Starting my PhD

Monday : I have officially started at the PSI as a PhD student. I was pretty excited about my first day, despite still feeling a few of the aftershocks from winefest. I went for a morning run, and showed up bright and early only to discover there had been a leak in the synchrotron cavity on sunday and the beam would be down until further notice and likely until thursday (you can check the beam from home at http://sls.web.psi.ch/view.php/organization/status/realtime/index.html) (-0.1mA is definitely not good, it should be around 400). After discovering this, I went to go find my advisor and he was out of town for the day. So as far as first days go it was pretty uneventful. I got to meet some of my colleagues we had a nice lunch and coffee, and I stayed until it seemed justifiable to leave (6pm).
As for my colleagues, I think I am going to like them. I will give a short blurb about each one since they will remain the same for the next few years.

Rajmund - Postdoc/Office Partner
He is Czech, did his PhD in Grenoble at the ESRF (European sychrotron facility), and speaks about 7 languages. He sounds like a pretty outdoor-oriented person, he likes to mountain climb on skiis, and general adventuring. He also is quite a tea drinker, which I like because BASF made me much too addicted to coffee, and tea is good for you. He lives in Villigen since he likes the quiet town experience better.

Christoph - Postdoc
He is austrian, did his PhD in Graz (maybe?), and lives in Wettingen. I have certainly learned other things about him, but I cannot recall them at the moment, I will let you know when I do. He is very friendly and good in english.

Sam - Postdoc
He is british, did his PhD in Manchester, and now lives in Baden (since he likes to be able to bike to work, and still live somewhere with nightime activity). He was just at a conference this weekend in Bordeaux on Imaging of some sorts. I am hoping conference travel is common, although I have do have something to show first.

There is another beamline scientist, an engineer, and a technician, but I dont really know any of them well enough to write much.

Tues : I ran again before work, also to the ATM since the closest one is about a mile away. The path was quite nice and the Wanderweg (hiking trails) here are quite plentiful. This is a really cool country. I ended up not getting to work until later, but it didnt seem to be a problem. Not too much to do today, just continue reading, sending some emails, and we had our group meeting. I like the format of it, very open but still efficient. It also looks like just about everybody eats lunch together which is nice, since at BASF, no one I worked with ate together so I had to find people from all over to eat with. Although perhaps maybe that was better since you see these people at work anyway, who knows. I also made my first apartment phone call (all in german). It was a bit scary but I realized pretty quickly the apartment that was advertised was already gone, and the person had a really nice one for nearly $2000/month, at which point I had to explain to her, independent of niceness that is not in my range. From what i can tell now, it looks like it might be best to find a couple other students to live with, since bigger apartments are easy to find, although that does slow the swiss integration down.
After work, I went to go try and find the Laufsportgruppe-Brugg (A running club, my friend told me about). I got kind of lost trying to find the exact meeting point, but even after I found it and talked to a random runner there, who said he runs everyday and has never seen them around here, there was no one there and no signs of a group. So I explored brugg a bit more then ran back home, where I feasted.