Viaggio a Brookhaven, NY

The week before going to Italy, Crissy and I had to go for a week to Brookhaven, Long Island, to do some measurements at the synchrotron radiation facility. Life over there is quite hard. You have to stay at the beamline nearly all the time. We're lucky, and our beamline is very automated, so we managed to get at least 6 hours of sleep per night - and a six hour trip to New York! (forget about the sleep for that night :) ).
Luckily we had some good results, which cheered our spirits. Also, luckily, there are some very nice people at the beamline over there, so the atmosphere is less depressing than what it could be otherwise (the lab is in an old military camp, so the whole architecture is really ugly, we have a tiny dorm room with common bathrooms, the surroundings contain radioactive waste, there are signs posted everywhere saying to pay attention to the lime desease and lead in the water.. and even the deer that circulate freely in the park are scary! They run after you at night if you seem to bother them :) ).
But when you're really tired and even coffee cannot do anything to you anymore, you can look at the 'beamline animals' and be happy again! (There is a collection of stuffed talking puppets at our beamline, that you can partially admire in this post) :)

And here is one shot from Central Park, NY!
It's been a very intense six hour walk, all throughout Manhattan. If you want to see more pictures, go on my picture website.