to help American academics with some of the bureaucratic entanglements they inevitably encountered. The hostel compound, which was an old house and yard surrounded by a high wall, was located across the street from the Institute’s main building where the Institute’s director lived.

By 9 AM the morning of the Shah’s birthday young men were marching near the American Institute’s hostel, bellowing "marg bar shah" (death to the Shah) and denouncing the kharaji and farangi, two terms meaning "foreigner." Sometimes the demonstrators ran down the alley in front of the Institute. Even boys ten or eleven years old joined in. The four of us staying in the hostel took turns watching through a large keyhole in the door of the compound’s wall. Helicopters flew low, as if spying or poised to shoot.

The young men we watched from the peephole were protesting against the Shah. They were not rallying for an Islamic state. They wanted the Shah out of power, and some wanted him dead. The Shah had been a dictator for decades, loved by some, hated by many. His autocracy emerged in 1953, twelve years after he had taken over the title from his father. At that time his popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. This action pleased the Iranian public. The British and Americans, though, were furious at having lost their control over Iranian oil. They ousted Mossadegh in a coup d’état in August 1953. After the coup, the Shah’s rule became more imperious. His CIA-trained secret police, Savak, imprisoned and tortured thousands of political dissidents.

By ten thirty that morning the director of the Institute entered the hostel compound.

“Don’t go outside,” he warned as he walked in. “Soldiers are everywhere.” He sat down with the four of us in the courtyard. He folded his hands, rested them on the metal table, and continued. “Apparently, the demonstrators knew the soldiers were coming. They moved cars into the street to block them. But the army materialized some vehicle that could lift the cars and put them down by the side of the road.” He looked at us as if he were waiting for a response, but none of us said anything. “Okay, just stay inside the compound,” he cautioned. Then he left.

We heard gunshots. Demonstrators and soldiers raced through our neighborhood. My heart was pounding so loudly that I feared the demonstrators could hear it and would demand to be let into the courtyard.

By two in the afternoon everything was quiet. I wanted to use the Institute’s phone in the main building to call friends of mine who lived in a northern Tehran neighborhood to find out what happened there. Bob, an archeologist staying at the hostel, decided to join me.

I wrapped myself in the black chador that I had bought on my first trip to Iran in 1975. My right hand held the chador clinched around my chin. With my hair covered, my body concealed, and my face exposed, I opened the hostel’s metal door two inches, then pushed it wide enough to stick my head out. I saw no protesters on the street. Three young men were talking to each other several houses away. Garbage bags were piled outside the door of the American Institute waiting to be picked up.

Bob and I crossed the street. In less than no time, the three young men were standing next to us. They lit matches and set the garbage on fire. I rang the Institute’s doorbell, once, twice, three times. No one answered. My knees were shaking. I felt weak. I was perspiring.

I was wearing a chador, but my American sandals were showing and they were flat with thick straps—a good-for-walking style, the type that no Iranian woman would wear in 1978.

One of the men lit a paper bag. He thrust it so close to my face that its heat tingled my skin.

"Come, lady...come, lady...come, lady..." he taunted in Farsi.

My feet were barely holding my body upright. Sweat soaked me. My hand trembled as I pressed the doorbell again.

At last the Institute's director peeked out the door. We rushed in, pushed him out of our way, and slammed the gate behind us, leaning on it to make sure it was shut. The director stared at us.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “ We didn’t see you, and we didn’t hear the doorbell.” He led us into the dining room. “We were on the third floor watching what was going on in the streets.”

He made me a lime vodka drink with the refreshing tart lime juice particular to Iran. I sipped it, relished it, needed it to calm my pounding heart and the intense disquietude I felt. In spite of Islam's taboo on alcohol, pre-revolutionary Iran had decent vodka.

By four in the afternoon, tranquility permeated central Tehran. In the early evening Bob and I walked to Govinda's, the local Hare Krishna joint, for dinner. How strange—on that birthday, that day of riots—to smell the incense and the mélange of Indian spices, and to talk to English-speaking Hindu-practicing Western waiters dressed in saffron robes. After dinner we strolled back to the Institute. Stores were open. Men, women, and children were walking on the streets, talking, smiling, and laughing. It was as if nothing at all had happened that day.

©Karen Lee Pliskin, Ph.D.

Amtrak and Railing about Railroads

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Thu, 16 Oct 2014 19:30:00 +0000

On a recent Sunday, after a short visit to Canada, Spouse drove me to the Amtrak station at 75 Exchange Street in Buffalo, NY. I was headed to Albany to see my dear childhood friend, and Spouse was going to the airport to return to California. We planned to get to the station somewhat early so that we could have coffee before I boarded the train for the six-hour trip.

Amtrak Station, 75 Exchange St., Buffalo, NY

The small brick train station, in the middle of nowhere under a maze of high-rise highways, was closed. A sign posted on the door informed passengers that the depot was open Monday to Friday from 6:30 AM until 4:00 PM. There was no place nearby to get coffee. Spouse dropped me off and headed to the airport. I walked to the other side of the train station to find a few passengers, no toilet facilities, and no benches.

Sign telling that the station is closed weekends and nights

Closed Amtrak station with no benches for passengers

At least the day was warm and sunny. But Buffalo is infamous for inclement weather. What do passengers do if they’re sick, need a toilet, need to sit down, or get refuge from cold rain or the biting snow of blizzards? Is this the best we can do for our national passenger train service?

Standing or sitting on suitcases while waiting

Amtrak's Maple Leaf train approaching

At least 25 people boarded the train that came fifteen minutes late from Toronto. I sat in a comfortable window seat. We passed Buffalo’s bygone spacious train station, now dilapidated, stranded, and overgrown with weeds like a ghost town, and then we entered a landscape of trees whose leaves were morphing into the reds of fall. Soon the train stopped. In the middle of the trees. Just stopped. For twenty minutes.

View of fall trees from stopped train

The train plodded along the tracks and every once in a while it stopped between cities for ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes. I asked the conductor why all the standstills, and his answer surprised me. Amtrak has to cede usage of the tracks to freight trains run by CSX Corporation, the company that owns the tracks.

Amtrak, our publicly-funded passenger rail system run as a for-profit corporation, is like a share-cropper who has to pay the landlord to use the land. CSX owns 2800 miles of track in New York State. Amtrak owns 150 miles. As a result, the Maple Leaf train, the one I took that goes from Toronto to Manhattan, was on-time less than 37% of the time for September 2014 because of train interference, 84.4% of which were from CSX freight trains. We were more than two hours late getting into Albany.

CSX moves consumer goods – not consumers. They transport cars, food, coal, chemicals, petroleum products, and industrial waste. Their CEO, Michael Jon Ward, made $12,444,632 in 2013. The CEO of Amtrak, Joseph H. Boardman, made $350,000 in 2013.

The United States has one of the worst passenger train systems in the industrial world. If China, which has a land mass that’s 1,933,018 square kilometers more than that of the continental U.S., can have the world’s longest high speed rail system, why can’t we have high-speed passenger trains? Japan has had the bullet train since 1964. France has had the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse) since 1981. Spain has high-speed rail. So do Italy and Germany and other European countries. By contrast, we have high-speed railroad derailment by politicians and corporations whose only thought is their bottom line. Shame on them, and shame on us for just standing by as freight trains that move commodities monopolize the tracks and we American citizens are left stranded with a regressive passenger railroad system that does not meet our needs. This is a national disgrace.

The Resurrection of CERN Wife

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Sun, 14 Sep 2014 22:19:00 +0000

Stone of Unction, Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem

CERN Wife has been resurrected. Its demise in cyberspace occurred more than two years ago when we returned to Oakland from Ferney-Voltaire, France. I had plans to continue the blog with essays about life in Oakland and still write about France. But I couldn’t figure out how to change the subtitle from “Spending a Year in Ferney-Voltaire” – which I wanted to leave on the blog for the time we were in Europe – to “Oakland Life”. When I changed it, everything changed to “Oakland Life” – including all the posts I had written in France. I also didn’t want to put the Ferney postings on a separate page in a navigation bar.

I googled Google, the parents of Blogspot, to find out who worked on its software. I wanted to get help from the source. No luck. You can google Google but you can’t get any of Google’s information about its staff. Although Google can get all sorts of facts (true or not) about all sorts of things and people, it’s impossible to penetrate Google - especially on Google. So CERN Wife was buried in cyberspace because of my inability to modify the subtitle in mid-blog.

Every once in a while, I’d think about reviving cernwife.blogspot.com, but the subtitle dilemma and the boredom of my Oakland life blocked me. I resumed my work as an artist. Spouse has continued his work in the U.S. and at CERN, and he travels to international physics meetings every few months. In the past two years, CERN Wife has accompanied Spouse to three of these international meetings.

Voila!

An idea for the resurrection of CERN Wife occurred to me a month ago when we were at a physics meeting in Crete: just change the subtitle to include the beginning of the blog up to the present - “Adventures in Ferney-Voltaire and Exploits of a Nom de Guerre.” Why did it take me two years to think of that?

Now I’ll go back to October, 2012, three months after we left France. That’s when I experienced my first exploit as CERN Wife after spending a year in Ferney-Voltaire. I went with Spouse to Israel.

Street of Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel

Rehovot, Israel
I accompanied Spouse to an international symposium in honor of his dissertation advisor, Itzhak Tserruya, at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel. The title of the symposium was “Hot Topics in Hot Matter”. Although the presentations were incomprehensible to me, I couldn’t help but think about physicists’ choices of terms and metaphors to convey their concepts.

Subject of Symposium

International physicists listening to lecture

CERN Wife, Yitzhak Maron, and Itzhak Tserruya

Aside from attending the talks and the evening celebrations in Rehovot, we toured several spots in Israel.

Jerusalem

Jerusalem, one of the most beautiful and fought-over cities in the world, was my home for two and a half years while I was doing my dissertation research. If only Jerusalem lived up to the meaning of its name: city of peace. One blog post can’t begin to describe the physical and social changes that have occurred in the city in the past few decades, or the ethnic and religious diversity of its citizens, or its beauty and charm. I won’t even try. A few photos will suffice.

The Edicule, Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Ultra-Orthodox couple

Israelis and Palestinians wait for the light rail train

Mahane Yehuda Market

Retirees play backgammon, Mahane Yehuda tea house

Trompe l'oeil, downtown Jerusalem

Trompe l'oeil detail

Preety Woman - Boutique with an accent

Neve Shalom

We spent an afternoon at Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, the only planned Christian-Jewish-Muslim village in Israel. One of the founders of Neve Shalom was a doctoral student with Spouse. The village of over 50 families hosts educational workshops for Israeli and Palestinian adults, teenagers, and children in their School for Peace. The village’s Fred Segal Library has books on peace and conflict studies, health and nutrition, and Hebrew and Arabic literature, as well as rooms for meetings about peace and human rights issues.

Playground

Sign for Library

Haifa

Haifa is an Arab-Jewish city built on hills overlooking the Mediterranean port. Perhaps its most famous landmark is the golden dome of the Shrine of the Bab and the terraced manicured gardens of the Baha'i World Center on the northern slope of Mount Carmel. The

Bab, born in Shiraz, Persia, in 1820, was the founder of Babism and a forerunner of the Baha’i faith. He was shot at the age of 30 in Tabriz, Persia. His remains were transported over the years from Persia to Damascus to Beirut to its final resting place on Mt. Carmel, where the Bab was interred in a tomb in 1909. The striking Shrine that we see now was completed in 1953.

The Baha'i Gardens overlooking the Mediterranean

The Shrine of the Bab

Wadi Nisnas, Haifa's Arab quarter, hosts "art of co-existence" on walls of buildings. One noticeable example is a ceramic piece by Israeli artist, Chaya Toma. A Jewish widow with a young son, she married a Palestinian-Israeli and had another son. Her two boys are represented in the artwork, which has inscriptions on top in both Hebrew and Arabic.

Ceramic wall art by Chaya Toma

Israel is a hot topic with many hot matters. I will discuss none of them at present. But now with the resurrection of CERN Wife, perhaps posts on hot topics and hot matters will appear in the future. After all, if physicists can discuss such subjects, why can’t anthropologists?

Farewell, Ferney

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 06:25:00 +0000

Packing

When we returned from our Bulgaria trip, we spent 10 days sorting, discarding, and packing our belongings. How did we accumulate so much in 10 months? Assorted books bought, some clothes purchased, several household items acquired at Ferney’s community-wide garage sale in September, a half dozen black stones laden with fossils picked up from flat dry land (remnants of a prehistoric sea) in Morocco during our Christmas vacation, two diminutive art pieces obtained at Lyon’s Sunday artisan market, miscellaneous French food items that are pricey in California… These acquisitions and others added to the mass of items we had brought to France: suitcases of clothes for 4 seasons for 3 people; books to read and tour guides to use on trips; our computers and cameras; art supplies; Spouse’s bike disassembled and packed in a secure, stout, durable black plastic bike box. We ended up with 9 suitcases to take with us on the plane, 8 boxes and the bike crate to ship air freight, and 4 boxes of books to be sent through the post.

We made trip after trip to Spouse’s CERN office to store the suitcases and boxes because our apartment lease ended on June 30, and our tickets back were for July 6. We stayed 5 nights in a hotel.

Storage at Spouse's CERN Office

Our final day in the apartment was sunny, humid, and the hottest of the summer: 35 degrees Celsius, or 95 Fahrenheit. With no air conditioning, working nonstop to finish packing by 6 PM, then cleaning the apartment, we were exhausted, sweaty, and tired. But that evening we attended a community-wide festival, La Fête à Voltaire, held on the grounds of Voltaire’s chateau. Blue, violet, and pink lights shined at different times on the chateau and church (which Voltaire had built). Different civic organizations from the area sold food and drinks. Not only could we buy traditional French fare, like crepes or champagne, but we also could purchase food from clubs of immigrants: Ethiopian, Moroccan, Haitian, Spanish, Russian, Tongan, West African and others. On one stage a group of costumed folk dancers and musicians from Bourg-en-Bresse, the largest city in the département (province), performed and then taught dances to attendees of the festival. And a community chorus of adults sang a cantata by Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764), a contemporary of Voltaire. In fact, Voltaire had written a libretto for one of Rameau’s operas, Samson, but it was never performed because Rameau feared that Voltaire’s criticism of the Church would create public discord.

Voltaire's chateau in violet light

Between “La Fête à Voltaire” on Saturday night – which seemed to be a suitable and sad adieu to Ferney - and our departure the following Friday, we dined with friends we had seen throughout the year and we toured places we hadn’t seen – a cheese factory in the Jura Mountains and a medieval town with an interesting religious history, both of which I’ll write about in the next few months.

Cheese factory in the Jura Mountains

I drove around Ferney taking last-minute photos of scenes I wanted to remember, such as the statue of nude lovers which is located near the apartment where we lived, on a corner by the main road that connects Ferney-Voltaire to Meyrin, Switzerland. We passed that statue at least twice a day when I drove Spouse to and from CERN. Whenever I saw the sculpture, I assumed that Americans would ban from public display such a carving of a couple embracing in the buff, and I thought, “Vive la France!”

Embracing Nudes in Ferney-Voltaire

The day before we left France we took the boxes and bike crate to an air freight company at the Geneva Airport.

Our air freight load

And then on July 6, the three of us, with our 9 suitcases and carry-on pieces, bid farewell to Ferney.

CERN Wife and luggage at Geneva Airport

Although we didn’t spend an entire year in Ferney-Voltaire, we are fortunate for having had 10 months to live in France. CERN Wife, however, will continue to write about French culture, which has been the subject of this blog. But from now on, the blog posts will be written in Oakland, California. France from not France. Now that’s interesting.

Bulgaria - A Travelogue

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 00:38:00 +0000

Cart with flowers in Veliko Tarnovo

Bulgaria is one of those nations that needs a proactive Minister of Tourism to lure Americans and West Europeans (not just the usual visitors from Romania and Russia) into its historic cities and Black Sea resorts. It’s a country that should be known for more than its yogurt, feta, the wrapper Christo, and the 1978 ricin poisoning in London of the Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov. What most tourists of Greece and Rome don’t know is that Bulgaria was home to one of the most advanced prehistoric civilizations, the Thracians, who 6,000 years ago were the first culture to have created objects from gold, which can be seen in the Archeology Museum of Varna, a city on the Black Sea coast. With its Roman and Greek ruins, Orthodox churches, mosques built during the 500-year Ottoman rule, summer heat, and outdoor restaurant culture, you’d think you were exploring a Mediterranean country.

Although there are only 7.3 million Bulgarians, they have an active physicist community at CERN most of whom are working on the CMS experiment. One of these Bulgarian physicists, Leandar Litov, invited Spouse to give a series of lectures at a physics summer school he had organized at Primorsko, a Black Sea resort town. We had met Leandar and his physicist wife, Nevena, in 2004 when Spouse was at CERN on sabbatical; our daughters were eleven-year-old classmates struggling to learn French together at the local collège (middle school). We had decided then that we would like to visit Bulgaria, and just last month, from June 12-20, we had that opportunity. We stayed four nights in Primorsko, and then embarked on an exhausting whirlwind 4-day tour of this curious ex-Communist country.

Roman amphitheatre in Plovdiv

Plovdiv

From Sofia’s airport we rented a car and drove to Primorsko with a Bulgarian physicist from CERN named Alex, and on the way we stopped for a 3-hour lunch and quick tour of Bulgaria’s second largest city, Plovdiv, famous for its Roman ruins, cobblestone streets, and 19^th century revivalist architecture, among other things.

Plovdiv cobblestone street,
Bulgarian revivalist architecture

Primorsko

The town of Primorsko is just like any beach town: shops selling hats, sunscreen, sunglasses, bathing suit wraps, and floating toys; bars and discos playing loud music late at night; outdoor restaurants; hotels, hotels, hotels. In my wildest dreams, I never thought I’d ever have the opportunity to swim in the Black Sea, and for me, that was one of the most exciting activities of this trip. Bathers could walk into the sea for what seemed to be a block or two, being lapped by gentle waves, with the warm and clear water still waist-high. Primorsko’s pristine beach is littered with sunbathers of all ages and sizes. Men with nine-months-pregnant bellies strut as if they were flaunting seductive six-pack abs, and golden agers in their 70s and 80s are unabashed to lie topless on the sand nearby overweight middle-aged bleach blondes and young women with Barbie bodies.

Primorsko's beach

Middle-aged Strutters

Topless sunbather

Nessebar

The physics school held an afternoon’s excursion to the celebrated island-city of Nessebar, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Although prehistoric Thracian settlements existed on the island, Nessebar became known in the middle ages for its 40 churches, of which only a few remain, and none are used now for religious services. A tour guide took us into one 10^th century church, St. Stephen’s, and explained the iconography and rituals of the Bulgarian Orthodox church. I took a few flash-less photos before we were told that no photos were permitted.

Pantekrator Church

Icon frescoes in St. Stephen's Church

Varna

For archeology enthusiasts, Varna is a destination. Its museum is renowned for exhibits of Thracian gold artifacts and stunning pottery. But I had another destination in Varna, and that was to meet Mariya Koleva, a Bulgarian poet who writes in English, whom I had become acquainted with through an online writers’ group. Mariya, her inventor husband Emil, and their endearing 3-year-old daughter, Silviya, met us Sunday morning at the hotel where Mariya gave me the first-ever printed version of her poetry ebook, “Sombre Chapbook” - with artwork by Emil. They proposed being our tour guides, and escorted us to the Museum of Archeology, to the “petrified forest” of limestone columns, to Pliska, the first capital of Bulgaria from the 7^th to 9^th centuries, and finally, to Madara to see Bulgaria’s famous landmark hewed out of a high cliff – the Madara Horseman galloping over a lion, followed by a dog. According to UNESCO (the Madara Horseman is also on UNESCO’s World Heritage List), this relief was carved approximately 710 AD. Mariya, Emil and Silviya had made that day’s expedition from Varna to Madara impressive and unforgettable. If only we could thank them by being their tour guides in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In front of Varna's Archeology Museum:
Emil, Mariya, CERN Wife, Eliana, and Silviya

Bulgaria's Petrified Forest

Pliskins in Pliska

Madara Horseman

Veliko Tarnovo

From Madara we drove to Bulgaria’s San Francisco, Veliko Tarnovo, a city with a long history built on a series of hills that overlook the winding Yantra River. Veliko Tarnovo was the capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire from the 12^th to the 14^th centuries, but we had no time to visit its old fortress city and other sites because we had plans to meet friends in Sofia. So we spent just one night and morning in this charming city with so much to discover that our time there was barely an amuse-bouche.

View of Veliko Tarnovo

A woman sweeping on Gurko Street

Sofia

In the capital Sofia – a city teeming with traffic, dotted with parks, packed with communist-era concrete apartment buildings, and alive with new businesses and stylish twenty-first century housing – we visited three religious buildings: the huge medieval-looking St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, which was built between 1882-1912 (I had no idea that Alexander Nevsky was a real person; I associated the name with Prokofiev’s opera and Sergei Eisenstein’s film); the authentic medieval and diminutive 10^th-century Boyana Church, embellished with extraordinary frescoes (another UNESCO World Heritage Site); and Europe’s third largest synagogue, which was completed in 1909. Before World War II, Bulgaria had 50,000 Jews. The Bulgarians, unlike other Europeans invaded by Hitler, saved almost all their Jews from extermination by the Nazis.

St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral

Boyana Church

Sofia's Synagogue

We had dinner (and breakfast before our flight back to Geneva) at our friends’ tree-shaded apartment in Sofia. These friends - Nevena, Leander and Michaela - had kindled our interest in their country when we met them in France almost eight years ago. They were responsible for our being in Bulgaria this year, and for suggesting which sites of their captivating country to see during our lightning tour. Merci beaucoup!

Leandar, however, wasn't at home the two days when we were in Sofia. At the conclusion of his Primorsko physics summer school, he flew back to CERN for two weeks of meetings. Nevena, who is engaged in an interesting non-CERN physics research project about medical imaging, remained in Sofia. I never told her, but I think that she is also a CERN Wife...

CERN Wives and CERN Daughters in Sofia

CERN Daughters hugging good-bye

Higgs Boson

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 23:43:00 +0000

Enthusiastic physicists crowded the lecture hall, now an ersatz overflow assembly room. The main auditorium had been packed by early morning with students and postdocs who had lined up before 5 AM on July 4 to procure a spot; other seats had been reserved for VIPs. They weren’t going to a rock concert. Better than that, they were going to hear the results of two CERN experiments about the elusive Higgs boson.

Overflow crowd in the lecture hall

Two non-physicist observers - CERN Wife and CERN Daughter - found seats by the wall in the lecture hall, and like everyone else in the room, sat facing a screen where two images from the main auditorium were posted: 1) a CERN logo noting "Higgs research update" and 2) views of the crowd in the main auditorium (where everyone in the overflow hall wanted to be).

Waiting for the symposium to start

Lucky spectators in the auditorium,
as viewed on the screen at the overflow lecture hall

Like the scientists in the room, we too were excited to witness the "Higgs research update" announcements from the CMS and ATLAS experiments. Although we might not have grasped everything explained by the two spokespeople - Joe Incandela of CMS and Fabiola Gianotti of ATLAS - we knew that the results of finding either the Higgs boson or a Higgs boson-like particle were extraordinary contributions to scientific knowledge of the natural world.

The Higgs boson is the particle that is believed to be responsible for giving mass to other elementary particles. It is the last unidentified piece of the Standard Model, which describes all of nature at a fundamental level, except for gravity and dark energy. The Standard Model has withstood concerted attack by experimentalists, who for 40 years have been trying to find ways of disproving it. But they couldn’t. If this discovery turns out to be the Standard Model Higgs boson, the Standard Model will have been proven correct yet again. If it turns out not to be the Standard Model Higgs boson, further questions about the natural world would arise, which for physicists is even more interesting. At least, this is what Spouse has told me.

So there we were, listening to the two spokespeople's reports about some of the most expensive, exciting, and exhilarating experiments in recent physics history. Although CERN Wife and CERN Daughter needed further clarification to understand the talks and the graphs, the crowd's contagious enthusiasm needed no explanation.

Joe Incandela talks about the Standard Model

Another graph: Exclusion for SM Higgs

Explaining P-Values

Fitted signal strength

Intent physicists listening to the lecture

The CMS discovery

Joe Incandela summarizing CMS results:
discovering the Higgs boson (or boson-like particle)

Fabiola Gianotti explaining the ATLAS experiment

Gianotti explaining more results

ATLAS experiment's discovery
of the Higgs boson

Further research is needed...

Fabiola Gianotti thanking the ATLAS community

Summary of the director general of CERN,
Rolf-Dieter Heuer

Standing ovation in the auditorium

What, though, is a “boson” and why a “Higgs” boson? A boson is a subatomic particle that has particular symmetries. The name “boson” was coined by the theoretical physicist Paul Dirac to commemorate the contributions of the Indian mathematical physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974). “Higgs” refers to the English theoretical physicist, Peter Higgs, who hypothesized the existence of this boson in 1964. Although 5 other physicists (Robert Brout and François Englert from Belgium, and the Americans Gerald Guralnik and C.R. Hagen with Tom Kibble from England) wrote papers on the same topic at the same time as Higgs, the boson responsible for mass is named after Higgs. Was that because his name is the easiest to pronounce?

And then there is the connotation of the Higgs boson being called the “God particle”. This epithet comes from a popular book published in 1993 by physicist Leon Lederman and science writer Dick Teresi: The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What Is the Question? Lederman wrote that the Higgs boson is key to understanding the structure of matter but is elusive. However, he originally wanted to call it the “Goddamn Particle” because of its “villainous nature” - but the publisher wouldn’t let them use that term.

When Spouse had forwarded me the CERN press release several weeks ago about the July 4 seminar to update the scientific community regarding the Higgs boson search, I knew that I wanted to be at that colloquium, even if I needed to take Physics 101 again. This was going to be a momentous announcement, and as an anthropologist, I wanted to be part of that audience and experience their exhilaration. But I’m still a little unclear about term “boson.” I agree with my cousin Nancy (a professor at Stanford University): considering how physicists name things like hard probes and hot quarks, wouldn’t a Higgs bosom make more sense?

Hard Probes

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 15:55:00 +0000

The beach at Cagliari, Sardinia

The language of high energy physics is something that social linguists, like George Lakoff, would enjoy, because these physicists explore a world they can’t see without the help of technology, and they create names - like quarks and gluons - for the concepts of their theories and experiments. These names interest me, as an anthropologist. But I don’t have the time or understanding to delve into the anthropology of high energy physics in order to analyze the words that are used to explain the physics knowledge that people talk about at CERN and elsewhere. I just wish that I could ask George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, who wrote Metaphors We Live By (1980) to do such a study. Or maybe a linguistics or anthropology PhD student. The question is how high energy physicists use metaphor to explain what they are doing and thinking. According to Lakoff and Johnson, metaphor refers to “experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.” To use a metaphor, I’m in deep water just trying to write this, because I’m sure the physicists who read what I’m writing will say I’m wrong.

Why the term “quarks”? It was coined by the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles and the discovery of the “quark.” In fact, Gell-Mann took a nonsense word from James Joyce’s poem in Finnegan’s Wake: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!/Sure he hasn't got much of a bark/And sure any he has it's all beside the mark." Quark – unbeknownst to Joyce – became a building block of matter. But now with more theory and more discovery in high energy physics, there are differentiated quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. Some of these terms, in Europe, had been called something else: open charm and beauty. Talking about metaphor…

Lakoff and Johnson write that “many aspects of our experience cannot be clearly delineated in terms of the naturally emergent dimensions of our experience. This is typically the case for human emotions, abstract concepts [my emphasis], mental activity, time, work, human institutions, and social practices, etc., and even for physical objects that have no inherent boundaries or orientations. Though most of these can be experienced directly, none of them can be fully comprehended on their own terms. Instead, we must understand them in terms of other entities and experiences, typically other kinds of entities and experiences” (Metaphors We Live By, 1980:177).

So, CERN physicists have quarks, gluons, leptons, and other things I’ve heard about but barely comprehend, but I do know that the names are sometimes arbitrary – as in quarks – or descriptive – as in “top quark” and “bottom quark” (which Lakoff and Johnson would say are metaphoric descriptions). At times, though, I think that this physics community should hire a branding consultant to help them figure out that some names are not just descriptive of their own work, but connote distinct metaphors for non-physicists. Take the name of a physics conference that has been occurring every 2 years since 2004. The first one was at the coastal town of Ericeira, Portugal in 2004, and ever since, the conference has been somewhere near the sea: 2006 at Asilomar in California; 2008 at Illa da Toxa in Galicia, Spain; 2010 at Eilat in Israel; and this year at Cagliari, Sardinia (Italy).

Balcony of house, Via Giovanni, Cagliari

On Via Giovanni, Cagliari

Back in 2004 when I’d first heard of this conference, I burst out laughing. “You’ve GOT to be kidding!” I said. “What’s so funny about the name?” asked the physicist who told me he was going to be presenting a paper at the conference.

“Hard Probes? A conference called ‘Hard Probes’? What were you guys thinking? Doesn’t anyone speak English? There’s only one thing I can think of when I hear that term, and it has nothing to do with physics.”

The physicists didn’t think my comment funny.

La Frère Fête Française à Ferney

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Wed, 30 May 2012 09:59:00 +0000

Before moving to Ferney-Voltaire, I fantasized having a reunion in France of my coterie of high school girlfriends (and their spouses). Decades ago our circle of seven young women of different religious and racial backgrounds hung out together before classes started, ate lunch together in our rural school’s cafeteria, and in spite of living miles away from each other, got together once in a while on weekends. By our senior year we had become a congenial clique, although we didn’t allude to ourselves that way. Our self-reference signified our social ideals: after an assembly during National Brotherhood Week in February of our senior year, we decided that the 7 of us were a Brotherhood. From then on we called ourselves “Brothers.”

For over twenty years we’ve had Brotherhood reunions, most of which have taken place in the East Coast. But as the Brother who lived so far away from all the others (California), and who was the oldest mom with the youngest child, I missed out on most Brofests, as we call our gatherings. So I decided to host a Brofest in France, la Frère Fête Française.

Although only two of the Brothers, Donna (whom I’ve known since kindergarten) and Jan (whom I met in high school), were able to make it to Ferney, our six-day Frère Fête introduced them to “my” part of France and neighboring Switzerland. I prepared food for them from Picard, cooked meals from scratch, took them on trips to other towns and to stores I like (food stores, of course), and drove them through the undulating landscape of fields and farms, grazing cows and nibbling sheep, espaliered fruit trees and budding vineyards. Sharing this part of the world with some of my oldest and dearest friends, and listening to their expressions of joy and wonder (not a Christmas cliché here) delighted me and vindicated me: yes, there are valid reasons why I enjoy living here.

CERNwife, Donna, and Jan

The Six-Day Frère Fête Française Whirlwind Tour

Day One: Donna and Jan took the high speed TGV train (why don’t we have such trains in the US?) from Paris to Geneva. After I picked them up and took them to the motel in Ferney-Voltaire to register and drop off their luggage, we headed up the Jura to a lookout point so that they could see the valley surrounding Lac Léman, Geneva, the Alps, and the part of France that has been my home since September. Then we went to CERN to pick up my physicist Spouse (spouses, in the language of the Brothers, are referred to as “spice” – rhymes with mouses and mice). And we did what many CERN scientists do in the late afternoon: sat around a patio table and sipped beer (Coke for Jan).

Having a drink at CERN

Day Two: During the relaxing 45-minute drive to Annecy on a 2-lane country road, we passed through picture-postcard vistas of villages, rolling hills, farmland. Annecy is an alluring city with canals, flowers, Renaissance buildings, boutiques and gelato stores, a chateau overlooking the town, a romantic botanical park that borders the clean and serene Lac d’Annecy (France’s second largest lake), and mountains that jut out from across the lake, where hand-gliders jump off cliffs and risk their lives for the views. The old town’s buildings and boutiques amazed Jan and Donna, who would have spent more time shopping if I didn’t complain about being hungry. We bought lunch at a boulangerie/patisserie (a “formule” it’s called: one sandwich or pizza slice or quiche, a drink, and a dessert of choice for around 6 euros), and sat in the park near the lake to eat our picnic. By late afternoon we returned to the Ferney area via the 20-minute autoroute drive because, as the spouse-chauffeur, I had to rush to CERN.

Jan, CERNwife, and Donna at Annecy
(Jan's photo)

Crooked door of an old Annecy store

Lily of the Valley decorated chocolates (from May 1)
at one of Annecy's gourmet chocolateries

Day Three: This day we relaxed in Ferney-Voltaire. In the morning we walked to Ferney’s marché (yes, Jan and Donna were sufficiently awed), did a tour of Voltaire’s chateau in the afternoon, and ate dinner at a captivating country inn located in Echenevex, a village nestled in the Jura foothills.

The three Brothers at the Ferney market

Jan and CERNwife in front of Voltaire's chateau

Dinner at Auberge des Chasseurs, Echenevex

Day Four: Lac Léman, the largest lake in Switzerland (known as “Lake Geneva” to many Americans), is so picturesque that describing the lake and the towns, mountains, terraced vineyards and villages that surround it is impossible without seeming platitudinous and vapid. Some scenery is better just to experience. That’s what we did on Day Four by taking the 2-lane lake route (rather than the 4-lane autoroute) to the captivating Swiss town of Morges, where we strolled through a somewhat boring crafts fair that was held in Morges’ 13^th-century chateau. Then we drove to one of Switzerland’s spectacular tourist venues, the medieval Chateau de Chillon, built on a rocky promontory that juts into Lac Léman within site of snow-covered Alps. Walking through the cobblestone courtyards, climbing up and down stairs, examining various rooms of the chateau, and exploring the dungeon, where Lord Byron’s graffiti signature on one of the columns is marked by a frame (remember, he wrote “The Prisoner of Chillon”), we were like children playing make-believe. Chateau de Chillon casts that spell.

The moat at Chateau de Chillon

Lord Byron's carved graffiti (framed)

In the world of make-believe

Day Five: The salad bar at CERN’s cafeteria awed Jan and Donna as it had me. My CERN Spouse just doesn’t understand how the three of us could get so excited by a salad bar, but we can. After lunch he put on his tour guide cap and took them to the Microcosm, the museum that explains the kind of physics experiments that occur at CERN. We headed to a model of the detector used in the ALICE experiment, which, considering Spouse works on ALICE, formed the framework for his explanation of CERN physics. From the Microcosm we drove to the ALICE experimental site, but we couldn’t go down 100 meters into the tunnel to see the real detector because the site has been closed to visitors and employees since March: the experiment’s collisions of particles are occurring down there. I think that by the end of the day, Donna and Jan were more impressed with CERN physics – whether or not they understood it is another story – than they had been with the CERN cafeteria.

Model of the ALICE detector at the Microcosm

Spouse, Donna and Jan at ALICE display

Day Six: Yvoire, regarded as one of the most beautiful villages in France, fills with tourists during vacations and holidays. Although Yvoire is said to be a medieval village, in fact, most of its gray stone buildings hail from the early Renaissance, although its chateau (it seems as if every village I’ve written about here is dominated by a chateau) began its life during the 14^th century. From Ferney-Voltaire, one can get to Yvoire by taking a boat across Lac Léman from Nyon, Switzerland, or one can partially circumnavigate the lake by skirting Geneva (our way of getting there). We walked around its cobblestoned streets, admired the colorful potted flowering plants that decorate the gray buildings, peeked into Yvoire’s shops, and ate a leisurely lunch of “filets de perche” – tiny perch filets fried in butter and served with pommes frites – the specialty of French and Swiss restaurants bordering Lac Léman. Walking fast and not going into stores, tourists could see Yvoire in 20 minutes or less. It’s a small treasure. But we went in and out of boutiques and tried on clothes, walked into galleries and tourist shops, and relaxed at a restaurant by the harbor – with a view of Switzerland across the lake - for our midday meal of perch filets. We stayed in Yvoire at least 3 hours. Maybe more.

A street in Yvoire

CERNwife and Donna eating dessert, Jan with spoon

Day Seven: I picked up Jan and Donna from their hotel at 7 AM and drove them to the Geneva Airport for their flight back to Washington, DC. After our usual emotional Brotherhood good-byes, I left them in the departure section of the airport and walked downstairs to the arrivals. My 89-year-old mother was coming for a two-week visit.

Picard's Foods

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Sun, 06 May 2012 13:30:00 +0000

The Picard store in Ferney-Voltaire

Picard is my favorite French grocery store. Although they don’t carry milk, cheese (a necessity in France), seltzers (or wine and beer – additional necessities), salad greens, and some other staples, which means I make the rounds of different food markets, Picard is a specialty-item enterprise: they sell frozen foods.

Picard's rows of deep-chest freezers

Picard’s stores look somewhat sterile, with rows of deep-chest freezers packed with tempting packages whose alluring graphics of the foods within entice buyers like me to pick up more foods than the tiny French freezers could hold.

Flash-frozen fruit

The company flash-freezes fresh produce or prepared products, which preserves their texture and taste. Picard’s non-GMO foods are gourmet, flavorful, well-made, easy to use, and do not have artificial preservatives or flavorings. But what makes Picard my favorite French grocery store is the choice and the fact that whatever I buy doesn’t taste like frozen food. Take, for example, frozen spinach. In the US, I could buy a 10 oz block of frozen spinach, but what if I want to use just a quarter cup? I’d have to take a hammer or saw to cut it up, or thaw out the entire thing and toss most of it out. Picard’s frozen chopped spinach, on the other hand, like all their pureed vegetables in bags, are molded into individual little rectangles, around an inch by an inch and a half, and maybe a quarter of an inch thick. I just pour out as much as I need and freeze the rest.

Frozen cubes of pureed peas, pumpkin, and spinach

Whether I buy frozen fresh vegetables, like cauliflower florets, peeled fava beans, or chanterelle mushrooms, or a vegetable mixture such as a Moroccan tagine or grilled eggplant and peppers, or salmon wrapped in puff pastry, or vegetarian pureed soups, or some sort of ethnic food (such as frozen Indian, Japanese, Mexican, Thai, or Moroccan meals), or herb mixtures or sauces, or any of their mouth-watering cakes and ice creams, preparing everyday gourmet dinners feels like cheating.

Appetizers

Pureed soups (all vegetarian)

Fish

Ethnic vegetable mixtures

Crepes

Tartes and Quiches

Japanese foods

Cannelloni (Manicotti)

Thai foods

Cakes

Desserts (no calories, of course)

Ice cream confections

Ice cream desserts

The Picard insulated bag

One small purchase in my Picard bag

Like many French women (yes, women still do most of the cooking), I’ve become dependent on Picard, and I dread to think that, when I return to the US, I’ll have to make from scratch so many of these foods that I buy frozen in France. Maybe we can get Trader Joe’s to carry more of Picard’s items (in fact, some of Trader Joe’s frozen foods from France are Picard products with TJ’s labels). Better yet, maybe we can get Picard to open some stores in the United States – starting with Oakland, California.

The one frozen Picard item we don't need in the U.S.

May Day

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Tue, 01 May 2012 13:46:00 +0000

Lilies of the Valley

May Day in France is a national holiday: children don’t go to school and most employees get the day off; the post office and banks don’t operate; supermarkets and many businesses are closed. It’s a day to commemorate workers’ rights. In fact, May Day as a workers’ holiday started in the United States during the latter decades of the 19^th century, when workers organized to demand an 8-hour work day, which actually didn’t go into effect in the U.S. until 1938 (whereas in France, workers obtained the 8-hour day in 1919). While May Day is celebrated throughout most of Europe, contemporary Americans have no collective recollection of the holiday’s history because of its suppression in the United States since the mid-1950’s, when the Cold War dominated American political ideology: the United States associated May Day with communism since the Soviet Union celebrated workers on May 1. The American myopic view of May Day as a communist holiday ignores its ancient pre-labor roots.

The first of May prevailed as a pagan festival before Christianity conquered Europe. The Celtic holiday of Beltane celebrated fertility, fire, and the beginning of summer on May 1, and the Vikings observed the evening of April 30 lighting bonfires to scare evil spirits and witches, and to hasten the fertility of spring and summer. This festival became known in the Germanic-speaking and Eastern European countries as Walpurgis Night, named after a nun named Walpurgis in Germany who spoke out against witchcraft and sorcery. She was canonized on May 1, 779 – thus transforming pagan festivities into a saint’s day.

And then, of course, there was the Maypole dance and the May Queen (or Queen of the May) derived from old Anglo-Saxon celebrations, which, like the others, were fertility festivals.

I remember when my first grade class did a Maypole dance. The girls wore pastel frocks; the boys dressed in pants and white shirts. We wove around the pole, each holding a long strip of light-colored crepe-paper, ducking in and out of the ribbons as the boys circled in one direction and the girls in the other until the pole had been laced with the crepe-paper and we could dance no more. In the fall of that school year we six-year-olds had to remember to add “under God” to the already-difficult-to-say Pledge of Allegiance - which transformed the incomprehensible words (what’s a “witch-it stands”?) into a public prayer - to make sure we weren’t godless communists. After that spring, the Maypole dance wasn’t performed in school. It had become a symbol of May Day, which had become a symbol of communism.

But here in France, May Day is the workers’ day (La Fête du Travail), and it is signified by the lily of the valley (muguet) because, so it is said, King Charles IX was given lilies of the valley on May 1, 1561, and since he liked the flowers, he presented them to the ladies of his court every May 1 from then on. Thus the other moniker for May Day is La Fête du Muguet - and on May 1 anyone can sell lilies of the valley without incurring retail regulations or paying taxes.

Yesterday when I went to Carrefour, the hypermarché (supermarket-department-store), displays of lilies of the valley stood in the front of the store. Nearby, a prominent sign noted that the store would be closed on May 1. I bought a small potted plant of muguets. Then at the check-out counter after I had paid for my groceries, the cashier handed me the receipt – and a delicate fragrant muguet sprig tucked into a flower vial.

This May Day in France has resurrected primary school memories from Poughkeepsie: the Maypole Dance, the transformation of the Pledge of Allegiance, the American association of May Day with communism, and a song from childhood: “White coral bells, upon a slender stalk...”

Muguet sprig - Lilies of the Valley

Sprinter

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 20:34:00 +0000

Weather is not a topic that I thought would make an interesting blog post, because, although I grew up learning to love changes in weather, cloud formations, thunder storms and blizzards (my father had been a meteorologist), weather in Ferney-Voltaire has been what one expects it to be for the seasons. But these past few weeks have been way too rainy, and the past few days have seemed more like January than late April, with unrelenting rain, cold wind, and clouds hiding the Jura Mountains to the north and the Alps to the south. This morning, though, the clouds disappeared and the rain had vanished. The mountains emerged covered with snow, and they tower over fields flowering with yellow rapeseed blossoms that are ready for the late spring harvest. That’s why I’m writing about weather. There’s a new season here: Sprinter.

Fields of springtime rapeseed flowers and snow on the Jura

The snow-covered Jura seen from a street in Ferney-Voltaire

The Romans and the Jews

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:09:00 +0000

View of the Colosseum (left) and Arch of Titus (right)

One major advantage of being a CERN Wife is travel, because CERN physicists, who come from over 80 countries, have international meetings to discuss their work, and some fortunate spouses tag along as tourists, which I did last week when the ALICE collaboration held a meeting in Frascati, Italy – a half-hour train ride from Rome.

The Arch of Titus

When I toured Rome years ago, the Arch of Titus had impressed me, and I wanted to examine it once more. I was discussing the remarkable bas-reliefs on the inside of the arch with my friend Susan, who was with me in Rome last week. Both of us remembered bas-relief figures of the triumphant Roman soldiers and of enchained Jewish slaves carrying the Temple’s gold Menorah, which the Romans took while sacking Jerusalem in 70 CE. But before heading to see the arch, which is in the Roman Forum, we spent several hours in the Colosseum, and were most surprised by one placard where it was written that the Colosseum was financed by “booty” from the “Jewish Revolt” against Rome. WHAT? Don’t the Colosseum historians know that the Jewish Revolt, led by Simon Bar Kochba, started in 132 CE, whereas construction of the Colosseum began in 72 CE and was completed in 80 CE? Susan and I were puzzled: why such a blatant anachronism?

Bas-reliefs on one side of the Arch of Titus

Then we walked through the Roman Forum, passing majestic columns, stone paths, remnants of buildings, and current archeological digs and headed straight to the Arch of Titus. But instead of bas-reliefs of enchained Jewish slaves holding the Menorah, we saw laurel-bedecked proud Roman soldiers parading with the Temple’s treasures. How could our memories have been so wrong?

Roman soldiers carrying Menorah and other treasures

Victorious Roman soldiers with their horses

The following day we strolled through the old Jewish ghetto, where we sat outside at a kosher restaurant and consumed one of Rome’s most famous dishes – carciofi alla giudia – Jewish style artichokes, which are deep fried in olive oil and transformed into a golden-green crispy flower. We also visited the outstanding Jewish Museum and took a guided tour of Rome’s Great Synagogue, which was built between 1901 and 1904. The synagogue tour turned out to be a history lesson about Italian Jews. Although Jews were brought to Rome as slaves after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, they had actually been in Rome since the second century BCE, a time when the Maccabees sought the help of Rome to fight the Assyrian Greek Seleucid Empire, which controlled ancient Judea. Thus, Jews lived in Rome almost 500 years before the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity.

Rome's Great Synagogue

During the Counter-Reformation of the mid-16^th century, which was a Catholic revival in response to the Protestant Reformation, the Jews of Rome were forced to live in the ghetto (starting in 1555). By 1882, twelve years after the unification of Italy, Jews were permitted to reside outside the ghetto. Although its walls were demolished in 1888, the ghetto remains a center of Rome’s Jewish identity, with the Great Synagogue, Jewish school, bakeries and restaurants, and plaques commemorating the round-up of Jews during the Holocaust.

Medieval house in the ghetto

Lining up in front of a Jewish bakery

Police guarding Jewish school (right); restaurant (left)

Ghetto building with Holocaust memorial plaque

So what’s with the story about the booty from the Jewish Revolt financing the construction of the Colosseum? Since our memories about the bas-reliefs on the Arch of Titus were inaccurate, perhaps Susan and I harbored flawed memories about history. That, indeed, was the case. There were two Jewish revolts against the Romans, and we remembered the latter one. We forgot about the first Jewish revolt against Rome between 66-70 CE, which had triggered a major civil war between Jews, resulted in the destruction of the Temple by the Romans, and culminated in the construction of the Colosseum and the Arch of Titus. These two tourist attractions are reminders not only of ancient Rome’s power and ingenuity, but also of the intertwining history of the Romans and the Jews.

Self-Promotion and Politics

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 20:39:00 +0000

Sign for Berlitz at Versailles train station

Here is a poster in the Versailles train station, promoting English lessons at Berlitz. The translation: “Nicolas, Francois, Eva, Jean-Luc, Marine meeting with Barack in 8 weeks…In English, is everything OK?” Why those names – Nicolas, Francois, Eva, Jean-Luc, Marine? These are the five top contenders for the presidential race in France.

Actually, 10 hopefuls are running in France, from the extreme left, Eva Joly, to the extreme right, Marine Le Pen, with the center-right current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, battling the Socialist, Francois Hollande, as the top two contenders.

In Ferney-Voltaire: Posters of the 10 presidential candidates

The French election season, unlike the expensive and long American one, lasts 4 months. Next Sunday, April 22, is the election, and there might be a run-off election as well. And because of the concept of laicite – secularism – which is the French political religion, no mention of God is permitted in politics. French politicians don’t brag about going to church, nor do they mention religious beliefs in their speeches. Unlike in the United States, religion and politics are separate in France. No French politician would ever end a speech with something like, “God bless you, and God bless France,” in the way American politicians are obliged to end their speeches as if they are responding to an orchestrated public sneeze (“God bless you, and God bless America”).

The one thing that the presidential candidates of both France and the United States have in common is the personality of self-promotion, because that’s what’s needed to succeed in politics (aside from money and ideas that appeal to a segment of the population). Just think about Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich: with their bizarre ideologies, how were they able to get such a following? They have the talent of self-promotion - a flair that facilitated their obtaining financial backing, but in the long run, they didn’t make it as the Republican presidential candidate this go-around.

Self-promotion is not just for politicians. In our world of the world-wide web, writers such as Charlotte Bronte and Emily Dickinson would never have been published, because these were shy and introverted women who sat at home and wrote. They wouldn’t have been able to create a “platform” – the concept so necessary in today’s publishing milieu - meaning that you are already well-known and have a following, have many people reading what you write, are often quoted, are invited to lecture in front of audiences. In other words, before you can get an agent, let alone a book deal, you have to exist in a Catch-22 world. Just think of how many contemporary Brontes and Dickinsons are uncomfortable with self-promotion, and as such, we will never read their works.

I am uncomfortable with self-promotion and the concept of platform development, which writers are told they need to do. One agent who had agreed to represent my memoir about living in Iran during the revolution rescinded his offer, telling me it’s because I have no platform. So modest me has to put on the mask of a politician and start self-promotion. But how? Just the concept of platform development makes me feel like a phony politician, but without the financial support. Rather than self-promotion, I’d rather eat ice cream, read, write, paint, drink wine, travel, talk to friends, anything, really, rather than beg people to follow my blog, friend me on Facebook, tweet me with Twitter, or link to me on LinkedIn. But I do need a platform so I can get an agent so I can get a book published. In that regard, I need to self-promote, and ask you to follow my blog, friend me on Facebook, and connect with me on LinkedIn. I (with reluctance) signed up for Twitter – something I thought I’d never do (my Twitter contact, or whatever it’s called, is @KarenLeePliskin). Why am I doing all this? Because I’m participating in something called the “April Platform Challenge” by Robert Lee Brewer, from his blog, My Name Is Not Bob. Platform development is a real challenge for me as both a writer and an artist, and just think, I used to want to be a politician.

Easter Sweets

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 16:35:00 +0000

Versailles: Bunny and Duck Couples, Hen, and Eggs

Easter sweets appear in patisserie shop windows less than a month before Easter. Chocolate animals (milk, dark, white, even pink) populate the shelves.

Versailles: Chocolate Cows and Pigs

Versailles: Squirrel

Versailles: Melting Bunny in the Window

Versailles: Melted Bunny in the Window

In Alsace, kugelhopf (sweet yeast cake), cakes made in lamb-shaped or fish-shaped molds, and chocolate storks – the bird of the region – join the chocolate eggs and animals as Easter specialties.

Colmar: Lamb Cakes and Kugelhopf

Colmar: Kugelhopf and Fish Cakes (but not fish)

Colmar: Easter Gingerbread

Colmar: Easter Stork

Colmar: Littler Easter Chocolates

Strasbourg: Cartoony Chocolates

Strasbourg: Gourmet Easter Menagerie

American kids don't know what they're missing.......

Joyeuses Paques and Happy Easter.

Alsace Matzot

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 17:43:00 +0000

Alsace Matsot (r) made in the town of Wasselonne

We spent last weekend, from Friday, March 30 until Sunday, April 1, in Alsace, where French citizens speak French and a dialect similar to Swiss-Deutsch, where the food has a German influence, and where, once-upon-a-time, Jews resided in the cities and villages until the Holocaust.

We toured Colmar, Strasbourg, and Ribeauville, drove through villages and vineyards (Alsace produces mostly white wines: Sylvaner and Reisling the best known), and wondered how is it that in France people still live in houses that were built in the 14^th century. On Sunday, before heading back to Ferney-Voltaire, we went to a kosher grocery in Strasbourg, which has a large (and religious) Jewish population. We bought all kinds of kosher for Pesach food and wine that doesn’t exist at all in Ferney, and in Geneva the same things (if they have them) are twice the price.

The big box of matzoh made in Wasselone, a village we drove to but didn’t know they had a matzoh factory, towers over Manischewitz matzos.

One piece of Wasselone matzoh

And the size and shape of the Alsace matzoh is different from anything I’ve had in the U.S. or Israel – it’s not only much larger, but each piece can be split in the middle. Manischewitz here is the midget matzoh.

Alsace matzoh with a midget Manischewitz one

Have a Happy and Healthy Pesach.

The Toulouse Tragedy

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 21:23:00 +0000

Plaque on a Paris elementary school

On the outer walls of many elementary schools in Paris are plaques commemorating the deaths of Jewish children by Vichy France in collaboration with the Nazis. The most notorious mass arrest of Jews in Paris took place on July 16 and 17, 1942, by French police who rounded up 13,152 French Jews (of whom 4,051 were children) and kept them in a stadium called the Vélodrome d’Hiver, from which they were transported to the Drancy internment camp outside Paris, and then to Auschwitz to be killed. This raid is known as the Rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv. French schoolchildren didn’t start learning about their country’s cooperation with the Nazis until 1962, and only in 1995 did French President Jacques Chirac apologize for France’s role in the Holocaust. Although this history has been a difficult one for France to come to terms with, the France of 2012 is a far cry from the anti-Semitic country of 70 years ago. Unfortunately, outbreaks of anti-Semitism still occur, but nowadays the perpetrators are more often young marginalized Muslim youth who live in the banlieus, the slums of the suburbs. The tragedy that occurred last week in Toulouse brought up France’s past for many, especially Jews living outside France, who figured a far-right neo-Nazi was the killer. Instead, he was a newly-crafted Islamist. I can’t go into depth in this blog post about French society and the Jewish and Muslim minorities. Instead, I am going to respond to some of the comments I’ve heard about and read since last week regarding anti-Semitism in France.

A week ago, Wednesday, March 21, the four people murdered outside a Jewish school in Toulouse were buried in Israel. The murderer, a self-proclaimed jihadist born in France to Algerian immigrant parents, had assassinated 3 French soldiers (who were from the North African Muslim communities) the week before to protest France’s involvement in Afghanistan. He executed the 4 Jews to protest deaths of Palestinian children. Mohamed Merah, the murderer, was killed by the French police within hours of the victims’ burial in Israel.

The horrors of last Monday outraged the French public. The government ordered police protection for both Jewish and Muslim schools and houses of worship, because the first assumption had been that an ultra-nationalist right-winger was the killer. President Sarkozy decreed that schools should observe a moment of silence at 11 AM the following day. And at an impromptu silent rally in Paris that Monday evening (March 19), Parisians of all backgrounds marched in homage of the 30-year-old teacher, Jonathan Sandler, his 2 sons, Arieh, 6, and Gabriel, 3, and Myriam Monsonego, 8. Jews and non-Jews stood together flaunting French flags (some held Israeli ones as well) in a show of nationalism and mutual support in the face of that morning’s catastrophe. The message was clear: no to Islamist terrorism, and yes to the Frenchness of the Jews of France.

That Monday, some American Jews and Israelis reacted to the homicides at the Toulouse Jewish school with accusations that anti-Semitism is an integral part of French culture, as if France has not evolved from the Dreyfus affair of the 1890s, or the Vichy regime of World War II. On a California Facebook string I had participated in, one man wrote, “J’accuse la France” as if the country itself were responsible for the 4 deaths (and for others who blame France, would you condemn the United States as a country to be responsible for the deaths of Jews at Seattle’s JCRC in 1999, or at the Holocaust Museum?).

Two Israeli members of Knesset responded with the usual call for French Jews to immigrate to Israel. Danny Danon, chair of the Knesset Absorption and Diaspora Committee, said, “The terror attack at a Jewish school in France is a red light for the entire Jewish people. The nations of the world must unite against these acts of violence against the Jewish people, and work to eliminate anti-Semitism around the world. We will not allow the pogroms of the early twentieth century to return to Europe.” By referring to these murders as a pogrom, Mr. Danon desecrated the memory of our ancestors who suffered through real pogroms in 19^th century Russia, which were led by masses who pillaged villages and murdered their Jewish inhabitants. Another Member of the Knesset, Ya’akov Katz, said, “There is no Jewish future in France,” and that Jews should not trust “Sarkozy, Obama or other world leaders.”

What these Israeli politicians do not understand is that even though there are occasional anti-Semitic incidents in France, as there are in most countries of the world, the majority of French Jews consider themselves French, even if they have been distressed by the violence of last week, such as the French Jewish philosopher and journalist, Bernard-Henry Levy, who wrote, “There can be no worse blow to French culture, to the soul of our country, its history and when all is said and done, to its grandeur than racism and, today, anti-Semitism.” Levy, who considers himself both French and Jewish, would undoubtedly disagree with Rachael Levy (I assume no relation) who wrote a scathing attack on French society as being inherently anti-Semitic in an article this past week in Slate, entitled “Why You Can’t Be Both French and Jewish” (again, dredging up the Dreyfus affair, France’s complicity in World War II and historical Catholic anti-Semitism).

All last week the news covered the reaction of French citizens to the murders, as well as the marches against racism and anti-Semitism that had occurred in Toulouse and Paris (and other cities) on Sunday, March 25. Six thousand people marched in Toulouse, including the imam and France’s chief rabbi, walking arm in arm, both telling journalists that this was the act of someone who does not represent Islam, and that Jews and Muslims are French citizens. In Paris thousands more marched, and TV footage showed French people of all colors, women in hijab, men in kippot, Africans in colorful turbans and caftans, and the majority in variations of western dress. All were marching against racism and anti-Semitism, with the understanding that yes, you can be both French and Jewish.

As an American Jew living in France, I have had experiences with my Christian friends that are different from those of Rachael Levy. I have non-Jewish friends who marched in the demonstrations in Paris, others in Ferney-Voltaire who wished they could have gone, and another in Versailles, who is going this evening to an event sponsored by the Bishop of Versailles at the Saint Joan of Arc Church in support of the Jewish community of Versailles and its president, Samuel Sandler, father of the murdered Jonathan Sandler. “Our presence this evening will testify our friendship for our brothers of the Jewish community,” the email to parishioners stated.

The tragedy in Toulouse hit all of France, from the politicians running for president to the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim citizens of the country. The crime is horrible. But people not living in France should not make assumptions that the country is anti-Semitic, that all the Muslims here hate Jews, or that the Jews are afraid to remain in France. Jews have lived here for almost 2000 years, and they will remain here in the future. I only wish there were a Jewish community in Ferney-Voltaire.

Yahrtzeit in Ferney-Voltaire

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 15:39:00 +0000

Today is the second yahrtzeit of my father, William Aaron Pliskin, who passed away March 10, 2010, several months before his 90^th birthday, an event he was excited about celebrating. Yahrtzeit is a Yiddish word, meaning the anniversary of someone’s death according to the Jewish calendar (my father died on the 24^th of the month Adar in the year 5770), and it is observed by close relatives going to the synagogue and saying kaddish, known as the “mourner’s prayer.” It is, in fact, a prayer for the living that is said several times during the service to acknowledge the greatness of God and to appeal for peace. Kaddish is also said at home when lighting the yahrtzeit candle in memory of the loved one.

I wanted to go to services yesterday to say kaddish, but the closest synagogue, Beth Yaakov, is in downtown Geneva. The location was not a problem for me, although circling the city looking for parking might have been. The problem, however, is that Beth Yaakov is an Orthodox synagogue in which women do not say kaddish. Geneva’s liberal synagogue, GIL, has services on Friday nights starting at 6:30, smack in the middle of rush hour, and because the synagogue is on the other side of Geneva and parking is difficult, I would have had to have left Ferney-Voltaire at 5 PM at the latest to get there on time. Needless to say, that does not seem to be a restful way of spending Shabbat evening. So I didn’t go to services to say kaddish and considering I am a member of the egalitarian Netivot Shalom in Berkeley, California, not being in a community to say kaddish with other mourners is a lonesome experience.

But last night after sundown I lit the yahrtzeit candle at home and said kaddish with thoughts of my father. He, too, was an experimental physicist, but his world of science was far removed from CERN’s physics. He received awards from IBM for his patents of thin glass films which prevented printed circuits from oxidizing, and which saved the company millions, and probably by now, billions of dollars (too bad that savings didn’t trickle down to his salary…). My father loved his family and physics, had a wonderful sense of humor, was a lifelong liberal Democrat (his parents were members of the Workmen’s Circle, a Jewish socialist organization), and was as proud of being an agnostic as he was of being a Jew. He had a handlebar moustache, sparkling eyes, and a charming smile. I miss him.

The CERN Cafeteria

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 16:00:00 +0000

One section of the CERN cafeteria

Physicists have to eat. So do the engineers, support staff, administrators, construction workers, and artisans who contribute to making CERN the world’s premiere physics laboratory. CERN’s cafeteria is where they go, not just to refuel, but also to socialize and talk about their work.

Working in the cafeteria mid-morning

CERN has two cafeterias. The smaller one, in the outlying area of CERN, sits inside a fence that separates CERN from the fields and vineyards of a Swiss farmer. The other cafeteria, located in a more central part of the campus, is the principal venue for having meals, snacks, and coffee, and for relaxing with a beer in the late afternoon. Cafeteria One, as it’s called, has several sections or rooms with different types of tables, as well as two outdoor patios where patrons eat their lunches under umbrellas in good weather. That’s where the smokers go, since smoking is prohibited inside CERN’s buildings.

The patio on a rainy winter afternoon

CERN’s cafeteria, though, is not just for eating. By mid-morning and after lunch, the cafeteria provides a workspace for physicists who want a venue other than their offices for thinking about and discussing their experiments. Moreover, the cafeteria is used every so often by journalists who conduct interviews with CERN scientists.

The cafeteria manager (right) at the long salad bar

What also draws the CERN workforce to the cafeteria is the food. It’s really good. People decide what they want to eat after looking at the selections in the cafeteria’s different sections: a trattoria and a grill; two salad bars (one round table with bowls of plain vegetables and legumes, the other - a long rectangular table - with assorted pre-made salads, a variety of olives and pickles, cut meats, poached salmon, quiches and sushi); and a long dessert table with tarts, pastries, fruit salads, and puddings.

Some prepared salads

Quiches and breads at the salad bar

Fruit salads and puddings

Pastries on the dessert table

Daily options for hot meals include pizza, pasta, meat, and fish, which come with a choice of rice, beans, cooked vegetables, and French fries or other potatoes, as well as a small salad. There are sandwiches, too. Aside from water, which most CERN employees drink, people can buy beer, wine, soft drinks or juice.

Veal sausages and vegetables

Decisions, decisions

CERN cafeteria's wine and beer bar

Physicists at lunch

Lining up for espresso, ristretto, cappuccino, or plain coffee at one of the coffee bars is the final ritual of lunch. Then it’s back to work, at the office, experimental site, or…at the cafeteria.

CERN cafeteria's coffee bar

A post-lunch meeting in the CERN cafeteria

The Importance of Bonjour

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 16:44:00 +0000

Americans in Paris

The doctor’s office was on the bottom floor of a house. When I pushed the door open, I was standing in a square foyer. To my left was the “toilette.” In front of me was the “salle d’attente” – the waiting room. I opened the door and glanced at the six or so patients who were seated in the room; then I settled into a stiff chair and opened a book. Several minutes later, a woman walked in, said “Bonjour” to everyone, and sat down. Again the door opened, and another woman appeared, looked around, said “Bonjour” and found a seat. It then dawned on me that I am a rude American.

The next time I entered the doctor’s waiting room, I said “Bonjour” to the seated strangers, and felt oh-so-French. But this pride of figuring out some part of the cultural communication system was turned upside down soon after, when it was my turn to speak to a person at the information desk of a department store.

“Where can I find women’s shoes?” I asked.

“BONJOUR, madame,” she replied.

A timid and high-pitched “Bonjour” exited my mouth.

Bonjour is important. If you travel to France, make sure you say bonjour to salespeople, waiters, clerks, hotel workers, airline personnel, hairdressers, cashiers, and anybody, actually, before you ask a question or start a conversation. When you walk into a hotel elevator, say bonjour to the people who are already in the elevator. If you’re staying in an apartment building, say bonjour to people who live there, even if you don’t know them, and you can also up the civility by adding a “madame” or “monsieur” to your greeting for supplementary politeness (“Bonjour, madame”). And if you decide to get your hair done in France, make sure you greet everyone in the salon at once with a pleasant bonjour (in barbershops, men also shake hands with other customers as well as the barbers, saying bonjour to each). Bonjour is part of the French politeness code. Master that, and you won’t be such a rude American.

Ferney-Voltaire’s Marché

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 21:44:00 +0000

Produce purveyor at Ferney-Voltaire's Saturday market

Some merchants arrive by 5 AM to set up their stalls at Ferney-Voltaire’s Saturday market. By 8:30, the marché is open for business. The Ferney market is famous in this region, and because it borders Switzerland, it’s one of the more expensive ones in France. Most of the vendors live hours away, but most of the customers live in the Ferney area or in the Geneva suburbs. But shoppers from Lausanne will drive 40 kilometers to buy produce in the Ferney market at prices that they perceive to be less expensive than what they would pay in Swiss grocery stores.

Although I buy more produce at Ferney’s less expensive supermarkets than at the marché, I go to the Saturday market because it’s a celebration. The quiet town mutates into a retail festival, with one section of the main road devoted to the sale of food and the other section allocated to clothing. Rectangular polychromatic umbrellas transform the streets into narrower passageways where young parents push baby carriages, elderly couples walk arm in arm, middle-aged men and women fill backpacks, baskets, or shopping carts with food for the week, and children whine for chocolate or churros.

Shoppers at the Ferney market

Customers at a butcher's stall

Lining up at a cheese seller's truck

The Ferney market is a United Nations of shoppers. This area is home not only to the French, but also to an international array of personnel employed at the various NGOs and UN agencies in Geneva as well as at CERN. So milling about the marché, inspecting assorted fruit, vegetables, breads, cheeses, meats, pasta, olives, wine, flowers, clothing, tablecloths, fabrics, jewelry, books, and ready-to-eat food, are Africans, Chinese, Indians, Americans, Arabs and multilingual Europeans. But interacting with the vendors requires some knowledge of French.

Of course, there is appealing fresh produce

Cheeses from the region

Beaujolais wine, produced two hours from Ferney-Voltaire

Teas

Moroccan olives

French olives for tasting

Few of the merchants are actually farmers. Most are produce purveyors who create colorful tableaux with overpriced fruits and vegetables. Fishmongers drive more than four hours to Ferney and then they transform their long refrigerated trucks into extended display counters to sell fresh fish and seafood from the Mediterranean Sea. Bakers retail baguettes and pain au levain as well as unusual loaves that can’t be found at local boulangeries (such as breads made with chestnut flour, or with figs, cranberries, or hazelnuts). And cheese sellers often give miniscule tastes of raw milk cow, goat, and sheep cheeses that are produced in the region. Then there are immigrants who market ready-made food, such as paella, schwarma, tagines, and fried plantains, and French natives who sell vin chaud (hot spiced wine) or choucroute (a dish of sauerkraut covered with anemic-looking sausages and thick slabs of pink ham riddled with fat).

The fishmonger's display

Specialty breads

North African food for sale

Choucroute

Grand Rue, the cobblestoned pedestrian street, is where weary shoppers sit in the sun at outdoor cafes and watch women contemplating the skirts, blouses, hats, stockings, soaps, and jewelry that are displayed along the other side of the road.

Taking a shopping break at a cafe on Grand Rue

Trendy tops

Sweatshirts printed with fictitious American college names

Lingerie stall

Winter hats

The marché, crowded, animated, carnivalesque, closes at 1:00. Customers leave. Merchants pack their trucks and head out to their next destination. Cleaners remove the rubbish and sweep the streets. By 2:30, Ferney-Voltaire returns to its tranquil, provincial, sleepy self.

French Refrigerators

noreply@blogger.com (CERN Wife) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 12:15:00 +0000

Food shopping in France is a pleasure. When I go to the weekly outdoor markets or the hypermarches (very large supermarkets that sell not just food, but also clothes, computers, books, dishes, dishwashers, washing machines, and refrigerators), I admire the variety of garden-fresh produce, raw-milk and pasteurized cheeses, assorted breads made from different types of flour, fresh pasta, chocolate cakes and fruit tartes, and myriad yogurts with flavors that don't exist in the United States (chestnut, mirabelle plum, or hazelnut, for example). But the problem is, I can buy very few foods that need refrigeration. That's because French refrigerators are the runts of household appliances.

French refrigerators and freezers, covered with the same veneer as the rest of the cabinets, blend into the kitchen décor – unlike conspicuous American refrigerators, which announce the newest trend, such as brushed stainless steel, as if the exterior of the item indicates how well it keeps food cold. French refrigerators, though, are too small for me. I’m used to obese American ones with shelves stuffed, drawers gorged with produce, and doors overfilled with drinks and condiments. In the United States I don’t have to think about how much food I’m buying. In France, I wonder whether the refrigerator could accommodate the cucumber.

The veneer matches the cabinets

18.25" wide, 11.75" deep, 38" high
(including the 2 produce drawers)
The refrigerator is 4.72 cubic feet.
Our American refrigerator is 26 cubic feet.

Other countries have Liliputian refrigerators, but why does France, the country famous for its food, wine, chefs, and Michelin stars? How do people plan for dinner parties if there is no room in the refrigerator to prepare a dish the day before? (meaning, could the French ever celebrate a holiday like Thanksgiving?) Isn’t there wastage with discarding perfectly good leftovers ? (I know a woman who makes soup every day for dinner, and what’s not eaten goes down the drain.) How many times a week do French people shop for food? Do they think of their refrigerator space when they’re grocery shopping? Or do they have, as many if my French friends do, an extra refrigerator in the garage?

French freezers, unlike their American counterparts, are well-designed, although stunted. Open the door, and you see closed drawers, each one of which can be organized to hold a certain type of food (frozen vegetables in one drawer, desserts in another, and so on). In the American freezer, you see foods packed and crammed into a large space, and finding what you want is an endeavor in arctic archeology.

The freezer

A freezer drawer

A few days ago I bought a bag of 7 small organic oranges from Spain, 2 fennel bulbs, one lettuce, 3 turnips, 2 sweet potatoes from the U.S., one leek, 3 Granny Smith apples, and a small box of mushrooms. I was able to fit everything in the refrigerator, after chopping off most of the green part of the leek. Then I realized that I could have bought that yogurt. There was space on the top shelf. And that’s one thing that keeps commerce going here: returning to the grocery store to buy what we wanted to get in the first place, but didn’t know if the refrigerator had room.

After grocery shopping

Packed produce drawers
Each drawer is 8.5" wide, 11.5" long, and 6" high