Free time activities

While I was not able to do a lot in my free time in the first week, now I am happy to get to know people and find free time activities here. On Wednesday I joined the Fermilab choir. Singing a mixed program with other Fermilab persons for one hour in the middle of the day was really nice. Afterwards we had lunch together in the canteen. One other alto told me that she plays the cello in a string quartet, but they need a viola for this summer. So I am going to play some chamber music with them in the nxt weeks :-) The conductor of our choir is a supervisor himself for a summer student. He put my name on the summer students' mailing list so that I will also hear about their activities. On Friday I could participate in a guided tour through the grid computing centre.
On Thursday we went to an Indian restaurant with 5 people from the theory group and the speaker who had come to give a talk that day. There I got to know persons who also wanted to go to downtown Chicago this weekend. John had told me that there was a Blues festival now. Indeed we went on Saturday and listened to great Blues bands at the Chicago Blues Festival in a big park directly in the center and close to Lake Michigan. Chicago is the Blues capital of the world and the atmosphere at the festival was good despite the rain.



Chicago's skyline shows more skyscrapers than in San Francisco. Lake Michigan is so huge that you cannot see the opposite riverside, a bit like Pacific... We went to a bar on top a high bilding: on the 96th floor!