Tag Archives: france

Hi folks!

How time flies?

We’re nearing the end of the first half of 2018 already (which will end, like every other year, with our company’s mega b–day bash). Just about six weeks left – and just a few more business trips – and that will be it: time for downing tools and having some well-earned rest and relaxation.

Well here I am on one of the above-mentioned business trips – in sunny Paris. Can’t complain, generally, of course. Paris is Paris, after all. But I can complain that it’s 95% business on this trip: just a few hours left for some sightseeing. Oh well, at least we were installed right in the center of the capital, which meant only one thing, in my book: a trip to my fave Paris museum – in the Pompidou Centre.

Coming to this place is always such a pleasure. I’ve been several times since my first visit in the early 2000s, and am never let down. This time though, I have to say, the exhibitions weren’t quite up to their usual high standard; at least that’s how it seemed to me. But that’s only subjective: I was on a roll of negativity, which started back in Morocco ). I’m sure objectively [sic], all was merveilleux.

Read on…

En route from Jersey to Paris, there was simply no way we could have missed Mont Saint-Michel, the fortified island town – actually, island ‘commune’ – a kilometer out to sea off the Normandy coast. I’ll let the pics make the introductions:

Bonjour folks!

Onward we march sail…

We were up very early and headed for the Jersey-St-Malo ferry. The plan was to get a rental car and drive down to Paris, taking the scenic route through Normandy and Brittany. That was the plan, anyway…

The shortest route from Geneva to Milan is through the Mont Blanc Tunnel. I’d long heard about this route, and now I’ve finally had the chance to drive it for myself. And I can report the route’s a nice one. Not very long (only ~320 km), and very picturesque in the French part.

Read on: Mont Blanc in all its glory…

Haven’t been posting here for a while. The reason being that last week turned out to be horrendously hectic – without a single minute to spare for putting fingers to keyboard. Now for a bit of catch-up…

From last Monday to Saturday I managed to visit four countries on three continents: Gabon, Israel, France and Monaco. To do so six flights were necessary – on average one per day. Now, I’m no stranger to tight-schedulism, but last week was just daft: such all-out non-stopism is just too much for the body and soul. It took me the whole of the weekend after to get back to normal again.

All the same, though there wasn’t time for writing – there’s always time for snapping. Herewith, then, a quick photo-textual report of my very own international Grand Prix last week, split up into the four respective ‘laps’…

Read on: First stop – Gabon…

First, a brief summary of the previous two parts…

On the Swiss-French border, near Geneva, there’s a place called CERN. Within its various buildings, modern-day alchemists scientists conCERN themselves with the fundamental structure of the universe. They disperse protons and other particles at near light speed and have them smash against one another, which creates various kinds of quark-gluon plasma and other mysterious physical phenomena. Then they apply titanic brainpower (math, physics, nuclear physics, quantum mechanics… all that), engineering capacity, and computing power to track the results of collisions of these fundamental particles.

We were there the other week and given a good long guided tour. Took lots of pics too…

The first accelerator we saw is called LEIR (the Low Energy Ion Ring). In it, lead ions are pooled. First the ions come from the LINAC-3 linear accelerator to LEIR, then they pass through to a PS ring, and then into a complex of big hoops, including the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Read on: who does what at CERN…

Bonjour mes amis!

All righty. You’ve had the soup for starters; now let’s move on to the main course…, rather, into the main course – i.e., inside the proverbial pie served up as main course, and check out the filling – the proverbial steak and kidney, as it were… (but I digest).

Put simpler – let’s find out what goes on within the walls of these plain buildings on the Swiss-French border where nuclear-physicists study the very nature of… nature – at it’s very deepest level.

Read on: So what happens inside the Large Hadron Collider?…

It’s not just the biggest, it’s also the most expensive, most innovative device in the world. Naturally, that means it’s highly computerized. I wonder what AV it’s got :).

What we’ve got here is a modern-day wonder. Research at the cutting edge of both theoretical and practical knowledge into particle physics –  the study of what makes up matter. Other groundbreaking stuff has been going on here since the 1950s too, including the small matter of, in 1989, the invention of… the World Wide Web!

Yes folks, this is CERN. An international team that prods the microcosmic world with various kinds of prodders to try and learn what’s going on down there. Here they make particles ‘collide’ at the speed of light to find out how they interact and to get clues to the fundamental laws of nature. Pretty cool, no?

Read on: unassuming contraption winning the Nobel prize…

Next stop – France.

Here we were celebrating the 10^th b-day of the KL France office. The goings-on deserve a post of their own really. For now though, it’s down the Champs-Élysées and onwards for some speedy surveying of the familiar spectacular Parisian places of interest I never tire of checking out…

Read on: My top-three fave places in Paris…

A little while back we had the General Secretary of Interpol, Ronald Noble, visit us in Moscow. He really is quite a guy. He’s been awarded the French Legion of Honor, is a professor of the New York University School of Law, and – surprise, surprise! – is an honorary professor of the Urals State Legal Academy (if you believe the Russian Wikipedia page on him:). Anyway, it’s now my turn to pay him a combined business and social call…

Lyon in France houses the head office of Interpol. When I asked “Can I take photographs?”, I was delighted by the answer, “whatever and wherever you like”.

More: So I took some photographs…