The hottest day of the trip

So another 3 days has passed apparently. Let me start out with CERN, because that has been the highlight of my trip so far. The previous events of the day don't really matter except we met up with Justin and Alyssia Harding and started wandering to CERN. Anyhow CERN was awosome, nuf said. Lots of nerdy stuff there, we got some pictures of Fortran code used in the 80's version of their particle accelratiors and noticed that it had the concept of tupples, go figure. We also learned a bit about the LHC and why it was there. Sadly we couldn't see it and I wasn't able to bring Jessy back a Hadron. I also ran into this really cool Canadian couple, the girl just finished up a BI major and was applying for a BI job. We had a nice little chat about BI. Our conversation was cut short by the fact that they had a 3 hour tour of the place (lucky bums, we tired to reserve a spot, but it they were booked the day we wanted to go). We then went back to Geneva (CERN is outside of Geneva by about a half hour) and realized we had burned the entire day. We only had time for one other major tourist thing so we went to the WTO. Its normally not even open to the public but Gretchen was amazing and gave us a private tour. It was really interesting seeing the place where the diplomats work. Its really just a bunch of meeting rooms. Its an interesting contrast to a tech companies work space where they have lots of semi-private spaces set up for us. Their IT infrastructure was also a bit dated. They were still running windows XP from the looks of it. One final observation was that computers in general were deemphasized, everyone that worked there had a large desk, and a small computer.

From there we went and had another college student dinner at a super market and went with Justin and Alyssa when they checked into their hostel. To our present surprise we ran into the Canadian couple again. We had a nice talk and decided to take them up on their offer of beer and fooseball in the hostels rec room. The rec room btw also happened to be a bomb shelter. Turns out that all private swiss houses need to have a fully stalked bomb shelter in them. Crazy country, lots of good people in it. Sadly we had to cut out fooseball game short as we decided to take a night train to Venice, we should have stayed and played fooseball for a little longer.

The train was dodgy to say the least. We got on, and couldn't figure out how to pull down the beds. It took like 10 minutes. Once we got that figured out the conductor came by and took our eurorail passes, tickets and passports. He had a whole handful of other passports as well so we weren't to scared, but it was still really sketch. Then came the sleeping. We were sharing a 6 bed car with a Canadian couple and a Frenchman who arrived much later. The beds were stacked 3 high to a max hight of about 10 feet. The beds themselves were only about 3 feet wide by 6 feet long, not good for me. Lars got the middle bunk and Jeff and I got the two high bunks. I just stayed up reading for a while because I was nearly done with my book. In the mean time the Canadian couple decided to connodle on the bottom bunks, which really wasn't a problem, but kind of funny nonetheless.

When it finally came time to sleep I realized just was we had gotten ourselves into. 6 people in a car with about 20 square feet of space gets really hot really fast. We also couldn't figure out the AC system. Jeff and I were sleeping in a toaster oven that was about 95 degrees. Lars snoozed happy below us. We got about 2 hours of sleep that night.

We arrived in Venice, at around 8 am tired and confused. A great condition to be in when you need to navigate a city with no street signs. I navigated us around for a bit trying to find the hostel, but couldn't do it in my sleep deprived state. I passed the job off to Lars, who while being much more awake than us also doesn't mind yelling stuff in English to people and getting points in return. I dislike taking that approach myself, but it gets the job done and we get where we need to go.

After about a half hour of wandering we finally got to the place where our hostel was at. However even though the door labels matched up it looked just like a person house, complete with someones name on the door. We were so confused we asked a guy getting in a boat right next to us if it was the right place, he pointed and said yep. With that we buzzed up. Nothing happened for about 30 seconds. Then a skinny 20 something year old half naked guy popped his head out of an upstairs window and bellowed “hello”. We said hi back and he asked us if we had reservations. We said yah and he told us we would be right down. 2 minutes later a fully dressed Argentinean man with long hair and a hungover look about him opened the door for us. We walked into what looked like a rubbish pit of things the hostel (which still looked just like a house) didn't want to keep, but didn't want to throw away. Upstairs things didn't get much better, there were a few big rooms where people could sleep, but no locks on anything and no Internet.

Lucas (the hostel owner) told us we could leave our stuff in his kitchen and check in at 1:00. Great...
Oh I forgot to mention we payed 35 euro a night for the privilege to stay in this place. Anyhow we wandered the streets of Venice, I was tired and cranky. Lars just gocked at everything and said the entire place was amazing and Jeff was quiet, like normal :)

We got to Plazza San Marco and thats when I first realized I hate Italian tourist areas. Lars and Jeff wandered around for a bit, but I couldn't get out of there fast enough. At that point I realized the entire city was a giant tourist trap, originally designed as an actual liveable city, but re-purposed as a tool to separate tourists from their money. I really didn't like Venice, the only cool part of our two days there was when we wandered through the actual residential district and found the University of Venice. I'm realizing more and more that the thing I love about traveling isn't seeing the tourist sites, which is only allright, but really seeing how other people live. I can't stand stopping for pictures every 30 seconds. I figure shoot one of two shots of a place and move on. I'd much rather have a chat with a local or another tourist rather than seeing a site.

There really isn't much to report about Venice, we were unprepared for going there and had no idea what to see.

I did go out that night but it uneventful other than fact that two of the girls I went out with were really boring British girls who went to Oxford. It was kind of funny though, they loved Twilight, but had no idea Forks was a real city. They were impressed when I told them I had been there. We were joined by an Aussie girl in her late 20's who was working in the British museum, she was really cool, lots of interesting stories, and a Brazilian girl who kept fairly quiet.

Anyhow, Venice in a nutshell. I wish I had been a bit more awake and less grumpy and enjoyed it more, but as it stands its my least favourite city on the trip.