Date: Sun, 9 Mar 1997 13:01:05 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Been a while...


Sorry I have been chronicle negligent lately but between my recent
increased output of personal mail and a huge pile of other things I
haven't had the time to write a serious chronicle and I figured if it
wasn't going to be serious, I just shouldn't bother - if it's worth doing,
do it right.

I have so many things to do I have even made a list.  In fact, I have two
very long lists of things to do: the list of things I am supposed to be
doing and the list of things I want to do.  These lists seem to be
mutually exclusive, which is not suprising when one considers that
anything that is on both lists gets done pretty quickly.  Yesterday I
managed to cross off "buy cheezies" [I bought the last bag :(] and "buy
sequel to book".  I'll let you guess which list those items were on :)

Before I get into what's new and (not) exciting over here, I have a few
tidbits of recent (to me anyway) info on the home front to share.  Keith
Loh and John(ny) Pyper have both (independently) become land Barons.
Keith, along with his brother, has purchased a townhouse near the
Metrotown skytrain station and Johnny has bought a three bedroom townhouse
in Surrey.  [If you know anyone with money and an amiable personality who
is looking for a place to rent give them Johnny's number.]  Also, Mr. &
Mrs. Linn have entered the online age (as those of you paying attention
would have noticed from the header).  Welcome aboard!  Also, my Father has
managed to meet his New Year's resolution (some time agon now) to lose 20%
of his weight, and has even managed to recover after his slight setback
during his vacation in Mexico.  Onto business.

So, the last time I wrote anything informative was before I left for
Frascati way back on Feb. 18th. So we'll start with my trip to Frascati.

Well the trip down was relatively uneventful: your standard 10 hour train
ride.  Fortunately I was selected to take the train because the two people
that were driving with all the equipment got held up at customs for 5
hours and then we still had to take the stuff to the customs office on
Rome the next day.  And what did I have for dinner the first night I was
back in Italy?  Pizza of course.

After a bit of paperwork, we managed to get our rooms in the guest house.
It turned out I was sharing my room with a Russian theorist.  For the 3
nights I was in that room I think we were only both there and awake at the
same time once, so it was no big deal.  After the third night, the other
Swiss folk left and I got my own room with my own bathroom for the rest of
my stay.

Wednesday and Thursday we spent the days setting up and testing the
equipment and in the evenings we went into Frascati for Italian dinners.
Excellent pasta dishes and gelato you just can't find anywhere except
Italian gelaterias.  Mmmmmm.

Friday was mostly a wasted day as the Swiss folk had left and the Frascati
folk were busy with other things.  I basically shut down the system so
they could practice restarting it on Monday.  Friday night I foolishly
started reading the novel I had bought for reading on the train.

Saturday I got up far to late to catch the train into Rome (they only run
at 7:00 and 9:00 on the weekends - Southern Italy is the only part of
Europe where personal cars are still the mode of transportaion of choice)
so I read some more of my book and then walked in to Frascati. I even
ventured into a grocery store.  It must have been my lucky day because the
Italians have a Cheezie substitute called "Flash".  Of course it's not
orange because no European would be foolish enough to colour cheese, but
they were good and crunchy.  I also bought various other supplies for the
next couple days.  Needless to say, I also did not get up early enough on
Sunday to catch the train into Rome.  I spent most of Sunday reading, and
foolishly finished the book, leaving me nothing to read for the trip home.

Monday was mostly a work day (well atleast once the people there found
enough time to decide to attempt to start the equipment up).  Things went
okay.  We went into town for another late, tasty Italian meal.  Italians
eat very late.  In fact, if you go to eat at 19:00, chances are many of
the restaurants are not yet open.  Amazingly enough, I never really
over-ate while I was there.   (Speaking of which, I too have lost over 20
lbs since the new year and am at a svelt 67.5kg.)

Speaking of food in Italy, I am not sure if I have mentioned the coffee in
Italy before.  As most of you know, I'm not a coffee drinker, so the whole
topic of coffee is not of particular importance to me, but I get involved
anyway.  Basically, all Europeans detest North American coffee.  They
consider it extremely bland and flavourless and the concept of letting it
sit and boil (as they do in many restaurants) is basically considered a
sin.  All coffee here is made fresh by the cup and is extremely strong
(the concept of a 1 litre 7/11 refillable coffee makes them laugh).
However, Italy is famous, even within Europe, for the quality, and
strength of their coffee.  If you order a coffee after dinner in an
Italian restaurant you litterally get a half filled 1.5oz shot glass.  I
am sure that glass contains as much caffeine as a mug of our coffee.
Apparently if you order an espresso you get even less.

Okay, so the plan for Tuesday (the day I am leaving to return to
Neuchatel) was that the people there would come in in the morning and use
the system a bit more, we'd shut it down and I'd leave.  I either had to
leave by noon or wait for the night train (otherwise I arrive in Neuchatel
when the busses are not running).  Basically, the Frascati folks never got
around to doing anything so nothing much happened but I had already missed
the nnon train.  Around 19:00, I walked to Frascati (20 min), had pizza
for dinner with some after dinner gelato and caught the train into Rome.

Unfortunately, the night train from Rome does not leave from the Roma
Centrali terminal, so I got to take the subway to the Tiburtina station.
The only interesting thing about the subway (I was expecting some evil,
movie style New York subway) was the noise when the doors were closing.
No "bing ding dong" of the skytrain or a whistle like in Toronto, no, in
Rome they use an ear piercing, high pitched squeal that they let run for
about twice as long as they need to.  Extremely irritating.

Once at Tirbutina, I visitted the grocery store and bought myself some
more "Flash" and other stuff.  A very boring and tiring trip home, which
is always the case with night trains without a bed and no one to talk to
and nothing to read.  I left Rome at 22:00.  I arrived in Neuchatel (after
foolishly taking the local train for the last leg of the journey) just
after noon.  I decided not to go home and sleep as that would even further
screw up my sleeping schedule.  It was a long day at the university but I
figured it would help straighten out my sleeping schedule.  Of course,
what happened is I went to bed around 22:00 (well, actually, I fell asleep
with the lights on while waiting for a phone call I thought I was going to
receive from my brother, but as it turns out, the email had been written
three days earlier, as it explicitly said in the letter itself - guess I
shouldn't read email without enough sleep :) and slept almost 12 hours
straight (except for a 3:00 awakening to turn off the lights), putting me
almost exactly back at where I had been before I left.

For anyone out there wanting to bomb the laboratory I work in, it is
located at:
        N 41 49.519'
        E 12 46.372'

So there you have it, Aaron's unexciting week in Frascati.  As for the
Transylvanian Romanian, although she still claimed to be a vampiress, she
seems to have no problems walking in direct sunlight and she puts her
make-up on exceptionally well for someone who can't see herself in a
mirror.

Speaking of Romanians, I met two other Romanians there this time (both
male).  Talking to them over dinner one night gave me a little glipse of
how different attitudes can be depending on where you grew up.  For
instance, neither of them found it the slightest bit improper to say that
Catalina (the vampiress, whose name should bring some chuckles to my
family, from whom I recently requested a bottle of salad dressing without
explanation) was "quite intelligent for a woman".  In fact, even when
confronted on the matter, they seemed willing to defend their belief that
women's intellectual capabilities where more limitted than men's.  A more
believable hypothesis had been put forward by my professor during an
unrelated conversation days earlier when he said that on average, men and
women have equal intellectual abilities, however, men have a shorter wider
bell curve - most physicists obviously lie in the outstretched tail but
the question was, which tail :)

What's happened since my return... Well there are now atleast 7 different
types of flowers growing in the lawn at the house where I live :)

I have learned two new tidbits about Swiss life.  March 1st is a holiday
in Neuchatel. It is their independence day when they had a revolution and
threw out the Prussians (or whomever was here to be thrown out :).  Now, a
quick look at the calendar shows that March 1st was a Saturday.  No big
deal you figure, they just get Monday off instead.  Nope.  If a holiday
falls on a weekend, tough luck, you miss it.  To me this seems like a bad
idea.  What if consecutive holidays fall on weekends - months without a
holiday.  This also means the number of work days in a given year is not
always the same.  I wonder if they plan their holidays such that no two
consecutive ones land on weekends.

The other interesting thing I learned was about the Swiss tax system.  It
is quite different, and less expensive than ours.  I was suprised to learn
that they pay less taxes than we do.  First of all, depending on which
canton you live in, you have to file tax forms every year, or every other
year.  Also, your employer does not take taxes off your wages (although
the bank does takes taxes directly off of your interest - this is because
of the undisclosed nature of the banks here - they take it off at the
highest rate and if you claim it on the forms you can get some of it
back).  However, you must pay your taxes 4 times a year.  For any of you
who have expereinced "installment payments" that is how the tax system
works here for everyone.  Also, they do not have "tax brackets" like we
do.  They use a continuously increasing tax rate which affects all your
income, not just the income above a certain level.  This rate changes with
every 100 CHF change in income and generally results in a substantially
lesser amount of income tax than in Canada.  The maximum rate is 33%
(which occurs somewhere in the 70k range), compared to the top rate in
Canada of 60%.  Of course, in Canada, you only pay that amount on the
income about the $60k limit, so it is not actually a net 60%, but someone
making $200k would pay 50% in taxes in Canada but still only 33% in
Switzerland.  So not only do Swiss grad students make twice as much as I
do, they're probably paying less tax too.

Speaking of taxes, Revenue Canada has a web site which has acrobat and
postscript versions af all their forms and all their documentation on
line.  It's at http://www.rc.gc.ca/ and I have found it extremely useful.
Unfortunately, I have also learned that I may have made a mistake with
some of my old Canadian savings bonds and may have to file adjustments for
the past six years' returns for about $30 per year.

Upon my return to Neuchatel, I picked up my developed photos.  $27 for a
36 roll.  Not as bad as I had thought.  Unfortuantely, "update web page"
is on my afore mentioned long list of things I want to do, but has not yet
happened.  I have some nice multi-photo montages of the Alps skyline.  By
the time I get them all scanned and pasted together you're going to need a
very wide monitor to see it :)

On a web page related note, I was curious if Uniserve (my parents' ISP)
automatically added their user's web pages to the search engines so I did
a search for "famn damily" figuring it was somewhat unique.  The search
found 17 sites (none of which was mine).  I guess my originallity is not
what it used to be :)

Yestarday, in addition to buying my cheezies and novel, I went out to the
mall to look at glasses.  I didn't find any I liked, which is odd because
I could have sworn I had found a pair there before that I had liked.  Oh
well.  Anyway, while I was at the mall I noticed the cute cashier was
working, so then I had to find something to buy.  It's a good thing she
works at a department store and not something silly.  So, what does one
buy when they're not really looking to buy anything?  Film.  Why not, I'm
using my last roll and it's generally the sort of thing that is not a pain
to keep around.  And what a bonus, if you buy multiple rolls of Kodak, you
get a free "Hunchback of Notre Dame" figuring.  I spent 20 minutes
rummaging through their bin before I found what I was looking for: 400 ASA
with Quasimodo.  I didn't want Esmeralda or Phoebus - they must be morons:
their heads about 1/3 the size of Quasimodo's :)

Alas, I have foolishly started reading the book I bought.  I was hoping to
save it for my next train journey.  Once I finish this I'm not sure I can
find any other books in Neuchatel that I want to read.

I know some of you must be wondering when I will cease to be Aaron de
Neuchatel and become Aaron von Wiener, but I do not yet know.  My best
guess had been that after our next meeting in Frascati, I would move to
Vienna, however, the meeting, which was originally scheduled for April
4th, looks like it is going to be postponed until sometime in May,
possibly June, which means it is no longer a practical time for my
metamorphosis.  Your guess is almost as good as mine.  I imagine early
April, but this requires that the people involved (i.e. my prof in
Victoria and the head of the institute in Vienna) get organized.  I will
let you know when I do.

Tune in next week when Canard WC battles his arch enemy. (That should be
atleast amusing for those of you regular readers with good memories.)

Aaron de Neuchatel