You Go Nate!

From The Jura

FOUX DU FA FA

We went to Turin on Monday (the 5th), and for days that followed we enjoyed hanging around Joseph's parents' house playing games, watching movies, and eating good food.

One day we went Le bowling. I lost twice.



The parents of both Joseph and Emily live near the town of Ferney-Voltaire, named after the famous 18th century philosopher who lived in the town for many years towards the end of his life. Here is his statue...

And we even drove by his house, though it is still lived in today by his descendants and unavailable for public visits.




He even had his own chapel...




We were are also right next to the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN. This is one of the most important and famous science laboratories in all the world.




CERN is best known for the Large Hadron Collider that sits in a radius 100 meters below the ground. Scientist use this particle accelerator to recreate forces that the Universe hasn't seen since the time of the Big Bang. This helps them shed light on some of the biggest mysteries of the UNIVERSE Universe universe universe...

We were actually staying directly within the circumference of the particle accelerator. Thus if the scientists had inadvertently created a black hole or something, we would be the first to know about it.

Also in the area is the house where Joseph and his family lived for a few years growing up...



What's special about this house is that their landlord at the time, the owner of the house, was Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee was working at CERN in 1990 when he implemented the first successful communication between an HTTP client and a server via the internet. He was also renting this house to Joseph's family. Joseph's dad said he was a nice guy.

One night Emily's mom prepared a regional French specialty for us: raclette.

Necessary to this dish was a special electric skillet that is placed on center of the table. One then cooks thinly sliced beef or pork on the skillet while putting the raclette cheese in a special spatula that is then placed in a little space inside the skillet where the cheese melts...




Once the cheese melts and the meat is cooked one spreads it all over a small baked potato...



It was super.


It had been quite cloudy and foggy all week in the are around the house. One evening, however, Joseph and I took a drive into the Jura mountains not far from the house. We came up above the fog to a beautiful and clear scene.

We parked near a small ski resort and a wintry chalêt...





It was really cold...











From atop the Jura we could see Mont Blanc in the distance...




As the sun started to set, the fog came quickly up to cover the mountains once again...

All the days kind of ran together. One night Emily's dad took the boys out to see the new Bond film in Geneva. At some point Joseph had a birthday but it seems like we celebrated it two or three times. No complaints here!

l-r: Emily's mom, Jordan, Megan, Emily, Joseph, Joseph's mom

It was a lot of fun relaxing with friends in France. We had one more day-trip before heading back home to Munich. But that story will have to wait until next time...

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