Aglobal pandemic has frozen Charly’s dream. This French civil engineer was supposed to go travelling with no expiration date, but because of the Coronavirus outbreak in March 2020 that dream is still on stand-by.
Charly has shrunk his travel destinations for now, and after a 2-weeks hike in the Alps, and before going to the Dolomites (Italy), he is inaugurating the summer in Geneva (Switzerland). His biggest voyage started there, 4 years ago, when Chaly became a CERNie.
Last February, he left CERN. He was part of the Site Management and Building Department, in the civil engineering team of the HiLumi Project, and he was always surrounded by construction plans and designs.
When he arrived it was the beginning of the design phases and the submission of the building permits. He worked together with the different consultants, advising them during all the design phases. He also participated in defining the details of the infrastructure needed for the project in collaboration with other services of CERN. Since 2018, when the construction started, Charly was in charge of following the works in the real dealing of the shafts in the tunnels. Sometimes, his office was underground, circled by beauty and interesting facts about geology.
He remembers fondly the fact of being given plenty of responsibility from his managers, and the confidence they put on him. He also remembers the CERN Open Days, when thousands of people came to gain first-hand knowledge about this huge lab. They were asking Charly and his colleagues about physics, and it was funny and curious how a group of civil engineers tried to resolve their physics doubts. Those colleagues are now what he misses the most from his days as a CERNie.
Charly has started looking for his next job, being sure that he would like to move a bit more closer to the environmental field. To know when it will be the start of his next professional experience is still a mystery. First comes the dreams.
As the French Romantic poet, Victor Hugo, wrote: voyager, c’est naître et mourir à chaque instant, and Charly still has a lot to revive.
Although the COVID-19 outbreak seems to be taken from a surrealist film, Charly’s adventures as a backpacker around the Globe will also seem it, but much better because they will be for real.