Honeymoon in the Maldives!!!

Honeymoon!

Finally, almost one year after our wedding, we could go on our honeymoon! Since we were invited to Chanuka and Danushka's wedding in Sri Lanka, we first went there to attend the wedding ceremony and the home coming party which both took place in Kurunegala. We also spent several days in Colombo doing shopping and visiting friends. After a busy week in Sri Lanka we left for the Maldives on the island Kurumba. Having seen the pictures on the web I expected a really nice and wonderful place, but after having spent a week at the resort I realized that the superlatives were not enough to describe the reality! The beauty and perfectness of the island were perfectly matched by the incredibly helpful and super friendly staff. This added a dimension to the experience that I had not even thought about. Besides the obvious tanning at the beach and swimming in the warm and shallow lagoon (together with shy small reef sharks!), we also played table tennis and worked out in the gym, kayaked around the island, drank exotic drinks (pina coladas, daiquiry's, ..) and ate a lot of good food from some of the nine restaurants, visited a fishers' village and an inhabited island, went snorkling and scuba diving and saw a lot of fish (moray eel's, sharks, turtles, and thousands of reef fish), took a tour with a glass boat, went to a presentation about the Maldives, made new friends, etc etc.. The last night we visited the capital Male, a quite small city with not much to see or do. It was hard to go back home, not only to leave this tropical paradise but also since the actual trip home took 32 hours.. A link to some of the thousand pictures we took will come soon...

Panda!

Well, well.. Finally I got a permanent position! My desire was to remain at CERN and still get a good position. I really like this region and the work done here, but it has turned out to be quite difficult. Since last summer, I've not had a steady income which is rather hard since the Geneva-area is among the most expensive on the planet! But finally my persistance paid off when I found a position that seemed really interesting. I applied and eventually got it. The position is with the University of Texas at Arlington, USA, to mainly work on the Panda project, which is one of the LHC grid projects for the ATLAS experiment. I will continue working with distributed computing which is a field that is urgently needed in high energy physics and is under heavy development. Hopefully, and if there is time for it, I will also do Supersymmetry research. In the meantime, Maria Lucia will get her Swiss work permit on May 1, to work with ethical education for children with the Arigatou Foundation in Geneva. We will both start working on the same day. Next up is a trip to the good old US of A to arrange the bureaucracy of the position.