Fish poo and cat wee

Monday, I gave a seminar in Lausanne, at the N. Research Center. I stayed two days at the Center, measuring and discussing (scientifically) with people. Drinking free coffee too. Caesar said that you should give bad food to soldiers in order to keep them grumpy so that they will fight better. The opposite works for scientists: the better the food, the more motivated they are to take coffee/lunch breaks. Since the best scientific ideas come up during coffee breaks,  it is clear why N. offers good coffee to its scientists... maybe I should discuss Caesar at our department in Delft.

I travelled from Delft to Lausanne by train, not willing to take the plane with my suspect samples: one of mud, one with salt, one with (weak) acid. Buying tickets is a whole story in itself, it took me 2 hours to get them and I had to go to The Hague previous Thursday for them! But in the end I enjoyed travelling first class (I get refund for the tickets of course!), which means: quite good service on the Thalys (train from Rotterdam to Paris). There, there were train-attendants who tried to stuff me with cakes, cookies and black liquid that they called koffie (before Bruxelles) or café (after Bruxelles) but neither of these terms really corresponded to the definitions I have of this product. There is also a wall socket in first class Thalys, which is really handy to plug in your laptop. I could use the time running some programs and finishing my seminar slides.

From Gare du Nord to Gare de Lyon there is a direct RER (subway). The only snag is getting into the subway with a suitcase and a backpack. The best is to push the suitcase as fast as possible through the open jaws of the portillon (ticket gate), praying that the jaws will not close on the backpack. It really looks stupid when it does. I have seen it many times, and the only person not to appreciate this joke is the backpack carrier. In the TGV, from Paris to Lausanne, I had a grumpy-looking middle-aged lady in front of me. She was grumpy because she was French. She was French because the first thing she did was to complain about food to me: "There is NO voiture-restaurant onboard this train?".  She phoned several times: first to her husband then to her children, and her first question to them was always "What did you eat?" (I guess it helped her to get over her (hun/an)gry feeling a bit). The explanations of their menus lasted for some time, and I got several cooking tips like (to her husband) "you should not have removed the aluminium foil from the gratin before putting it in the oven, the heat is not well spread if you do." And to her daughter "Yes, I would do a crème anglaise with the cake, that is always a good combination".

At Lausanne, I still had to take a taxi to a hotel close to the Research Center, which is located in a village strangely called "Vers-chez-les-Blanc" (Swiss names are funny, I already noticed when I worked in Geneva). My friend at N. told me she had a student once who wrote a report in English by pasting his French version of the report into an online-translator. She noticed when on the first page of the report she found the address of the Center to be "Towards-at-the-White". The whole report is still considered as a cure for bad days at her department, and people read it when they need to cheer up.

I was quite happy that I had many interresting questions after my talk, and nice discussions afterwards. One of these discussions was with a guy who works on how fast cat-urine volatilizes from cat-litter... I had to laugh and told him that since I work on how fast mud aggregates thanks to fish-poo, we had something in common...