What I Did On My Holidays

I feel like this may be a post that ends up being like one of those “essays” that teachers set you as a primary school kid after the summer holidays, so you’ll see me throw in some large adjectives just to try and prove I’ve matured a little (I haven’t).

In my last post, I mentioned that I was off to Switzerland and Italy. I actually travelled to Switzerland as the last school trip I will ever go on (as I have ‘graduated’ from secondary school) to visit CERN, home of the hadron collider which recently discovered the Higg’s Boson. (For anyone mildly interested: The Higg’s Boson is a particle which effectively gives any particle it’s mass by acting as an exchange between it and an- essentially sticky- field which exists across the universe. Hence different particles interact with this field differently, meaning their masses are different. Very vague physics lesson over. Sorry! Couldn’t resist.)

Don’t get me wrong when I say this, I enjoyed visiting CERN, but it was as expected in terms of tourists and how I thought it was going to be. It was sort of like visiting a science museum, because although we were allowed into some of the main areas, because of the sheer amount of visitors they must have regularly, a lot of it was cordoned off. We were assigned a tour guide who explained the principles to us (unfortunately, he was too quiet for us to hear from the back of our group) and talked to about some of the other projects going on at CERN as well. It was interesting, but I can’t say I found it awe-inspiring except in the sense that you knew of the depth of work that was going on just around the corner in terms of particle physics and so on.

What I was pretty taken aback with was the United Nations. We had a tour, and I felt like the tour guide’s brain was pulsing it was runnning so fast. He gave us a lot of really interesting information, and was really passionate about the way he talked about the running of the UN and what they stand for. It was amazing to hear, and the place has some astonishing artwork feats as well. So if you’re ever in Geneva, Switzerland; I would pop by.

Now we move across to Italy for a bit. We have friends who live out in Napoli, which is hence why we (my family and I) thought to pay a visit. It is a fantastical city- very beautiful. In England, I live thereabouts in the midlands, so to wake up to the sound of the sea and to look across into this blue abyss was wonderful. I can still hear it now. We had booked into a B&B which turned out to be several rooms of a grand old house that we could have free run of, shared with the owner and her maid who spoke barely any English (and we, no italian). Nonetheless, we still managed to have an hour long conversation to them about everyone’s lives by waving our arms and me speaking utterly terrible spanish to the maid (who obviously spoke spanish as well as italian- she was Columbian actually and had spent near 25 years working in that house). There was something of a story in the place.

I’ll spare you too many details of what we did. It was very much exploring and eating and sitting by the sea. All of the food was fresh, particularly the fish and I adore fish. I took the opportunity to get fresh swordfish and it was amazing, of course. We drove up to the Amalfi coast and Vesuvius and saw the remains of some of the people who died due to the volcano’s eruption- which was chilling as you’d imagine. Knowing that it’s still an active volcano and one day, it will go off, and destroy all of the towns which are currently making home there is a pretty towering thought. But, the whole trip was a massive adventure.

I will continue to put up more photographs on flickr (and tumblr if you prefer). I have one last holiday to experience before work begins again. I’m heading off to Wales for 10 days toward the end of this month with my avengers (my friends) who will attempt to force me to go wake boarding and do various other aquatic activities in a freezing cold sea. My next blog post is probably going to be on creativity (just for some foresight).