Today was a work day, one of the few on this trip. We came to Lausanne just so I could meet with Prof. John Thome at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. In fact, after some email exchanges, I was lucky enough to be invited to give a seminar, and am the guest of the lab for a few days here in Lausanne. John had to teach a class from 10 -12 this morning so I wasn’t going to meet him until a little past noon. Katie and I had a nice breakfast at the hotel and walked along the lake in the morning. The lakefront area is very nice and perfectly safe, so Katie opted to stay at the hotel for the day rather than tagging along to the university.
I caught the metro to the university and arrived at noon. After a few false turns around the campus I found my way to the correct building and met Prof. Thome for the first time. He is extremely well-known in the fluids and heat transfer research community and actually wrote the book that is used to each the graduate courses in boiling. We headed off to a nice lunch at a University owned restaurant. This was a white-tablecloth restaurant that served liquor. We don’t have anything like that at Villanova. We both opted for the lake perch, which is a regional specialty here. The perch is cut into small strips and then rolled. Each little roll is about ½” thick and 2” long. This strips are sautéed and then covered in some sort of delicious cream based sauce. You get perhaps 20 of these on your plate. SO GOOD!
After lunch it was time for my seminar. John has 14 Ph.D. students and 5 post-docs and they made up the audience for the seminar which was held in a conference room just inside his extensive labs. I have given similar seminars before and this one went quite smoothly. The students were more or less engaged and even asked a few good questions. After the seminar I got a tour of his labs and saw his extensive set of experiments in both macro and micro scale condensation and boiling.
As the day drew to a close, he offered to take Katie and I to dinner. As he is an engaging person to talk with, a dinner sounded very nice. Plus, since food in Switzerland is incredibly expensive, it was nice to be treated. The Swiss franc is a strong currency and the exchange with the dollar is very poor for us. It was a bit early for dinner, so after collecting Katie from the hotel room the three of us walked along the lake about 45 minutes down and then 45 minutes back. John is an American ex-pat who has lived in Europe for 27 years, 15 in Rome and 12 in Lausanne. His wife is Italian and they met when he did graduate work at Oxford. He is incredibly interesting and engaging, and even held Katie’s attention, and she usually hates business dinners. As we are heading to Rome in a week, he had lots of suggestions for what to see, and what to eat. We now have the name f the best gelato shop in Rome and a list of the best flavors to try – local ones (walnut, pistachio and wild berry). He also had ideas for Florence, and we may now try to fit in a trip to the Italian beaches early in the week before Paul joins us.
We all had different salads for dinner, I had one with fresh seafood, Katie has a hot goat cheese salad and John had a Greek salad, plus John and I shared a bottle of Swiss wine from the vinyards that ring Lake Geneva. Then we finished with a very Swiss dessert- Crème Brulee, which was excellent. It was really a very nice day and I ended up with a wonderful new research colleague. It really pays to put yourself out there sometimes and make these email connections.
It sounds like it was a productive work day for you. I'm glad everything went well, and I would imagine, too, that the beaches along the Mediterranean would be lovely. You do not know how badly I wish I were at the beach right now. Very, very, very badly!!!!
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