Wrapping things up

I've been back home in Portland for a couple months now. Things have been going well. I'm happy with my new apartment and my new job. And at the same time, of course, this trip is still with me. I've been reading books inspired by my travels. Inevitably, ever few days or so I find myself making some reference to Nepal or Switzerland or Morocco.

I had planned on writing a post or two on trekking in Nepal. It would seem, though, that I've been suffering from a case of writer's block. I can't seem to find a way to do the topic justice. Instead, my photos--and the associated commentary--will have to suffice. Needless to say, these were wonderful experiences, and I highly recommend a trip to Nepal for anyone who is interested. I put photos from Nepal, Switzerland and Morocco up on my Picasa site.

Nepal 2010

France and Switzerland 2010

Morocco 2010

Also, I put together a panoramic composite image of the Himalaya near Mt Everest, and put it up on Photosynth.



There is one other topic in addition to my treks in Nepal that I had wanted write about: volunteering and development work. Of course, a big part of this trip was spent visiting a friend who is volunteering in Nepal for a couple years. Over the past few months--before, during and after my trip--it has been interesting for me to gain little insights here and there into various aspects of her work. And it's hard work, both for her, as a volunteer and a foreigner, and for the Nepalis that she is working with trying to improve the lives of people with disabilities in Makwanpur District. It's heartwrenching, frankly. Clearly, there is an emotional aspect to this topic of volunteering or development work, for me, at least, but I think too for Tiffany and her Nepali coworkers. But it is not and cannot only be about having a bleeding heart. There is funding and grants and paperwork and reports and conferences and trainings and on and on and on. It's serious work.

I wish I had something profound to say about volunteering and development work. Talking with Tiffany and her Nepali coworkers, and getting a glimpse of the work that they are doing certainly made the whole thing much more real for me. I suppose for now, I'll just leave it at that.

I will end this blog with a quote I heard the other day that I appreciated. From time to time, I listen to the radio show Speaking of Faith. There was a show a month ago or so on the art of peace, in which John Paul Lederach, a Professor of International Peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame, talked about peacebuilding work he has done in Nepal and elsewhere. Towards the end of the interview, he quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes as saying, "I would not give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity." That's what I'm talking about. That's what I'm striving for.

Liberty or death

I've been thinking a lot about independence lately, both with regards to my own life, but also as it pertains to the various places I have visited over the last couple months. For example, a few days ago I was driving down MainStrasse in Covington, Kentucky, and I noticed the image of a Gadsden flag on a banner outside one of the cute little shops.

Forgive me, but I have to share just a little bit of trivia here. Apparently, the Gadsden flag, as the yellow flag with the rattlesnake and the words don't tread on me is known, was one of the first American flags, before Old Glory. Here is a site with all kinds of interesting information on it, if you're curious.

When I was 12 Metallica released their black album. Hard to overstate the impact it had on me. I know, I know, it's butt rock, and lots of people don't dig it. For the most part I've moved on, but every now and then I get a little nostalgic. Recently, I can't seem to get this one particular song out of my head. I encourage you to give it a chance. Here are the lyrics. Liberty or death, it begins.

We Americans are so focused on liberty and freedom, on independence. Perhaps I'm more focused on it than most. Part of the reason I was able to take this trip is that there is so little to inhibit my freedom these days. I can hear Janis Joplin singing about having nothing left to lose...

When I was in Switzerland a few weeks ago, reading up on Morocco, and having just come from Nepal, it occurred to me that all three of these rather different countries are often described as being fiercely independent. But that independence takes a very different form from what I'm used to here in the United States. Maybe it is that here we associate independence with individuality, whereas in these other places there is no such association. There is so much more of a focus on community and on relationships, certainly in Nepal and Morocco, but I think even in Switzerland, as well.

This is just one of the many things that I have been meditating on as I have been making the transition back to the real world. How much independence do I want or need at this point in my life? How will I choose to assert my individuality? I can still rock out to Don't tread on me, but maybe I can learn something from the Nepalis and Moroccans--and Swiss?--too, about how to live as a part of a larger community.

Casa Voyageurs

Woke up a little before five this morning. Caught a cab to Casa Voyageurs, the main train station near downtown Casablanca. Took the train out to the airport, and a plane back up to Geneva. Tomorrow evening I'll be in Kentucky. Hard to express the levels and layers of contrast in between. More on this soon, though, inshallah. For now, here was this morning's train as it was arriving at Casa Voyageurs.

This one's for you, Kev

May 20, 2010. Moëns. That's the real deal.

Person, place, thing

This morning, now that the Kolbs have gone, I could take time to write about Genève and around, about places and things. I could focus my attention on facts and figures. On hyperlinks.

But that would miss the point, wouldn't it? Really, it's about people and relationships. About learning from one another and sharing. About conversing and lending a helping hand. That's where I'll try to focus my attention today.

By now the Kolbs, grandparents and all, are well on their way to Italy. Tomorrow, with any luck I'll be spending the night in Meknès. But for now it is simply quiet. A bright sunshiny day.

I can think back on this last week spent with the Kolbs. The beautiful singing Ruthie, the kids and I heard in John Calvin's cathedral.

The picnic lunch we all shared in a vineyard outside of Russin.

Of course, there was alone time, too. Appreciating how international of a place Geneva is. Home of the WHO, UNHCR, IFRC, etc. (The people from all over the world, speaking languages from Swahili to Vietnamese, dressed in their suites and professional-looking dresses, riding the buses into town to go to work at these places were such a stark contrast to the suped-up UN trucks I saw all over Nepal, in Kathmandu and on half-built roads in the countryside alike.)

Appreciating the Swiss sense of order on roads and hiking trails in the Jura Mountains. (Note: This is not technically an Alpine meadow.)

Simply appreciating being in a European city like Geneva, lions and all...

I've been traveling for nearly two months now. That's a while! It has given me an opportunity to think about my priorities, my values. I can get caught up in details, in information, in trivia. But really, so much of this journey has been about spending time with people: friends, new and old.

I'll fly to Morocco tomorrow afternoon, and take a train into the interior. I'll have a little over a week to eat tajines, practice my Moroccan Arabic, take in the call to prayer. (Incidentally, you can listen to the call to prayer, for example, here. And please don't misunderstand my sharing of this. I'm not Muslim or really even particularly religious. But something about hearing the call to prayer just gets me.)

And in a way I feel like this trip is coming to an end. Before I know it I'll be back home, with good people, yes. But it has been so wonderful to spend this time with my friends who are living for a time in Asia and Europe. That is something I'm truly grateful for.

A reminder that physicists are frequently furry

A few days ago the Kolb family and I visited CERN, where Jeff is currently working. An interesting note, the acronym CERN does not stand for the lab's current name, but rather for the council that originally set the lab up in 1952, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, see here. What is CERN? Well, perhaps most interestingly for most people reading this post, it is the birthplace of the World Wide Web, although of course that has essentially nothing to do with the main purpose of the lab, physics, which I'll get to in a moment. Here is a photo of the office where the web was invented.

So why does CERN exist? I suppose at the simplest level the point of the bulk of the research being done at CERN is to improve our understanding of how subatomic particles behave and interact with one another. Incidentally, this is not too dissimilar from the research I did as a graduate student. You can think of a particle accelerator like the one at CERN like a really big microscope. The reason it costs so much is that it takes a tremendous amount of energy to "see" these phenomena.

Jeff is working on the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment.  Oh, I almost forgot to say, CERN, and the Large Hadron Collider, in particular, is huge. Like 27 kilometers around huge. Here Jeff is pointing to Ornex, France, where his family lives. Note that it is within the ring of the LHC. Crazy, huh?

Anyhow, in the morning he took me over to the CMS site. Here is the control room. Very cool. A lot of CERN feels like it could be straight out of a science fiction movie.

In addition to being on call from time to time, Jeff works in here occasionally, monitoring various components of the CMS experiment.

As you might imagine, it takes quite a bit of computational power to make a machine of this scale work, let alone to crunch through all of the data that is produced. Here is one of many rooms full of computers at CERN. And by the way, a very significant portion of the data processing is actually done in other sites all over the world.

For lunch Jeff, Ruthie, their kids and I went up to one of the cafeterias at CERN. It was here, in particular, that I was pleasantly reminded of just how frequently physicists are furry. And really, whether or not an individual physicist is furry, they are certainly likely to be at least a bit eccentric, and that's wonderful.

Towards the end of my tour, we walked by a statue of a particular manifestation of Shiva, apparently a gift to CERN from the Indian government.

In a way I kind of felt like I had come full circle. There was also a quote by Fritjof Capra, author of the Tao of Physics among other books. I read this book when I was a rather young and impressionable seventeen year old. And I realize that reading it may be part of the reason why I decided to study physics and theoretical high energy physics, in particular. He painted such a beautiful picture of the world. I think in some ways, though, I think I misunderstood what he was trying to convey, and just took away a somewhat naive, if not downright crude caricature of his profound ideas. In graduate school, as I learned about the scientific method on a much deeper level, about assumptions and approximations in science, about experimental error, I became a bit jaded and came to strongly disagree with arguments such as those put forth by Capra. I found them misleading at best. But now I feel a little more relaxed about the whole thing. You could call it intellectually laziness if you like. I'd rather say I'm a bit more at peace, a bit more wise maybe even. I should be careful, though. I don't want to get ahead of myself... Regardless, it was great to visit CERN, and be reminded of all of this, in particular after just having been in the East. Way to be.

And now for something completely different

So I'm not in Nepal anymore. I arrived in Geneva, Switzerland yesterday to visit my friends Jeff and Ruthie and their kids for about a week. Here is Jeff and his beautiful 18 month old daughter, Eva, in the parking lot of the grocery store on the Swiss side of the border yesterday afternoon.

And here is Ruthie and their nearly month old son, Manny, on the walk to church this morning in old-town Geneva.

Last night after dinner we all went for a walk near Jeff and Ruthie's home. They live in Ornex, France, which is so close to the Swiss border that we actually walked right across the border through these beautiful fields on this small road yesterday evening.

Note the rockin' pack that Eva is traveling in. Well done. Happy kid.

It's very green and grey here, reminds me of home in that way. Due to the grey, though, I have yet to really see the Alps. Jeff and Ruthie tell me that on a clear day one can even see Mont Blanc from where we were standing in the above photo. Not bad. Hoping it will clear up a bit in coming days.

This morning we went to the English-speaking congregation worship service of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Geneva. It was a lot of fun to attend the service and meet some of Jeff and Ruthie's community here in Geneva. And what a diverse community it is! Literally people from all over the world: Brazil, Denmark, Namibia, and New Zealand just to name a few. For all of these people, though, English is more convenient than French for a church service. That doesn't mean by any means, though, that they speak English as their first language. When it came time in the service to say the Lord's Prayer, everyone was invited to say it in their own language. I'd guess there were probably at least 10 if not 20 languages spoken. Moreover, we sang songs from all over the world, and Africa in particular, as we were praying for Malawi and Zambia as a part of the Ecumenical Prayer Cycle, which by the way, I had never heard of before. Fascinating.

Right now Ruthie and Manny are taking an afternoon nap. Jeff and Eva are having some yogurt on the living room floor. They just finished checking out Turkey and Georgia in Jeff's world atlas. It's good to be here. My six weeks in Nepal were wonderful, and I'll have more to say about it. In a way being here feels like coming home, though. The green and grey. The Western sense of order. One chapter ends and another beings.

To the Kingdom of Bahrain and beyond!

This is a photo I took in the Bahrain airport six weeks ago, when I was on my way to Nepal. Note the sign indicating the mens and ladies prayer rooms. Wow. That was different. Call to prayer in the airport and the whole bit.

It's crazy to me that it has already been six weeks since I arrived in Nepal. It's Wednesday morning now. Today is my last day in Hetauda. It has been a wonderful visit. I still have lots of stories to tell and photos to share. Today, though, I'm starting to think about my journey west.

My travels will begin at 7:00 tomorrow morning when a Tata Sumo comes to pick me up near Tiffany's dhera (that's Nepali for apartment). We'll drive north towards Kathmandu. The journey takes about four and a half hours. It can roughly be broken into thirds. The first and final thirds are paved. The middle third is not. We will go over two ranges of hills. Somewhere in the middle we'll stop for khaja (that's Nepali for snacks). The food in Nepal is very good. Even stopping for khaja in a little hamlet on the side of a dirt road in the middle of nowhere is a treat. Likely I'll have something similar to the curried potatoes I had on a similar stop a few weeks ago. Mmmm...

By the way, here is a pic of one of these infamous Tata Sumos, as well as one of the little roadside inns where we had our khaja on a previous trip.

And then it will be one final round of Kathmandu before... Bahrain for a few hours. And then Jeff, Ruthie, and family, Geneva, Switzerland, France, CERN, and if I'm lucky... fondue!

And so it begins, as all blogs must...

Over the course of the last few years, I've actively talked myself out of starting a blog a number of times. Although having a blog sounded like fun, who would read it? And perhaps more importantly, what would I say?

But I suppose things have changed. I'm off to travel the world, and it just seems the most appropriate means to share my travels with friends and family. So here you have it.

Tomorrow I fly to Kathmandu, Nepal, where I will be meeting up with my good friend who is currently volunteering there. I'll be in Nepal for six weeks, and during that time my friend and I will go trekking in the Langtang Valley north of Kathmandu, I will climb Island Peak in the Khumbu (Everest) region, and we'll hang out some in and around Hetauda where she is based. Needless to say, I'm stoked!

And from there I'll be off to Switzerland... and Morocco. But more on that later. Don't want to get ahead of myself.