Visited Einstein’s house in Bern, visited university palaeontology museum in Munich to see first discovered Archaeopteryx skeleton (the floor was closed for renovations :(, Saw solar neutrino observation centre on Klein Matterhorn, got excited that one of our hotels was on Wolfgang Pauli strasse, took a keen interest in the climate change data at Jungfrauhof, visited museum of natural history in Salzburg – seriously cool got this “” close to a big alligator. Not sure what science things I’ll find in Italy but CERN is still to come in Geneva.

Just some pictures of the wonderful scenery in the Alps

We’ve travelled from Bavaria, which was beautiful into Austria. We went to a concert last night which was mostly Strauss (mostly younger, some older) and Mozart. They did keep throwing in Rossini arias for no apparent reason but the singers were good so they’re forgiven. During that day in Vienna (Wien) we went to the house of music. If you ever go to Vienna it is worth a visit – we played namadaus (a take on how Mozart sometimes composed that produces a piece of music based on the letters of your name. We made a sound scape recording – combining Beethoven’s moonlight sonata with waves crashing on a beach on Easter Island and the “one small step” speech. They worked together well or at least we thought so. We used dice rolls to compose (well the computer did that part) a waltz too. There were lots of other activities but the place was crowded so we didn’t get to conduct the philharmonic among other things – probably because the weather was lousy. The first thing we did that day was visit the Spanish riding school which was an event although the use of birch whips to pass signals to the horses sometimes made me a little concerned.
Today we went to Hallstatt a tiny town surrounded by mountains on a lake – we had to take a boat after the train trip. Very picturesque although mostly closed as the season ended with October – we were seriously concerned about finding somewhere to eat! Fortunately our “room” is the bottom half of a house with a kitchen and we found a small supermarket (not what they are called here) so we cooked for ourselves.