Blog Ani i Radka
Bastille Day (14 July) is widely celebrated in whole France. In fact, every little village has its own concerts, celebrations and of course – fireworks. We went to Ferney Voltaire to be a part of it. At Château de Voltaire celebrations were at its best. At 22.30 (I was surprised by the punctuality) fireworks accompanied by classical music started. That was a real treat. We watched them from the castle’s garden hill, they looked stunning.
This week we have guests – Radek’s brother and his friend are visiting us. So for the weekend we set out to Annecy, a lovely village close to Geneva. There was Les Noctibules festival ongoing, although to be frank, we didn’t benefit at all from that, because we didn’s stay long enough to go and see the concerts.
Our first destination was Annecy beach. The place is situated on the shore of the Annecy lake, so with the recent heat waves we had to take advantage of that and refresh ourselves in a chilly water. We also passed by the Annecy cathedral where we parked our car, went pastAnnecy chateau and had a look over small but lovely marina.
Properly chilled by the water we went on to see the old town of Annecy. Narrow allays, colorful buildings, blooming bridges – that’s the spirit of Annecy. The town is well known for its beauty and many people choose to live there over Geneva. We strolled a bit through the lovely passages, grabbed an ice cream and moved on to the promanade – yet another treat for tourists.
The promanade is situated along Lac Annecy shore and is simply beautiful. One can stroll slowly admiring the lake and water leisure activities with a perfect surrounding of mountains. The place is always full of life, winter or summer, and never stops to amaze.
We continued on down the promenade, to the less touristic place of Annecy and headed back to our car. It was still early so Radek decided to take our guests to Le Reculet (see another post).
This is going to be a long post…
We set out for a walk in dendrological garden in Przelewice, very close to Szczecin. I always wanted to go there but never have had a chance so far – it’s a shame not to see places like that when they are only a few kilometers away from your city. Since I’m having some back aches and need to recover after surgery, walks are expedient and so – off we went.
What can I say about the place? 45 ha of terrain with a prominent garden and a newly restored residence, surrounded by ~1200 species of plants.
We started our stroll from a less populated route by turning into polish trees alley which led us to Three Ponds area. The walk was very relaxing since we were walking in a soothing shade of the trees and we were the only visitors on that path. The view was not spectacular (in the end – we are all used to the image of the polish trees) until we reached the ponds.
The ponds were lovely, with all the shades of green one could imagine. I particularly liked a zigzag footbridge that wobbled riskily under our steps. Well, no risk, no fun – if it hadn’t been for the footbridge Radek wouldn’t have made a fantastic frog shot (yet more shades of green to experience). After spending a while next to the water we moved along and followed the path that led us to a central meadow and pond. And that was really awesome. I don’t know if the garden is designed in such a way that the flowers are in full bloom all the time, but they all were that day. Lovely.
We remembered not to feed the swan although it acted like it hadn’t known the rule, leaning out towards us, counting for a piece of bread. When I thought it would be the end of a representative part of the garden, we went round the pond and it turned out it was even prettier at the other side of the water.
By that time we ran out of water and got pretty tired, so we went by the residence to have some juice and ice cream. I enjoyed the time, resting after a longer walk, so in the end they needed to rush me a bit to get up. As I did, we moved to an orangery but we hurried up a bit when inside… The temperature that day was somewhere around 33 dg. Celsius and it was way hotter and stuffier than that in the greenhouse. Imagine yourself… We finished our tour passing by the remnants of a former folwark (agricultural enterprise) with an old creamery, barns, distillery, granary and a couple of more – now shabby but still showing a spark of its former magnitude – buildings.
It’s not that often when world wide stars visit Szczecin to give concerts, so whenever it occurs, we try to participate because it seems like a big deal for our city. This time it was Sinéad O’Connor who is a brilliant singer to me. I love her songs but most of all, I love her voice.
Here is my favourite song of her (it’s a pity she didn’t perform it) and a couple of photos from the concert:
I dedicate this poem to Radek, it pictures our today’s activity pretty accurately, as we went to see a rose garden very close to our apartment in Szczecin. The weather was perfect and the sun falling on the petals made the colours vivid and beautiful. It feels like first days of summer in Poland.
The garden seemed not yet in its full bloom, nevertheless, it was very pretty. Roses are indeed royal species, it’s no wonder that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry chose this particular flower to be the love of le Petit Prince.
We strolled around the garden (it’s not particularly big), sat down on the bench, enjoyed the sun, smell and colours and had a look on a small posters’ display arranged in the park. There will be a French music concert here later this week, perhaps we will come again if time permits.
Today we went for an absolutely awesome visit of CMS detector of Large Hadron Collider. But before I start with the description and pictures, a short YouTube video in order for you to understand the title of this post.
I love this video, it’s funny and it conveys surprisingly a lot of science knowledge going on in LHC.
So back to our visit – CERN is a place where the scientists from all over the world look for the principle of our world. But that’s not the only thing in CERN’s strategy. They also try and spread the knowledge about physics, educate people etc. That is why they organize free trips, exhibitions, lectures etc. I really appreciate that and we could benefit from that not for the first time.
We enrolled for a visit to CMS – one of four detectors in LHC. When I was at CERN 3 years earlier it was impossible to visit the cavern because the beam was in and detectors were closed for public. This time, with long shutdown and maintenance phase, going to a detector was first thing we thought of.
Our visit started with SM18, a place where the magnets and other elements for LHC are assembled.
For me it was a very interesting tour because the guide explained everything we saw and added some interesting stories on top. i was aware of some facts, but more or less half was new to me so I was pretty content to have that tour.
Then we went on a shuttle and drove to Cessy, a small French village where CMS detector was build only 15 years ago. It really makes me breathless to think that all of that was constructed only within 15 years. They started with a flat ground, dug a shaft of 100 m. underground, build the whole infrastructure around and constructed the detector which, for me, is like a masterpiece of science. Seriously, when I saw this I was simply awestruck. It’s so enormous and complicated and makes you respect collaborative work because such things can only happen when people unite and act together in one cause.
How cool is that?
It takes a lot of champagne to celebrate all the days of success of LHC/CMS.
And at the end check out our short movie from the visit to the cavern:
Finally, clouds that had been covering the Geneva sky decided to give us a break and unveil the sun. Therefore we took the occasion and went out for a walk down the neighbouring vineyards. We started off from Challex, a quaint village on the French side. There is really something charming about those lovely little dots on a map, life seems so peaceful there, everything is neat and tidy and there are tiny offerings at every corner. What do I mean by offerings? Things that you watch with pleasure, that sometimes trigger your thoughts on different subjects like history, human mankind, even our lives. Such things make you stop for a while and absorb the beauty of being. Ok, maybe that description is a bit flamboyant, I admit, but if you once see those petits villages you will understand what I mean.
We found ourselves almost immediately on the vineyard trail and we made our way to Dardagny – a Suiss village of wine makers. The grapevine we passed by were not yet in full gloom, well, not even in partial gloom, I would say – they were just waking up from winter. I guess these hills must look spectacular in summer, we will definitely visit the place again when they start to flourish.
From Dardagny we followed the trail back to Challex. It was even more spectacular and, as the sun went higher, hotter than our first part of the trip. First we passed by the village, watching the wine-vaults, stopping by a chateau and admiring the flowery mansions scattered all over the place. Then we turned right, off the beaten track, through yellow fields and vineyards again. When we reached Challex I was already pretty tired, not used to the sun and a bit rusty in joints after winter, so we went back to Saint Genis for lunch.
The weather was awful today, so when in the evening the sun pushed its way through the clouds, we went for a short walk in Saint Genis. You can’t imagine our astonishment when it turned out that just a few meters away from our doorway we had camels, donkey, horses, lamas and various other creatures that came here with the circus. We could actually touch them, though they didn’t reciprocate our interest and were utterly involved in nibbling at grass. Anyway, for me – a city dude, as well as animal fan – such proximity of oriental creatures was awesome.
The weather is not very favorable for me during my stay at Radek’s. Today was more or less the first day with the sun shine long enough to actually get out somewhere further, so we set off to Geneva for a walk. The city itself is not new to us, but you can always discover something unexpected in large places like that.
We started from the old city of Geneva, with its St. Pierre cathedral. We also strolled through the narrow, cobble-stoned allays and enjoyed the first breath of summer.
Well isn’t he cute? Tripod does what cats like most – taking a nap.
