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Slippers, a kind gift from a Russian friend who was maybe too kind with the vodka

I’ve got a little story about these slippers.  It’s a heartwarming tale of international friendship and vomit.

When I first moved to CERN, and before I acquired a proper apartment (recall that this process can be difficult), I lived at a CERN hostel for a few months. This wasn’t one of the relatively new and very conveniently located hostels right next to Restaurant 1 and Building 40 (two hubs of activity).  Instead, I lived in what we commonly called the  ”French hostel” (more specifically it is the ”Saint-Genis hostel,” part of Foyer Résidence Schumann, which also provides housing to people outside CERN). It is off-site and requires a bike or shuttle bus ride to work, but it has the advantage of cheap single rooms that can be booked for long periods of time.

Life at the French hostel is pretty basic. The showers and toilets are shared, though each room is equipped with a sink. During my stay a hot water heater was broken for almost a month during which only those who leapt out of bed before sunrise got a hot morning shower. The kitchen/common area at the end of each floor was primitive. (I hope there have since been some upgrades, though I doubt it.) We had an ancient electric range that sat on the counter as a free-standing component. The microwave was a hefty industrial model of similar vintage that showed off enough metal to make the modern American homeowner proud, except that it worked only part of the time. There was a fridge with small locking sections for each resident, two tables, and some chairs.  That’s about it.  The space was large, but largely empty.

It seemed like quite a disproportionate number of the residents were Russian, though their hearty dinner gatherings my have unduly enhanced their visibility.  One especially gregarious fellow from my floor made frequent shirtless appearances in the common area.  We spoke quite a lot.  He was older and had been working at CERN and other high energy experiments in Russia for quite some time.  He teased me about my salad dinners, which apparently where only fit for a rabbit.  My kinship with rabbits was conveyed in pantomime, with a little hopping and sniffing, as was most everything else: neither of us spoke the other’s language.

One evening my friend insisted that I join them in of their large gatherings in the kitchen.  The table was filled with bread and crackers, preserved fish, some meat, and plenty to drink.  Vodka had marched out from the hostel cupboards, each new bottle introduced as “the finest Russian vodka.” There was one young person who could help with translation.  Up until that point in my life my most extreme drunkenness involved slipping off for a nap under the table during one of our biannual grad-school house parties. This nerd was not prepared to keep up with liquor poured 8oz at a time, but I was determined to do my duty as a gracious guest. It wasn’t long before the plate of sardines was swimming back and forth in the sloppy surf that my view of the world had become.  I stumbled back to my room in search of some snacks to add to the party, but instead spent a moment on the bed before leaping to the sink and filling it with the most vile cheese-fish-crackery vomit.  In my next conscious moment the kitchen was empty and the sun was about to rise.

At least a week passed before I ran into the fellow who had been translating.  He greeted me simply with, “it is good to see that you are alive.”  Not long after that I met my shirtless friend in the kitchen.  He dragged me back to his room and dug out of his suitcase a pair of handmade slippers, the “finest Russian slippers” I’m sure.  One of the best of the very meaningful gifts my CERN friends have given me.

Postscript: One day I found my Russian friends clustered around the microwave, disassembling it with a pocket knife.  They poked around inside the chassis, sometimes with the power on.  Eventually the roomful of scientists and technicians prescribed one wadded up piece of aluminum foil for a gap that under much safer circumstances would be bridged by a fuse.  I entered just late enough that I never learned if the fuse had been blowing or the aluminum, having been previously installed, had been shifting. In any case, our intermittent microwave problems were fixed.