Moon suits
So apparently the Italian bureaucracy thinks that any foreigner who wants to stay here for a significant period of time needs not only a visa, but a 'permesso di soggiorno' which you have to get from the police. Which requires, in order to get an appointment to see the police, filling out and sending in many many pages of forms. Which are available only in Italian.
Great plan, guys. I mean, I can cognate my way through things like 'cognome', 'provincia di domicilio', even 'Riportare il dato come scritto sui passaporto o documento equipoliente'... but when I'm told to mark the appropriate entry of a list like "Richiede il: -rilascio -rinnovo -aggiornamento -duplicato -conversione", there are only two words there for which I can make a reasonable guess, and I'm pretty sure neither is the one I need.
I got a tour of the lab today. It's kind of crazy; you're driving along the highway in one of the interminable tunnels that cut through the mountains, and just turn off and drive even farther into the rock through huge metal doors that look like something out of a scifi movie. I even got to go in the clean room that's used to assemble the detector arrays; see title.
Apparently my shifting job largely consists of hauling a tank of liquid helium halfway across the lab every two days to replenish what's evaporated out of the cryostat - time-consuming, but not difficult. The rest is monitoring the data as it's taken, just in case there are any problems or anomalies. I don't start until Thursday, anyway.
There's another girl here for whom English is her - well, actually, still second language, I guess, as I gather she's québécois, but she's fluent and accent-free. Also rather nuttily energetic, but hey, if that means she wants to take the initiative on arranging weekend trips to places like Rome and Florence I'm all for it.
Elena will probably be by to grab me for dinner soon (restaurants here don't start serving until 7:30 - freakin' Europeans), so I guess I'll wrap it up here. One more thing, though. Nick, you will probably appreciate that Elena's rental car is a Fiat Panda.
Great plan, guys. I mean, I can cognate my way through things like 'cognome', 'provincia di domicilio', even 'Riportare il dato come scritto sui passaporto o documento equipoliente'... but when I'm told to mark the appropriate entry of a list like "Richiede il: -rilascio -rinnovo -aggiornamento -duplicato -conversione", there are only two words there for which I can make a reasonable guess, and I'm pretty sure neither is the one I need.
I got a tour of the lab today. It's kind of crazy; you're driving along the highway in one of the interminable tunnels that cut through the mountains, and just turn off and drive even farther into the rock through huge metal doors that look like something out of a scifi movie. I even got to go in the clean room that's used to assemble the detector arrays; see title.
Apparently my shifting job largely consists of hauling a tank of liquid helium halfway across the lab every two days to replenish what's evaporated out of the cryostat - time-consuming, but not difficult. The rest is monitoring the data as it's taken, just in case there are any problems or anomalies. I don't start until Thursday, anyway.
There's another girl here for whom English is her - well, actually, still second language, I guess, as I gather she's québécois, but she's fluent and accent-free. Also rather nuttily energetic, but hey, if that means she wants to take the initiative on arranging weekend trips to places like Rome and Florence I'm all for it.
Elena will probably be by to grab me for dinner soon (restaurants here don't start serving until 7:30 - freakin' Europeans), so I guess I'll wrap it up here. One more thing, though. Nick, you will probably appreciate that Elena's rental car is a Fiat Panda.