Bern, Pizza, and Nicotine

Last Saturday, some other interns (who work at the World Health Organization in Geneva) and I went to visit Bern, the capital of Switzerland. We took the train there and explored the Parliament buildings (see the photo on the right), some outdoor markets, the Münester cathedral, and the River Aare(the photo below). The cathedral was awesome because after a dizzying climb up a 254 step spiral staircase, there were amazing views overlooking the city!


We also saw the famous Bern fountains, like the one below. It's called the "Kindlifresserbrunnen," and it depicts an ogre eating young children.








From Bern, we took another train to visit a cheese factory in the Emmental region of Switzerland (see the photo below). (Emmental cheese is what we call "Swiss cheese" back in the States.) The cheese samples were tasty, and the surrounding scenery (with rolling hills, flowers, and farms) was absolutely beautiful.



As far as everything else has been going, I've been trying to work on my French around the house and at work, and I've been learning lots of new words and phrases that are used in conversation. It's also been cool to learn about pop culture by listening to music or watching movies with my housemates. Speaking of my housemates, they're a lot of fun! Below is a photo I took at last week's International Pizza party to celebrate the end of the school year. (Everyone made sure that I was sitting near the American flag.) Then for dinner tonight, one of my friends here made a "traditional dinner" from the south of France consisting of a lot of colorful vegetables and finished off with chocolate cake! It was great!

This week at work, I've been helping a bit with the Neglect study, running "my own" nicotine study with healthy volunteers (including myself), and trying to learn more about the computer program that I'll need to use to analyze the nicotine results. For our study, participants have had to wear nicotine and placebo patches before completing the fMRI scan, and so, by the end of the week, I'll have worn a nicotine patch for one of the days. (I just can't know until later what day that was.) On Friday, I'm off to Milan for the 19th Meeting of the European Neurological Society for five days. When I return, I'll be attending another conference in Geneva on Emotions, Stress, and Aging for two days, and after that, it's back to work at the lab.

Hopefully the next post will be full of fascinating science and some lovely photos of Milan!