Summer 2009 and 2010 at IMEC

Upcoming trips

2010-07-21T08:01:00.004-05:00

So just an FYI, I'll be traveling to Barcelona and Rome in the next two weeks. Stay tuned for pics of my travels in the coming days.

This past Friday, there was another concert going on in the middle of the city. The main headliner was a Belgian vocal trance band, so kind of techno/electropop, called Milk Inc. Supposedly they're pretty popular, but I've heard of them in the states.

The main stage is set up smack dab in the middle of the city, in a square enclosed by bars. Extra security was present throughout the square since it was so packed for this event. I was told that the maximum capacity for the square was about 12,000 people, and I have no doubt it was that crowded. The band had fireworks going off and flames sprouting out of the ground randomly throughout their set. The crowd really got into the music and it definitely made it much for fun.

Music festivals galore

2010-07-02T16:42:00.003-05:00

So today kicks off Leuven's weekly music festival. Every Friday there's a music theme and there are 5 or 6 stages dispersed throughout the city. These are free concerts for anyone who wants to come and there's an eclectic mix of music. For example, today's theme was jazz. I ended up visiting 3 different stages throughout the city and each had their own little genre of music going on. I got a little bit of jazz, some cuban/salsa music, and indie rock. I really enjoyed the indie rock band. They called themselves Bad Cirkuz and claim to be a blues/jazz band, however there's not a single brass or horned instrument among them. They reminded me of paramore and flyleaf, although they weren't as hardcore.

Their set was probably a little bit more than half an hour. I really enjoyed their music, enough so that I think I'll try to find their cd.

So I haven't really been traveling a whole lot....

2010-06-30T16:06:00.003-05:00

So sorry to anyone that's expecting new pictures of my travels. I've mostly been relaxing in Leuven during the weekends and then heading over to IMEC to do some work.

The weather has been relatively warm around Belgium. It's typically been around the mid-80s during the day and then cooling down to the high 60s at night.

I've sort of been debating if I should start my Master's thesis pretty soon. I don't think I mentioned this earlier, but I graduated from Hopkins with my B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering this past May. I'm sticking around Hopkins for one more semester to finish my Master's, so by December of this year I'll have my Master's in the same field. Since I've been doing research with the Gracias lab for the past three years, I have enough material to write a thesis, hence why I only plan on staying at Hopkins one more semester as opposed to one more year.

Anyway, I've started working on an outline and so far I've got a couple pages worth of material. Only 60+ more to go! It's a good thing that the ChemBE senior lab forced us to write so many long reports because 60 pages really doesn't seem that bad considering I still have four months to write it.

Research update

2010-06-24T16:12:00.002-05:00

At IMEC this week, I've mostly been running some simulations. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we shipped some samples to IMEC from Hopkins. We're using spectroscopy tools to determine the spectral response of our nanostructures. I've been making and running some simulations on an assortment of designs and then doing the subsequent analysis. I can't really go into too much depth, so I'll just be leaving it at that.

I've also been doing some work in the clean room, fabricating some of our samples. I mentioned this last year, but the clean room here at IMEC is amazing. In the Gracias lab at JHU, we have a 14 m^2 clean room with a mask aligner, a spinner, a couple hot plates, and a wet bench. The clean rooms at IMEC are separated based on the compatibility with different wafer standards, ranging from 50 mm to 300 mm. In total, there's 5000 m^2 of clean room space, however, the 300 mm facility has been expanding, so I'm not quite sure how much additional space there is.

In terms of what type of work I'm doing, it's fairly similar to last year. The processes I'm running are nearly identical, however, the materials in which we use to fabricate our structures have changed.

Anyway, just wanted to give a quick update about what I've been up to. I definitely won't be doing any traveling during the weekdays, so it'll mostly just be updates about IMEC during the week.

A quick note. So the population of Leuven is about 90,000 and a little bit more than a third of that are students at the Catholic University of Leuven, which pretty much encompasses the entire city. Their finals have ended recently and I've slowly started to notice that the city is starting to empty a little bit. In a week or two it's suppose to be pretty empty once everyone finishes their end of the semester celebration and goes back home/on vacation.

Revisting Bruges

2010-06-20T05:04:00.015-05:00

This past weekend, I went to revisit the medieval city of Bruges.

I went on a brewery tour of the De Halve Maan Brewery, which is the only remaining family brewery in the city of Bruges that is still active. Their beers are world famous and have won numerous awards. The award winning beers include Brugse Zot Blonde and Brugse Zot double.

This was my first brewery tour ever, but I think it's the typical tour you can get at any type of brewery. They show you their malting and fermentation facilities along with all the tools they use to brew the beer. Since this is a small brewery situated right in the congested city of Bruges, their facilities were confined to maybe a large building, definitely not warehouse style. On the roof of the brewery we got a nice view of the the Beguinage.

Afterwards, I made my way back to the city center to get another look at the Belfry. I didn't go up again this time, because I didn't feel like paying again to see the same view that I saw last year.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I got a new camera so I wanted to retake pictures of important sites. My old point and shoot camera wouldn't have been able to capture this entire building due to its limited focal length and therefore wide-angle capabilities.

After walking around the Markt, I went on a canal tour around the city. For about 7 euros, you could go on a half hour tour along the canals that span 5 km around and through the city.

The tour really didn't take me anywhere that I couldn't have gotten by foot, however, it did give me a different perspective of viewing the city (in the middle of a canal versus the sidewalk).

Even though I've been to Bruges probably 4 times now, I still enjoy walking along the cobbled streets while admiring the architecture. It's just so radically different from anything you see in the states, it's difficult not to just sit back and appreciate the strong history of the city. That's one thing I dislike about the states. We have no history relative to Europe. Most of our architecture is relatively new, so we don't ever see anything truly original.

If anyone was wondering, all my pictures were shot with a Nikon D90 and the kit 18-105 mm vibration reduction lens. All the photos were taken in Manual mode or Shutter priority.

First week back at IMEC

2010-06-12T18:07:00.004-05:00

The research I'm working on is based partly on the work that we do in the Gracias lab at Johns Hopkins University. Recently, we developed a method to develop self-assembled patterned nanoparticles (as seen in a recent paper by Cho. et al. in "Self-assembly of lithographically patterned nanoarticles," Nanoletters 9, 12, 4049-4052 (2009)). In the Gracias lab, we specialize in the self-assembly of 3-dimensional structures on the micro and, as evidenced in the aforementioned paper, nano scale. Back at Hopkins, we have little access to any means to spectroscopically characterize our structures. The group I'm working with at IMEC specializes in a field called plasmonics and they have access to numerous instruments capable of characterizing the optical properties of nanostructures. Essentially, we're characterizing structures we've fabricated in the Gracias lab (and also here at IMEC) with IMEC's equipment.

This past week has been fairly busy actually, considering it was the first full week I was back. A month ago, I shipped over some samples we made at JHU to IMEC. A member of the group over here took some preliminary measurements and for much of this week, he aided me in continuing to take measurements of the samples. I ended up working a couple 12-13 hour days to work on the measurements.

Anyway, quick update on what my blog will be focusing on for much of the summer. I'm probably not going to be traveling as much this time, so I won't be adding a lot of pictures of what foods I've been eating. Instead, I'll probably just be posting pictures of whatever buildings I find interesting. I recently got a DSLR, so hopefully I can try and improve my nonexistent photography skills.

If anyone has any questions or comments, feel free to post in the comments!

First couple days back in Belgium

2010-06-06T07:26:00.010-05:00

Well, I just flew into Belgium last Thursday, June 3rd. I flew from Houston to Newark and then from Newark to Brussels. It was the identical flight that I took last year. Overall I think that the total time it took me to get from the ground in Houston to Brussels took about 15 hours. The flights weren't that bad. Airplane food is still not that great, but it's definitely better than it was a decade ago.

I arrived in Brussels around 8 am on Thursday. After checking into my hostel and dropping off my luggage, the first thing I did was head over to the bike rental shop to pick up a set of wheels. Like I mentioned before, a bicycle is essential in a city like Leuven where the greatest distance between any two points in the city is probably 3 or 4 miles.

It just so happened that on the same day I arrived, a Ph.D. student from IMEC was giving his public Ph.D. defense. After checking into IMEC for a couple hours and revisiting some friends, we all left to attend his presentation at the university. Unfortunately for me, his presentation was in Dutch. Somehow I managed to stay awake for the entirety of his talk, despite not being able to sleep on the plane. I can't really attest to my understanding of his defense since I didn't understand a word, but at the end everyone was clapping, including the judging committee, so I'm assuming he did well.

After the reception, we headed out to the city center for drinks and then met up with everyone else for dinner. Almost everyone ended up getting some type of spare ribs, since that seemed to be the restaurant's specialty. I didn't take pictures of my food this time, mostly because of the fact that I was too tired to bother with it.

On Saturday, I met up with Kayla, a Hopkins grad who's also spending some time this summer working at IMEC. We went on a bike tour around Leuven in order for Kayla to get familiar with this small city and also to refresh my own memory. We biked around the city to the town hall, a local botanical garden, IMEC, and the city center.

A spent the first couple nights in a hostel, but after 4 days I found somewhere else to live. I'm actually staying at the same flat that I stayed at last year. There were very few openings throughout the city, so I resorted to a place I already knew.

This coming weekend I'll get a chance to post an update of what I've been up to this past week.

Until later!

IMEC: Round 2

2010-05-09T20:00:00.002-05:00

First off, I should probably apologize for abandoning my blog at the end of my trip last year. I kind of left it just hanging.

Anyway, this is just a quick update to notify whoever reads this that I'll be heading back over to IMEC again this summer. So keep checking back for updates/pictures as I continue to update this blog starting in June.

Quick Update 8/25/09

2009-08-25T12:49:00.002-05:00

It's been almost two weeks since I last posted on here. Although I haven't been traveling anywhere, I've been incredibly busy with work. Since my last post, my father had actually come back to Belgium on a business trip. After work all of last week, we went out to some restaurants and as a result, I didn't get back to my flat until pretty late at night. At that point, I didn't have time to update my blog.

I'm still in Belgium wrapping things up. Tomorrow is my last day here at IMEC. I actually need to start making a presentation for tomorrow, so I'll end this post here. To whoever reads this blog, no worries, I'm still alive!

Post-London

2009-08-13T14:22:00.007-05:00

After visiting London, I spent the next two weekends just relaxing around Belgium and visiting some nearby cities. Both weekends I ended up going back to IMEC to work on a couple things. Even though I'm over here in Belgium, I'm still able to work on some things for my research back at Hopkins like editing figures and drafts for papers we're in the process of submitting and publishing.

My time here at IMEC is winding down far too quickly. Even with an entire summer over here, it's not enough time complete a project. No matter what type of facilities you have, finishing a project in 3 months is incredibly difficult. Originally, INBT's IRES program was slated to last between 8-10 weeks for undergrads. I can't imagine being limited to such a short time span. It took me at least 3-4 weeks just to get situated and trained on the basic instruments. I waited 2 weeks just to get trained for general clean room use.

I think I forgot to mention the differences between university research and industrial research. Transitioning into university research is significantly more fast paced than in industry. At the university setting, your research groups are generally small and it's much more personal. You can use almost any instrument as long as you receive training. Training itself is generally easy to obtain. Simply ask someone to show you how to use the instrument. At large companies, there's always paperwork involved and training sessions to be scheduled weeks in advance. This is all for liability purposes. If you make a mistake, there is a lot on the line for the company, including its reputation and your own personal safety. As a result, in order to limit liability, companies have formalities that must be followed to the dot.

My last internship at ExxonMobil was exactly the same. In order to use certain solvents, I had to file paperwork and then wait for it to be processed. Specifically, I wasn't allowed to use chloroform until I had the correct paperwork filed. It's an annoying inconvenience, but for large corporations it's a necessity. IMEC, however, isn't as strict as ExxonMobil. I've used HF without ever having to sign a document beforehand.

I've already mentioned before that technicians operate a lot of the instruments here, including thermal evaporators, select sputter systems, select plasma etchers, e-beams, and a large majority of the expensive instruments. Before being allowed to use some of the instruments, I had to verify my fabrication process with some of the technicians. I had to discuss with them the composition of my samples and why I needed to use certain instruments. It took me almost 3 weeks to get approval to use a plasma etcher. At one point, I almost wasn't allowed to use the etcher at all because the technician feared that my sample might ruin the instrument. After some convincing, I was luckily allowed access to the instrument. My point here is that in industry, your research goes by much slower than in a university setting. Sometimes I'll wait 3 days to run my samples through a single process. If I was back at Hopkins, I could have it done in less than half an hour.

The most noticeable difference between research at the university and in industry is the pace at which it progresses. Although it may not be desirable, you just have to acclimate to the change in pace.

London Part 3

2009-08-11T14:11:00.011-05:00

I still have quite a bit to discuss about London. Picking up from where I left off, on my last day in London I first stopped by Westminster Abbey.

I was a little surprised about how pricey admission into the cathedral was. There were no student discounts, so the full fare was 15 British pounds (~$25). Although an audio listening device was provided at no additional cost, it was still rather expensive.

Inside the abbey is a coronation chair where all English and British monarchs sit when they're being crowned. It's been used at every coronation since 1308. I couldn't take pictures inside, so I won't be able to show images.

The Abbey is also the location of many burial sites. On the ground inside the Abbey, there are slabs the size of coffins that acknowledge the body of the person lying below. Several historical figures that are buried here include Charles Dickens, Jane Austin, Sir Isaac Newton, and Charles Darwin.

London's Tomb of the Unknown Solider is also located in Westminster Abbey.

After visiting the Abbey, I made my way to the British Museum.

This museum is essentially a miniaturized version of the Louvre in Paris. It contains a hodgepodge of antiquities ranging from ancient Egypt, Greece, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The most spectacular piece in their collection is the Rosetta Stone.

The crowd gathered around the Rosetta Stone reminded me of the crowd around the Mona Lisa in Paris. An arc of people surround the perimeter and all were trying to take snapshots. I think part of the reason for the large crowd stems from the fact that the Rosetta Stone is placed in the first room you run into after gaining admission into the museum. It is the museum's highlight, so I guess it makes sense for it to be at the forefront.

In the Egyptian exhibit there's a huge bust of Ramses II. There were also the obligatory mummies on display as well.

In the Greece exhibit, remnants of the Parthenon were on display.

After wandering into the Asian antiquities section I found this little guy.

For some reason, this guy reminds me of the Power Rangers. I feel like this monkey just morphed into his combat costume or something. Either that or he's a well-fashioned zord (most likely belonging to the yellow ranger). However, I think the Sabre-Toothed Tiger is more intimidating than this little guy. Unibrows are not intimidating. Okay, enough of the Power Rangers flashback. Onwards we go.

After leaving the the Asian antiquities exhibit, I kind of got lost and I randomly starting walking around the museum. Somehow I ended up in an exhibit featuring the oldest known chess set. It was discovered in 1831 and is carved out of walrus teeth.

I also found this violin-like instrument on display.

It supposedly dates back to 1300. The side view of this instrument I found to be much more interesting.

The British Museum had plenty more exhibits and antiquities, however, I'm only mentioning here the main highlights.

After walking around the museum for a couple hours, I decided to find somewhere to go for dinner. I stumbled into a restaurant called the Criterion. I found it from my guidebook, but it didn't mention that the place was classy. I came in horribly under dressed, wearing jeans and birkenstocks. They didn't refuse at the door though, so I just sat down and decided to have my dinner there.

For my appetizer, I got king scallops with shrimp.

Unfortunately, the scallops weren't very king size.

And for my main course I got ostrich fillets! It was the oddest thing that I saw on the menu, so I obviously just had to try it. Not even Asians eat ostrich, so I guess English cuisine is pretty daring, or probably just more sophisticated. Yeah, I'll go with more classy/sophisticated.

After I ordered the ostrich, the waitress asked me how I would like it cooked. Maybe I'm gullible, but I just glaringly stared at her, confused for a little bit, because I didn't know what my options were. Apparently it's just like ordering steak, so I ordered medium. The taste of the meat was a mix between lamb and beef. In addition, the color of the meat was very dark. By looking at it, I could barely tell it was medium. I was only able to notice after taking a bite and noticing the texture. Overall it was an interesting experience. I enjoyed the taste and if given the chance to order it again, I think I would.

Anyway, this dinner concluded my trip to London. Right after this I had to go back to the hostel to retrieve my things and then head back home to Leuven.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time in this magnificent city. Even after 4 days, I didn't get close to seeing as much as I had hoped. Perhaps there will be a next time...

IMEC Update 8/10/09

2009-08-10T07:29:00.008-05:00

As my time here is winding down, I'm scrambling to get in as much work as I possibly can. From today, I have a little more than 2 weeks left here in Belgium. All good things must come to an end, there are no exceptions.

So what have I been up to at IMEC? Almost all the work that I do is inside the clean room. All day I go in and out, changing into the clean room suits probably more than 5 times a day. Every instrument involved in lithographic fabrication is inside one of the many sections of the clean room here, including thermal evaporators, sputter systems, ion-milling systems, electron beam evaporators, profilometers and ellipsometers, solvent/acid wet benches, plasma etchers, dicing tools, optical microscopes, spin-coaters, mask aligners (3 in a single room capable of handling 8" wafers. They have more than 3 mask aligners here. These 3 are just the ones that I have access to.) and numerous other instruments used for functions that I'm not aware of.

As I've mentioned months earlier, the most annoying part about research here at IMEC is still the fact that technicians operate most the instruments. Yes, I'm thankful that it's less work for me since I don't have to run the instrument, however, sometimes I'll wait a day or 2 for my sample to be processed. Although I have enough work to do to keep me busy in the mean time, sometimes the samples that I need processed are the ones that I desperately need the most. The worst offending instrument is the e-beam (electron beam instrument used for lithography).

There are multiple different forms of lithography. Two such types include photolithography and electron beam lithography. The advantage of e-beam lithography over photolithography is the resolution that you're able to achieve. Electron beam lithography is used to pattern nanoscale structures while photolithography is conventionally used to pattern microscale structures. In an earlier post I tried to describe the basics of lithography. First you start with a bare silicon wafer, spin coat a resist material onto the wafer, and then pattern something into the resist using, in these cases, photolithography or e-beam lithography. In photolithography, UV light is exposed to certain areas of the wafer using a mask to block the UV light from penetrating other areas of the wafer. If a positive resist is spin-coated onto the wafer, then once it's placed in a developing solution, those areas exposed to UV light will be etched away. With a negative resist, the opposite occurs such that areas NOT exposed to UV become etched.

Here at IMEC, I'm using electron beam lithography. Instead of using UV light to pattern my samples, an electron beam scans across the areas defined in my mask. . This is probably the most important step in the process because it creates your pattern. Without any patterns you don't have any structures. After being exposed to the e-beam, the patterns are developed similarly to photolithography, however a different solution is used as the developer.

The e-beam is the bottleneck that's holding back my research. It's a very delicate and expensive instrument, so a technician operates it. There are numerous research teams here at IMEC and a lot of people require the use of the instrument. As a result, each group is technically only allowed to use the instrument once every seven days. For my structures, I require two steps of e-beam lithography, so that already sets me back 2 weeks to process one batch of samples. For the past couple weeks, the technician has been on vacation and will continue to be on vacation until after I leave Belgium. Two people in the group I work in are trained on the instrument, however their use of it is limited. They've also been taking vacations on and off, so it's tough to catch them, let alone ask them to do extra work for you. Everyone here is very friendly though, so they're always willing to do the work for you. You just may have to wait a couple extra days when they're not on vacation or busy with their own projects.

Currently, I'm still in the fabrication stage of my structures. I'm in and out of the clean room fabricating them and then occasionally taking images with a scanning electron microscope. In the next couple days I'll be changing my routine as I begin to take optical measurements of my samples. I think I said that in my last post, but I'm hoping that if I keep saying it then it'll actually happen.

I'll end with a couple more random observations:

-With reference to the cost of something, in the number system Europeans use a comma to separate the equivalent of dollars and cents. I'm actually not quite sure what they call the equivalent of the American cent. If I go to the store and buy something for 5,50, the cashier says that it cost five euro fifty.

-The cost to use the facilities at the laundromat are significantly more expensive than Hopkins. One load of laundry (in a washing machine half the size of what you see at the campus facilities) costs a whopping 3.80 euros. I forgot what I paid to use the dryer. The cost is per every 8 minutes and I don't remember how long I used it. I just keep refeeding the hungry meter until my clothes are dry.

-When I was in Paris, I checked out a McDonalds to see what the menu looked like. A medium fries cost 2.20 euros (~$3.12)!!! I haven't been to a McDonald's in the states in probably 2 years now, but I recall it being on the dollar menu. You can also buy beer at McDonalds.

-Speaking of beer, you can usually buy it in vending machines as well (at least here in Belgium). It's the cheap kind though, so it's the equivalent of Natty Boh or Keystone Light in the states.

-Still speaking of beer, it's not illegal to walk around with an open alcoholic beverage in public.

London again

2009-08-07T11:55:00.007-05:00

On Sunday, I devoted most of my time to just walking around the markets and shopping areas. Early in the morning I ventured over to Covent Garden Market.

This outside area is devoted to street performers. Early in the morning it wasn't very crowded at all. The weather wasn't very cooperative either, so that may have influenced the absence of entertainers. Inside the building on the left are stalls where local businesses sell their goods, ranging from glassware, ceramics, jewelry, hats, clothes, and random knickknacks. It's essentially a glorified farmer's market, some things were rather expensive (as in >100 euros).

Eventually I made my way to two of the most popular shopping streets in all of London. The picture above is on Regent street. This street is filled with fancy shops and upscale department stores. It also had the biggest Apple store I've ever seen. I forgot to take a picture of it unfortunately, but it was two stories with about 80% of the store empty with only small tables along the perimeter. Fairly typical of any other Apple store, lots of wasted space.

The picture below was taken on Oxford street. It's a road practically 1 mile long filled with stores and department stores on either side. Unlike Regent street, the stores along this area were much more affordable.

I honestly spent almost the entire day just shopping around and I don't have very many pictures chronicling my shopping spree.

Fast forward a couple hours, I went back to the south eastern part of London and made a stop at the Globe Theater.

Shakespeare's original Globe Theater was destroyed in 1642. In 1997, a replica was built 750 ft. away from the original theater. Every summer plays are held in the building. I wanted to go inside or at least get close to check it out, but the entire theater was surrounded by gates. There was a line outside the entrance, but I don't know if it was a line for a play or a line for a tour. Instead of waiting to find out, I continued walking around until I found St. Paul's Cathedral.

This is where Prince Charles married Lady Diana in 1981. Anyway, that concluded my day. After a lot of shopping and walking around, I was exhausted and looking forward to just calling it a night.

You sound like you're from LON-DON!

2009-07-30T11:39:00.040-05:00

In the event the title of this post may seem familiar, it's from the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall, when Paul Rudd's forgetful character approaches an injured Londoner calling for help.

Anyway, Friday, July 17 I left for London. There are direct trains to London leaving from Brussels, the only requirement is that you have to check into the train station a half hour before the train is scheduled to depart. Once the train gets to the coast, it passes through a chunnel to get to the UK. Unlike all the other countries I've visited so far, I had to through customs in order to get to the UK. This process was essentially the same thing you see on international flights, you go through a passport check and then declare any goods that you bought.

The train ride from Brussels to London only took about 2 hours. A high-speed train rides this route and there are very few stops, so this contributes to the short commute between the cities. I arrived in London fairly late in the evening. As a result, I didn't have much time to explore. I first made my way to my hostel so that I could drop off my duffel bag. I forgot to mention that in order to get to the hostel, I had to use the metro, which they apparently call the 'tube.' Similar to what I mentioned about the metro in Paris, the 'tube' here in London works just like any other major city (not surprisingly). You can buy individual one-way tickets or you can purchase a card and deposit money onto it as you go. I opted to purchase the card since that also gives me a nice souvenir to take home.

This is the hostel I stayed at. I forgot to take a picture for myself, so I grabbed this off of google images. This hostel was advertised as a "party hostel," partly due to the fact that a bar is directly attached to the hostel and there's a back door (without a bouncer) into the bar. Another reason is because you probably won't be getting a good night's sleep unless you're intoxicated. As such, I didn't get much sleep here. The environment was fun though, receptionists were friendly, fellow hostelers were nice and easy to get along with. I met people from Canada, Australia, France, Denmark and the UK.

Since I got into London late on the first night, I decided to just walk around the area. Within close proximity of the hostel were the Tower of London Bridge and the Tower of London.

On the right of this photograph, you can see a conical-like building. I was just reading an article the other day about the world's 18 strangest buildings and that cone building claims a spot on that list. It's called the Gherken and is the second tallest building in London.

After walking around the area I decided to call it a night. I dedicated the following day entirely to sight-seeing. My first stop was Big Ben and the Parliament houses.

As expected, the neo-gothic building is much more majestic in person. The 150th anniversary of the bell tower was celebrated just this past May. On the right is Westminster Bridge.

Along the River Thames and next to Westminster Bridge, there's the London Eye and an aquarium. The London Eye is 443 ft high and is the tallest Ferris wheel in all of Europe. As opposed to the ferris wheels you find at local carnivals, this ferris wheel has 32 pods that are shaped sort of like jelly beans and are completely sealed and air conditioned.

After walking around a little bit more, I made my way to Buckingham Palace for the changing of the guard. First of all, the crowd outside the palace was fantastically enormous.

Tour buses lined the perimeter of the palace and every direction I looked I could see a tour guide holding up some sort of object (umbrella or sign usually) and a large group (usually consisting of Asians wearing headphones) marching behind them.

I got to Buckingham Palace early enough to catch the Changing of the Guard ceremony. My tour book made statements about how it's overrated, but I wanted to see it anyway. After an hour of waiting outside the gates, two bands marched into the palace coming from two different directions. They then took turns playing songs. I didn't even notice that the guards in front of the palace even switched out since too much focus was centered around the bands.

Here are some random pictures I took while walking around the city looking for a place to have lunch.

For a late lunch, I stopped at a place called Porter's where I got a meat pie.

While I was in the UK, I figured I would try the traditional food. Anyway, the meat pie was filled with steak and mushrooms and doused in a salty sauce made from Guinness beer.

Eventually I finished it, but it did take almost 45 minutes. The meat pie wasn't what I was expecting. When I first saw it, I thought that the crust would be doughy, however that was definitely not the case. Instead, it was flaky, like a croissant. At first I wasn't too excited about having a pie for lunch, especially one filled with meat. Like most people I associate pie with dessert, so my mind was stuck at a crossroad trying to figure out what to expect. It was delicious though and I finished the entree fully satiated.

For dessert, I got a spotted dick.

It's a spongy and sweet cake topped with custard and stuffed with dried fruit. For those who frequent Asian dim sums for brunch, the texture and taste of the spotted dick reminded me of ma lai gao, the spongy yellow cake that you'll usually find on the dessert cart at dim sum. For those who don't have experience with dim sum, ma lai gao is a traditional Chinese steamed cake. It's spongy, yellow, and has a light sweet taste.

After filling my stomach, I then found my way into Trafalgar Square, the most recognized square in the UK, and some argue, the world. The building on the left is the National Gallery, which houses a vast assortment of artists. Here they have Van Gogh's Sunflowers, Van Gogh's Chair, Two Crabs, and A Wheatfield with Cypresses. It also houses works from Michelangelo, Rubens, Titian, and da Vinci. Sorry for the lack of photos, once again photography was adamantly prohibited. Museum workers were stationed in every room and chased down anyone taking pictures.

By the time I left the museum, evening had already begun to set in. I hung out outside Trafalgar Square for a little bit, just adsorbing the opportunity and coming to the realization that I'm in London! Eventually I made my way back to the area where my hostel was located. I wandered around a little bit and walked around the Tower of London.

Several noticeable figures of history that were imprisoned here include Ann Boleyn and Sir Walter Raleigh. For the rest of the night I went back to the hostel and chatted with some of the other guests.

Relaxing in Leuven

2009-07-30T10:46:00.011-05:00

During the week after I got back from Paris, my dad made a quick visit to Leuven before the end of his business trip. Two nights during the week we met up after work for dinner and a beer in the city center of Leuven.

On the first night, we went to Oude Markt (Old Market), which is the pedestrianized square filled with bars and restaurants along the perimeter.

The first night we went to a place called The Meating Room. It's a steak restaurant situated right in Oude Markt. The menu was littered with all different types and cuts of steak. I'm no steak aficionado, so I randomly chose one off the menu.

The fries were complementary with the meal. I recently discovered that the reason why Belgium's fries are unique is because they are fried twice. The first dose is to cook them while the second is used to brown them.

My dad couldn't finish his steak. Not quite sure why he's proud of that...

For dessert, we got some vanilla ice cream with raspberry topping.

I forgot to take a picture of it before we started to devour it. My bad.

The next night, we went to a restaurant right on the main shopping street in Leuven. Right after you sit down, they give you a complementary appetizer.

The small slice on the right is foie gras and the cup on the left was a cold soup. For an appetizer, we got grilled king crab. First of all, I've never had grilled crab before, so that was new. Secondly, the crab was by no means 'king.'

For the main entree, I got a lamb rack. I just noticed that I tend to pick lamb a lot during my meals. I think next time I go out I'll stay away from it.

For dessert, we got a strawberry dish.

On the right is a scoop of strawberry sorbet. On the left, there's a really dense yogurt-like mass of strawberry. I actually wasn't a fan of this dish. The yogurt-like substance tasted a little bitter and there was something inside the mound that conflicted with the texture of the yogurt.

Anyway, that concluded our dinners in Leuven.

Paris Day 3!

2009-07-26T07:47:00.024-05:00

The Sunday of that weekend was my last day in Paris. My train was leaving around 8 pm, so I had most of the day to explore with my dad. The morning was a little overcast as you can see from the image below.

For today, my dad and I decided to dedicate most of our day to exploring the Louvre. From our hotel, we walked over to the museum. The trek only took about half an hour.

Right in front of the Louvre, there's a small arch. In the background you can see the glass pyramid. Unsurprisingly the Louvre is the most visited museum in the world. The museum is composed of 3 separate wings that house over 35,000 objects ranging from 6th century BC to the 19th century. In total, the floor plan spans about 652,300 square feet. It is impossible to see everything in the museum. I imagine you could spend a week here and still not see everything.

The museum was absolutely packed with tour groups from all over the world.

It's interesting to note that the entrances to each wing are centered around the glass pyramid.

In the above image you see the glass pyramid from the inside. Stairs lead you below ground level and then on three edges of the square pyramid are the entrances to the exhibits.

Since there are such vast collections of antiquities at the Louvre, I'll only mention the major pieces that we saw.

The first major piece we ran into was the Venus de Milo.

The original spot where the sculpture was stored is undergoing renovation, so it was temporarily placed in a small hallway. As a result, the crowd in front of the statue was massively large. We essentially had to wait and push our way through to the front to take pictures. Anyway, this marble sculpture spans 6'8" and was sculpted sometime between 130 and 100 BC. The mystery of the statue is derived from her missing arms, which were lost along with the original stage on which the statue stood.

Our next stop was Winged Victory. The pathway to the statue was surprisingly majestic. A staircase rises up past an arch and focuses solely on this piece.

I know the picture is pretty blurry. The museum in general was a little dark and my camera had a hard time focusing. I think you can get the idea though.

While my dad and I were admiring the sculpture, museum workers actually cleared out the entire area of people. They made everyone move into the 2nd room away from the statue so that the area was absolutely clear down to the stairs before Winged Victory. I wasn't quite sure of the reason for this but my dad hypothesized that they need to do this in order to clear the area of lingering people so that the crowd can continue to move. Makes sense to me I guess.

On the way to see the Mona Lisa, we ran into this rather morbid painting.

There's a cleaver sliced half way into the man's head...

Anyway, we finally made our way into the room that features Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. I suspect it's the most famous painting in the world, but I'm guessing others may beg to differ based on preference. Oh well, to each their own.

The painting was in the least optimum environment to capture a good photograph. First of all, there's a barricade that circles the painting that prevents people from getting within 10 feet of it. Secondly, it's enclosed in a a glass casing, making flash photography/red-eye prevention flashes reflect off the surface. Lastly, there's an eager mob of probably 50 people all shoving their way closer to the barricade, pushing people out their way and jabbing shoulders with cameras trying to capture the perfect angle. I was practically sweating by the time I got to the front of the crowd since the museum was so hot and everyone was packed in like sardines.

From the picture above you can see that it's true what people say about the painting being surprisingly small.

Afterwards we then found the Dying Slave sculpted by Michelangelo between 1513 and 1516.

I'm assuming the back side of the sculpture was nude based on the kid's surprised response on the left.

There was also a large sculpture garden nearby.

We also saw the stone on which Hammurabi's Code is inscribed.

The code dates back to about 1790 BC. It's quite miraculous to be standing next to such history.

In the Egyptian antiquities section there's a sitting statue of Ramses.

I touched this one too!

There were also a couple sphinxes.

After walking around the museum for hours, my dad and I decided to stop at the museum restaurant for a late lunch. The food was surprisingly cheap considering it was a museum restaurant. It was also quite good.

I got a steak with potatoes.

For dessert, I got a spongy cake filled with custard and fresh strawberries.

We walked around the museum a little bit more afterwards. We already hit all the major pieces, so I'm not going to elaborate on the rest of the antiquities that we saw. When we left, we just took some more pictures outside the glass pyramid.

Visiting the Louvre pretty much took all day. We didn't even get close to seeing everything, however, we were able to hit all the major pieces that we were aware of. Obviously if you ever go to Paris, the Louvre is a must see. Set aside at least an entire day to see the museum at a leisurely pace. You can see the big three (Venus de Milo, Mona Lisa, and Winged Victory) in maybe 1.5 hours if you rush, however it's much more pleasurable to take your time as you stroll through this gargantuan museum.

Sadly, the visit to the Louvre concluded my visit to Paris. I'm trying to make plans to go back in the next coming weeks, so hopefully that plan gets finalized.

IMEC Update 7/25/09

2009-07-25T08:25:00.011-05:00

I know I've neglected to discuss the research I'm doing over here in Belgium. Part of the reason is that my research groups on both sides of the pond require there own confidentiality. With respect to the Gracias lab, the work we've done with the nanocubes has not yet been published. As a result, I'm not at the liberty to provide details about their fabrication.

On the IMEC side, all employees have to sign a confidentiality waiver about not providing internal information to 3rd parties. You see these at almost every company, so it's not surprising that IMEC had their own.

Fabrication
Anyway, in terms of my day to day operations, I'm currently in the fabrication stage of the nanocubes. They're structurally similar to the microcontainers that we fabricate in the Gracias lab and their fabrication is based on lithography.

Patterning
First, we need define a pattern for our structures. What shape/size do we want them to be? Here at IMEC, I'm currently working with structures that are approximately 500 nm, which in terms of relative size is about 200 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

In order to define a pattern, we first need to spin coat some type of resist material onto a silicon wafer. We then use photolithography or electron beam lithography to selectively remove the exposed or non-exposed portion of the film depending on whether the resist material is positive or negative. In the semiconductor industry, the go-to resist material is polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA). After exposing the film, it needs to be developed in solution such that certain areas of the film are selectively removed. After we define our pattern, we can then move onto the next step.

Material Deposition
After we have our pattern, we need to deposit some sort of metal onto a silicon wafer via thermal evaporation, electron beam evaporation, or sputter coating. In these steps, metal atoms are removed from a source and then deposited onto a sample. In terms of thermal evaporation, the metal source is heated and the solid evaporates, allowing metal atoms to rise and coat the wafer that's placed above the source. To learn more about these techniques, please consult wikipedia. There's no sense in me discussing these in depth here when there are outside sources available.

Lift-Off
Once we have our material deposited, we need to go through a lift-off process. After completing the above steps, we have a silicon wafer coated with a resist and a metal. Depending on our pattern, some sections of the wafer consist of silicon/resist/metal and other sections are simply silicon/metal. In the lift-off process, we dissolve the resist and what remains is our pattern which is now composed of just a metal.

After repeating these processes several times, we can fabricate structures composed of different shapes and compositions.

As I mentioned earlier, for the past couple weeks I've been involved with fabricating our nanocubes. I've mostly been in the clean room making samples using the techniques I described above. All throughout the process I'm checking the condition of the samples after each step both with an optical microscope and a scanning electron microscope (SEM).

One of my highlights so far while working here at IMEC is my personal operation of the SEM. These instruments cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and it's been exciting to operate these on my own. Undergrads at Hopkins aren't trained on the Materials Science SEM, so I've never been able to operate the instrument back at school.

One of my other highlights while here at IMEC has been working with hydrogen fluoride (HF). It's a very dangerous chemical such that when it comes into contact with water it forms hydrofluoric acid, which is incredibly corrosive. It interferes with nerve function and if it contacts your skin, you probably wouldn't even notice the burn. If you've ever taken a chemical safety class you've probably seen the effects of hydrofluoric acid. If not, you can google it if you're interested. However, be warned that some images may be disturbing.

Granted, the HF I've used was buffered, so it wasn't pure HF. The risks however still apply. My first use of HF was a very memorable event and I think I'll forever associate HF with IMEC and Belgium. I admit that might have sounded vaguely nerdy, but we're all nerds at Hopkins, right?

Anyway, that's what I've been up to at IMEC the last couple weeks. Fabrication and imaging. Once I have final structures I'll be taking optical measurements of my samples. In the next week or two I should hopefully be starting that up.

Paris Day 2!

2009-07-23T11:54:00.021-05:00

The following morning we got up early to get a head start on our sightseeing tour. We walked over to the Eiffel tower.

Since the lines were rather long, we didn't want to waste hours waiting. Instead we just took some pictures and continued onwards. Perhaps if I make a second trip to Paris I'll go up the tower.

Walking around Paris, you get multiple views of the Eiffel Tower. So here's another one.

In order to get around the city, my dad and I got tickets for a hop-on hop-off bus. The bus stops at all major tourist attractions. During the ride we passed by a museum.

Admission to the museum was free, so we did actually check it out a little bit. There were small antiquity exhibits along with some Greek sculptures. It was nothing compared to the Louvre, of which I'll discuss later. Anyway, our first stop off the bus was Notre Dame Cathedral.

Construction started in the 12th century and it was completed in 1345. It was one of the first gothic cathedrals and also one of the first to use flying buttresses. The lines to enter the cathedral dissipated rather quickly. Since the line continuously moves, you can get inside in a matter of minutes. Admission was surprisingly free.

Afterwards, we took the tour bus to the Opera House.

Right next to the Opera House we stopped by at a restaurant for lunch.

I got a braised lamb shoulder. Doesn't it look just so succulent? I only wish I had another one. The portion was surprisingly large.

My dad and I walked around the city for most of the afternoon. We couldn't stay out too long because we needed to get back to the hotel so that we could change for the night's festivities.

After changing into more formal clothes at the hotel, we ventured off to find the meeting point for our night cruise along the Seine River. The cruise was just a normal excursion you would find in any other city. You hop and and then drive around the river to see the sights.

During the 1 hour ride, we saw

The outside of the Orsay Museum, the 2nd most visited museum in Paris, the Louvre being the first.

The back of the Notre Dame Cathedral.

The Alexander III bridge. It's the most decorated bridge in Paris. Four gilt-bronze statues watch over the bridge and 12 lights span the perimeter.

At the end of the ride it started to get dark outside. The conclusion of our excursion led us to this gorgeous view of the Eiffel Tower lit up at night. At 10:00 pm, lights on the tower continuously flash. Unfortunately the video is out of focus, but you get the idea of what was going on.

After the boat tour we went to see a cabaret show at the Moulin Rouge. Going to Paris, we felt somewhat obligated to make a stop here. The show currently on right now is called Feerie. The closest translation we could get was "A wonderful life."

About the show. It was very tasteful and classy. Although it was a cabaret, there was not an ounce of sleaziness/shadiness/seediness about it. For the first 20 or so minutes, you could barely tell that the dancers were topless. In the beginning, the woman wore several necklaces that strategically covered up the upper portion of their bodies. After that though, it was blatantly obvious (as in their costumes didn't even try to mask their chests). In total, there were probably 100 males and female dancers, the majority of which being female.

The show was about an hour and forty-five minutes long with 60 songs the women danced to. Although the show was entirely in French, I don't think it was necessary to understand since there wasn't a significant story line. Some scenes didn't even have any dialogue. Only a fraction of the songs consisted of the women actually singing, and even then I got the feeling that they were lip syncing. I tried following the women's lips with the music and at times it didn't seem to fit.

One of the most memorable scenes during the show was when a water tank half the size of the stage rose up from the ground. In addition to water, the tank was filled with pythons 6-8 feet in length. During this scene/song, a scantily clad woman pranced around the stage and jumped into the pool of water. At this point she proceeded to perform underwater acrobatics with these snakes in hand.

For a more in depth review, please check out this guy's review. He seems to be an avid theater goer.

Paris Day 1!

2009-07-13T13:34:00.012-05:00

It's been about two weeks since I last updated this blog. I've been incredibly busy with work and traveling that I really haven't had the chance to just sit down and write about my life.

I guess the most appropriate place to start is about 2 weeks ago after I had my accident.

Two weeks ago I met up with my father in Paris. He happened to be on a business trip in Europe and we had planned to meet in Paris when he came over. I'm finally not traveling alone! I would have asked some of the other interns to come join me, but all of them are from Europe and most have already been to Paris. It would also be a pretty expensive trip, so I think that may have dissuaded them.

Anyway, two Fridays ago, I left Leuven for Paris. From Leuven, I took a train to Brussels and then another train from Brussels straight to Paris. It took about 2 hours for the entire trip. As opposed to the regular trains I've taken throughout Belgium, the train to Paris was a high-speed train, so that explains the quick arrival into Paris. Supposedly the top speed of these high speed trains is 185 mph.

I got to Paris around 6:30 pm and my first priority was to find the hotel my dad had booked. The train station I pulled into was on the north side of Paris. I needed to get to the west side toward the Arc de Triomphe. I ended up taking the metro. The metro here really isn't much different than what you would see in NYC. You pay for your ticket at a kiosk or ticket counter, feed the ticket into the turnstile, and then pass through. Just like in any other city, musicians and beggars roam the corridors hoping to earn your spare change. Homeless people still make their way onto the subway, giving speeches, sometimes bringing along furry friends, asking for your change. The metro was also just as crowded as you would expect at rush hour. Everyone was packed like sardines in a can.

Once I rose above ground from the metro, I walked straight into the outer ring of the Arc de Triomphe. What an exciting way to be welcomed to the city! After 2 hours on a chilly train and half an hour in the stuffy metro, it was quite captivating to be introduced to the city of Paris so magnificently.

Once I got to the hotel, I waited for my dad to arrive from the airport. I only had to wait about 10 minutes in the lobby, which just coincidentally happened to be excellent timing. We hit a little snafu at the hotel. When we tried checking in, they had supposedly overbooked their 2 bed rooms. As a result, we were put into another hotel down the Champs-Élysées.

Since we were both a little tired from our respective traveling, we decided to make a light sightseeing trip to the Arc de Triomphe. Even though I had arrived in front of it, I didn't take my time to observe it because I was in a hurry to ditch the bag that I was lugging around. Circling the perimeter of the Arc is the biggest roundabout I have ever seen. It looked to be about 10 lanes wide and through the entire thing, there are zero lane markers. Worse yet, six different streets intersect the roundabout. I think it's safe to say that this is every drivers nightmare. I for sure would dread entering this hell hole. Getting into the roundabout is the easy part, but I don't know how to go about exiting when cars are circling your passenger side. Now I'm not the stereotypical Asian driver. I don't drive 10 mph below the speed limit or drive with my blinkers on for 5 miles. If I got stuck in that roundabout, I'd probably circle the Arc at least 10 times before I mustered up the courage to make my way to the outside. I guess it's a good thing I didn't drive in Paris...

After seeing the Arc, my dad and I had a dire urge to eat some Parisian food. We found our way to a sea food restaurant where we both had some beer, wine, mussels and fish. I got a seabream and my dad got a slice of a cod fish. One thing we immediately noticed about the food was that they used very little oil in their preparation. The mussels were absolutely fantastic. They had a faint sweet taste mixed with the herbs. Although the mussels were small, there were plenty for the both of us.

Then onto the main course.

When I first saw my dish, I was surprised to see the head still attached. Having thoroughly experienced Asian cuisine, this didn't bother me. I know that in the states restaurants don't serve the head with the fish. I used to think that the attached head was an Asian thing, but apparently the French/Europeans are fine with it too?

We finished off our dinner with this lava chocolate cake accompanied with a small scoop of sorbet to clean the palate.

The food in Paris seems unreasonably expensive. This small piece of cake was 11 euros. With respect to the cost of living, I'm glad I don't live here.

Dinner at this restaurant concluded our night.

On our walk back to the hotel from the dinner, we were able to get a view of the Eiffel tower.

After a long day of walking, we finally hit the sack and called it a night.

So I had a little accident...

2009-07-08T10:58:00.007-05:00

Last night when I was biking home from work, I noticed that my bike was making an odd noise. When I checked it, I noticed that the back tire was cyclically scraping against the brake. This morning, I had planned on going to the place where I had rented the bike from in order to fix it.

When I woke up this morning, the sun was hiding behind the overcast and raining skies. I started making my way to the bike shop, but before I could get there, the back wheel of my bike began wobbling side to side and before I knew it, I had fallen in front of my handle bars. After I got up, I noticed a couple drops of blood on the road and on my bike. When I turned my hand around, I saw a fairly large gash that was bleeding a little bit more than I had hoped. I immediately ditched my bike on the side of the road and started running to find help. Luckily, I knew where I was and I was able to find the health center of the university. As I was running through the streets, I noticed people staring at my pants, and that's when I noticed that in my haste, I had let the blood from my cut drip down onto my pants. I'm thinking to myself "Great, now I need to scrub this out later or else it'll stain."

Anyway, long story short, I ended up getting six stitches in my right hand, which happens to be my dominant hand. I can't ride my bike for two weeks so I'll be hiking over to IMEC for a little bit. On the bright side, I get to take another souvenir back home with me after this trip is over, the scar on my hand.

Don't worry, for the sake of decency I'll refrain from posting images of the actual cut.

Ghent, Belgium

2009-07-05T12:53:00.019-05:00

Since my next few weekends are going to be rather busy with Paris next week and London the week after, I decided to take it easy this week and not venture too far away from Leuven. Throughout the past month, I've explored the majority of the touristy cities in Belgium, including Brussels, Antwerp, Knokke, and Bruges. For today, I decided to scratch off the last major hotspot in Belgium, Ghent.

Ghent is situated northwest of Leuven, the same direction as Bruges. The train ride from Leuven to Ghent took about 1 hour. I think I'm starting to get used to the transportation system here. I'm much more familiar with the general destination that I need to head to and I think I'm starting to look less like a tourist, minus the fact that I always have my camera in hand snapping pictures.

The medieval architecture throughout the city center here vaguely resembles that of Bruges. Ghent is much less lauded upon than Bruges, and as a result there are far fewer tourists here. Although they are present, the street-blocking mobs of tourist groups were thankfully absent.

The picture above is of a fountain right in front of the train station.

Unlike most of the cities I've been to so far, the train station in Ghent is a little bit of a trek to the city center. It took me about half an hour to walk to the center. Visually there was nothing really appealing to see during this brief walk. My guide book actually suggests just to hop on the tram and bypass the 1 mile journey to the city.

The Leie river runs through the city and that's what you can see in the background here along with one of the many bridges that connect each side.

My first stop for the day was the 14th century gothic St. Bavo's Cathedral. The highlight here is a 24-panel alterpiece of The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.

I had to paste this image from google images since taking pictures of the original was prohibited. It was completed in 1432 by Jan Van Eyck and is considered one of Belgium's masterpieces. The entire framework was at least 10 feet tall. Adam and Eve are featured in the top left and right panels, respectively. The Virgin Mary and John the Baptist are symmetric about the central figure, who is either God the Father or Jesus. Van Eyck experts have yet to identify the central male figure, since elements of both God the Father and Jesus are represented.

In the background here is the town hall.

The above structure is the Castle of the Counts. It was originally built in 1180 and is surrounded by the Leie River. Over the last 2 centuries the castle has been restored to its original figure. This castle was known to have an active torture chamber. Inside the castle is a small museum dedicated to these torture devices.

The above picture shows original torture devices, a noose and a cleaver used for the detachment of limbs. A guillotine was also on display.

The framework of this guillotine is not original. Instead, it was based off a model and built in 1913. The blade, however, IS original. It's kind of creepy knowing that lives were lost due to this blade sitting in front of me.

In addition to torture devices, this castle also had a prison chamber.

I'm assuming prisoners were thrown down this hatch and left for dead. The pit is enclosed by 4 stone walls with a barricaded door on one of them. Definitely not the place to be.

The number of sites to visit in Ghent are far and few. It's relatively small in terms of touristy attractions. There are 2 popular art museums that feature Belgian artists, however due to the combination of me not recognizing the artists and the unstimulated artistic appreciation part of my brain, I decided to pass on these museums.

Aachen, Germany

2009-06-30T14:32:00.008-05:00

After spending the night in Cologne this past Saturday, I took a train over to nearby Aachen, which sits on the border between Belgium and Germany. This is a very small city best known as the favored residence of Charlemagne in the late 8th and early 9th centuries.

The first landmark I passed was this city gate. Only two gates remain throughout the entire city. All the others were destroyed during the eventual wars that arose.

After passing through the gate, I made my way to the city's main cathedral.

This cathedral was originally built in 786 AD, however, additions were made to it after it suffered damage throughout the years. Charlemagne's remains are stored inside. Unfortunately I didn't get to view it. Seeing that it was Sunday, there was a service inside that prevented tourists from entering. Here's another picture from the opposite side of the cathedral.

Placed directly in the city square, I found a Starbucks.

From what I've noticed, the franchise has very few stores throughout all these medieval cities. All throughout Amsterdam, Bruges, Antwerp, and Brussels, I failed to notice any of these chain coffee shops. I'm assuming the primary reason Starbucks has few locations over here is because of the fact that much of the architecture throughout these cities are rather medieval, and there is little room for commercial expansion. In order to preserve the history in these cities, I feel like renovation in these ancient buildings is restricted.

In addition to Starbucks, there are significantly fewer fast food restaurants here. I can count the number of McDonalds and Burger King restaurants I've seen over the past month on my 2 hands.

The picture above is of the city square from the direction of the city's town hall.

After relaxing and sitting outside Starbucks for half an hour, I decided to go on a tour of the city hall.

It was built in the 14th century and is the place where Kings were coronated. Once I walked inside, I was given a tour via an audio device.

This device was actually an iPhone. When I accidentally reset it, I saw the iPhone interface and the T-Mobile symbol that indicated it was connected to the network. Since this device had GPS, whenever you stepped into a new room, a prompt of audios would appear specifically for that room. Fourteenth century architecture, meet 21st century technology.

These stairs in the city hall have been ascended by kings and nobles of centuries past.

Once you get to the top of the stairs, you can see copies of Charlemagne's relics.

Centuries ago the original relics had been stolen. After recovering them, they were stored and these copies (forged in 1913) were put on display.

Once I left the city hall, I made my way to the Elisenbrunnen. It's a neoclassical hall surrounding one of the city's fountains. I actually didn't see the fountain itself. I didn't find out there was one until I got back to Leuven.

Anyway, that was my trip to Aachen in a nutshell. It's a very small city and there are very few sites to see. As a result, few tourists roam the streets.

Changing of the CEOs

2009-06-30T13:03:00.003-05:00

I still have a post to write about Aachen, which I visited last weekend, but I figured I'd make a quick post about today. There was a reception today at IMEC, where the current CEO stepped down to join the board of directors and appointed a new CEO. There was a large reception in the cafeteria where all types of orderves were served, ranging from cheese, salami, sushi, lumpias, some sweet interesting yogurt with dried shrimp in it, small pieces of cake, and a small assortment of meats.

What surprised me about this reception was that there was an open bar of beer in addition to champange. It's 3:30 in the afternoon and people are helping themselves to an endless supply of beer during work. The perception of alcohol here in Belgium, in addition to much of Europe, is much more relaxed than the states. It's very common here to have a beer or two or three with your lunch and it's not frowned upon in the least bit. Whereas in the states the addition of alcohol to complement an early meal is generally taboo, it's widely accepted over here. I was just surprised by the relaxed atmosphere with respect to alcohol that I figured I'd mention something about it.

Cologne, Germany

2009-06-28T12:48:00.013-05:00

I spent this past weekend on the west side of Germany. The country's bigger cities, like Berlin and Munich, are on the east side of Germany and are a little too far to trek to for a weekend. I would love to visit either of those cities, but it takes over over 7 hours to get there from Leuven and I'm not quite sure when I'll have time for that.

Anyway, on Saturday morning I left Leuven for Cologne. I caught a train from Leuven to Liege and then from Liege to Cologne. It took less than two hours to get to the city. The weather forecast for this day was overcast, with several sprinkles all day long. As long as it wasn't pouring all day, I was fine with the cloudy weather.

As you can see, I was pretty excited to head over to Germany.

The second I step out of the train station, I find the Cologne Cathedral. It's Cologne's most famous landmark and the largest gothic church in northern Europe.

I think I'm getting used to the whole self-portrait thing, even though I tried taking this picture at least 5 times.

The construction of this cathedral took over 600 years to complete. Construction began in 1248 and wasn't finished until 1880. The cathedral contains the Shrine of the Three Kings.

The opening of the shrine in 1864 exposed human remains along with 2,000 year old clothes. It is believed that the remains are those of the Three Wise Men. Throughout the entire cathedral are stain glass windows depicting religious events. I'm not well versed in biblical history, so unfortunately I can't make sense of their meanings.

This structure was right in front of the cathedral. I'm not quite sure of it's significance.

After walking around a little bit, I was starting to get hungry since I neglected to eat breakfast. I stopped by this crowded pastry shop. (It was crowded during the day anyway. I came back later at night to take this picture.)

At this shop I picked up 2 berliners for 1 euro, exactly what the sign says. After looking for a definition of a berliner, I found that it's a traditional German pastry made from yeast dough, filled with a marmalade (in my case strawberry), and topped with conventional sugar.

Once I filled my belly with a snack, I was ready to start the rest of the day.

I made my way to a perfume shop.

Cologne (the perfume) was invented here in 1709 with the Eau de Cologne, a spirit-citrus perfume. This original formula was used by nobles of the time. To this day, the original formula is still produced. The recipe, however, remains a secret. Inside the shop, there is a fountain that circulates the formula, which apparently you can take a sip from. I didn't realize you could drink from the fountain until after I got home to Leuven. I wish I knew this fact beforehand.

After stopping by the perfume shop, I made my way to the Lugwig Museum.

The musuem features works from the 20th and 21st centuries and has one of the largest Picasso exhibits in Europe. Since I'm not much of an art buff, I can't really elaborate on my opinions of the artwork. Honestly, I had a really hard time trying to find the inspiration and meaning behind the majority of the works here.

There were suppose to be paintings from Andy Warhol, but I didn't find his exhibit here.

After shopping around along the streets for a little bit, I decided to head out to dinner. I went to a place called Gaststatte Bei Oma Kleinmann where I ordered a schnitzel and a locally brewed beer. The beer tasted vaguely similar Corona light.

It consisted of a huge slab of breaded pork stuffed with potatoes, grilled onions, bacon, and cucumbers. This piece of meat was gigantic. It took me about 40 minutes just to finish it.

After dinner, I made my way to a hostel.

I was hoping to find other travelers or backpackers to chat with and perhaps go out to a bar, but this place was mostly vacant. I checked the lounge, kitchen, and downstairs cafe and only saw one person using one of the computers. Right when I entered the room and said hi, he just left. My room had two bunk beds and a locker for each person.

Cologne is a city of cathedrals and art museums. Besides the main cathedral that I showed earlier, there are 12 Romanesque churches. If you're a fan of churches and cathedrals, this is definitely the city for you.

Eurotrip Planning

2009-06-26T14:21:00.004-05:00

My work at IMEC this past week mimicked last week fairly well. I've been running models and simulations in order to determine a viable structure to then bring into reality when we fabricate these 3D self-assembled plasmonic nanostructures. In addition, I've been communicating with the technicians that operate the instruments over here so that I can try and ease the transition from the equipment we use at Hopkins to the equipment at IMEC's disposal. Just as I had assumed earlier this month, transitioning between equipment facilities is the hardest aspect of this research experience.

One thing I've noticed while being trained here at IMEC is that it helps immensely to have a background in microfabrication. Going through basic safety trainings in the clean room, it's almost assumed that you're familar with lithography and all of the steps and equipment involved. Luckily I've been working in the Gracias lab for the past year and half, so my transition to the research here has been fairly smooth. I don't mean to imply that you have to have a background in microfab to be able to work here, because that is absolutely not the case. It's definitely feasible to learn about lithography through means provided by Hopkins (like Dr. Gracias' Micro to Nanotechnology class or the Microfabrication lab offered by the BME department) or through literature.

Anyway, onto the point of this blog post. Seeing that I'm in Europe until the end of August, I'm trying to plan weekend trips to different cities. As I've shown in my earlier posts, I've mostly been traveling throughout Belgium and a little bit of the Netherlands. This weekend, I had originally planned on making a trip to Paris. This past Tuesday, I booked a hostel in Paris for Friday and Saturday night. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of not booking a train ticket first. I went to the Leuven train station on Wednesday to buy a train ticket to Paris (via Brussels) for Friday night. Lo and behold, the trains were fully booked the entire weekend. So there goes that plan. No trip to Paris. I immediately canceled my hostel reservation and began looking for somewhere else to go. The lesson I learned from this was that in the event that I need to take one of these high demand trains, I need to do it in advance. For future reference to anyone planning on vacationing in Belgium, if you plan on taking direct trains from Brussels to Paris or Brussels to London, be sure to purchase your ticket at least a week ahead of your planned departure date. To be safe, book your ticket a couple weeks (or even a month if possible) before you intend to leave, otherwise you'll be departing later than you had intended.

This fully booked train scare encouraged me to plan my trips further in advance. Accordingly, I've already booked train tickets to Paris in 2 weeks and London in 3 weeks.

Long story short, I've made plans to visit Germany this weekend. Tomorrow morning I'm catching a train to Cologne where I'll be spending the entire day walking around the city and sight seeing. On Sunday morning, I'll leave Cologne and head to Aachen for the rest of the day before returning to Leuven on Sunday night. The current weather forecast predicts rain in both cities this weekend, but hopefully it changes for the better.

Amsterdam

2009-06-21T06:11:00.019-05:00

This past Thursday, I decided to make a trip to Amsterdam. Earlier during the week, I was debating between going to Paris or Amsterdam. Each passing day I was monitoring the weather forecast for each city, seeing which one would be better. On Thursday night, I decided I was going to go to Amsterdam. I went to a BBQ that night with some of the other interns, so I didn't get back to my studio until 11:30 pm.

Planning on spending the entire weekend in Amsterdam, I forgot that I needed to book a hostel. I scoured the internet for hostels in Amsterdam and I come to realize that either they're all booked or they are 3+ miles away from the city center. Also, one thing I didn't realize is that most hostels require at least 2 nights stay on the weekends. However, I couldn't even find a hostel that had a bed available on Friday and Saturday. Instead of spending the weekend in Amsterdam, I decided that I would try to make it a day trip. If I wanted to go back, it's easy enough just to hop on a train.

I forgot to mention how I'm managing my use of the trains. Before I left for Europe, I bought a train pass called a Eurail Global Pass from this website. With this train pass, you can travel on each eligible country's national rail line without any extra charge. There are 22 countries where this pass is valid and the only trains the pass does not cover are high speed trains. With regard to the cities I currently plan on visiting, I should only need to pay an extra charge to go to Paris and London. These extra charges are actually discounted as well, since I have this type of rail pass. When I say I'm hopping on the train, I'm doing just that. This rail pass allows me to evade the ticket lines to purchase individual tickets. I just arrive at the train station, park my bike in the parking garage, wait for my train, and then hop on.

The train ride to Amsterdam took 3.5 hours and included 1 change over. I traveled from Leuven to Brussels and then from Brussels to Amsterdam. To get the most out of my day, I boarded the 5:30 am train to Brussels and arrived in Amsterdam around 9:00 am.

Once I arrived in Amsterdam, I bought a city map. There was absolutely no way I could have navigated the city without one. It was incredibly helpful, however, my navigation skills could use some improvement . Immediately after I stepped outside the train station, the first thing I noticed were the canals that spanned the entire city. These canals cover over 100 kilometers and include over 1,500 bridges.

I planned that the first stop of my day would be the Anne Frank house. On the way, I stumbled across some coffee shops offering cannabis. Although visually they were easy to identify, the unique stench emanating from the store was much more noticeable.

Side note: Although cannabis is legal here, it doesn't mean that everyone uses it. Before coming to Amsterdam, I had the impression that a large majority of people in the city were users and that these coffee shops would be teeming with people. From walking around the city all day, I noticed that these shops were relatively empty and that more people smoke cigarettes than cannabis. I feel like a lot of mainstream movies give a false interpretation of Amsterdam.

Anyway, I eventually made my way to the the Anne Frank house.

When I got there, it was about 9:30 in the morning. After waiting in line for a little more than half an hour, I finally was inside.
This is the outside of the Anne Frank house. Taking photographs is prohibited inside, so unfortunately I can't provide pictures. Once you're inside, you can walk through the moving bookcase and peruse throughout the entire house. The hideout actually consisted of two floors, each with several small rooms. On display, they had Anne Frank's original diary flipped open to a page where you could see her handwriting and the edits she made throughout it. Throughout the house, there are news clippings and pictures posted onto the walls, which are still intact from when the house was raided in 1944.

After the Anne Frank house, I made my way to Rembrandts' house. His artwork wasn't actually on display. This month, there is a traveling exhibit of his friend, Jan Lievens.

This spot is where Rembrandt worked on his paintings. I was a little disappointed that I didn't get to see Rembrandt's works, but oh well, there was nothing that I could do about it.

After Rembrandt, I found my way to the Van Gogh museum.

Once again, photography was strictly prohibited. Van Gogh's works were organized chronologically such that you could see the evolution of Van Gogh's style. Some of the pieces on display included Wheat Fields, Wheat Fields with Crows, The Harvest, and Skull smoking a Cigarette. Pictures of Van Gogh's work in books pale in comparison to the originals. Most of Van Gogh's work is oil on canvas and what you don't see in books is the intricate texture that each brush stroke provides.

Walking around Amsterdam still, I found a Chinatown!

Continuing on with my travels, I found myself in the Red Light District.

In the Netherlands, in addition to cannabis, prostitution is legal. The windows on the left are where the women watch the world go by and try to grab customers. The scene is suppose to be completely different during the night hours, however, since I wasn't able to find a hostel, I can't attest to that.

After walking around all day, I decided to find somewhere to eat for dinner. I went through my travel book and found a place called Kantjil & de Tijger (Antelope and the Tiger). It was a modern Indonesian restaurant just outside the city center.

Tonight, I tried the nasi goreng Kantjil, accompanied with a dutch beer called Hertog Jan. The food consisted of fried rice, topped with pork kabobs, spicy stewed beef, pickled cucumbers, and vegetables. The food was delicious and pretty cheap too! The total bill was almost 14 euros.

After dinner, I had to make my way towards the train station to head home. My first train was from Amsterdam to Brussels. The train schedule was altered at the last minute, some stops being removed and others added. I ended up arriving in Brussels 20 minutes later than I was suppose to and in the process I missed my train at 10:56 pm to Leuven. The next (and last) train heading to Leuven would leave at 12:10 am, so I ended up having to wait in Brussels until then.

IMEC Update 6/19/09

2009-06-19T09:39:00.005-05:00

I realize I haven't discussed much about my research over here at IMEC. The major reason for this is the fact that the first couple weeks have been rather slow.

The work atmosphere at IMEC is similar to a research position at a university. The company structure is divided into departments that are then subsequently divided into groups. Each department has a department leader and each group has a group leader. For example, I'm in the Bio-Nano Electronics department in the Functional Nanosystems group. The work day is very relaxed. You can essentially come to work whenever you want, as long as you put in 8 hours a day. I've typically been coming in around 9 am and leaving around 5:30 or 6 pm. I imagine once the research starts picking up I'll be staying later in the evening.

The company places itself as a link between university and industry. Almost all of the students who work here already have their Bachelors or Masters degrees and are either here for an internship, like myself, or working towards a PhD. In my temporary housing, the age of the interns ranged from 21 to 28. Only two of us did not have a degree.

IMEC's link to industry stems from their collaboration with other companies. Several third party companies conduct their research here and fabricate their products using IMEC's facilities. This 3rd party presence has contributed to the slow progress of my research. For the past 2 weeks, I've been trying to get approval to use one of the instruments, specifically a plasma etcher. One of the companies that conducts their research here depends on this instrument for their products. As a result, the IMEC technician for the instrument was hesitant to let me introduce a new process into the mix. Yesterday, I finally got approval to use the instrument, so hopefully the research starts to pick up.

So what have I been up to these past couple weeks? I spend a lot my time getting trained on the procedures here. One aspect about university research that I miss is the ability to use instruments on my own, whenever it was available. At IMEC, a lot of instruments are serviced, meaning that technicians, and only technicians, operate them. Coming in to this internship, I expected technicians to be responsible for the instruments. With a single technician, the company saves itself a significant amount of time in training each employee on the tool. Additionally, the company saves money. People who aren't well-trained on a piece of equipment are more likely to have an accident and not know how to remedy the situation.

In addition to being trained on procedures, I've been learning how to use a simulation program for electrodynamic modeling. Before we physically fabricate some structures, it's important to know what we should expect and if it's worth investing time in fabricating them in the first place. This past week I've been running simulation after simulation hoping to get some usable results. The structures I'm currently modeling are a combination of the cubes we fabricate in the Gracias lab and plasmonic nanostructures developed over here at IMEC. In these simulations, I'm looking for localized charge distributions and resonance wavelengths. Within the next week or two we should be physically fabricating these structures.

Brussels

2009-06-14T05:12:00.019-05:00

This past Saturday, I left Leuven for a trip to Brussels. The weather Saturday was absolutely gorgeous, sunny and mid-70s all day. It was such a beautiful day!

Anyway, the train ride from Leuven to Brussels was about 30 minutes. I got to Brussels around 11:00 am and as soon as I step outside the train station, I see a rather tall building with spires poking up. I decided to just head in that direction. It turns out to be the Cathedrale des Sts-Michel-et-Gudule. My travel book lists these cathedrals and museums in the native language, so sorry for the these not being in English.

Afterwards, I found my way to Grand Place. It's the largest and most popular square in Brussels. It's surrounded by guildhouses and the city's town hall. While I was walking around the square, there was actually a wedding going on in this building.

The picture below is the town hall, which is in the same square.

The buildings in the picture below are the guildhouses that I previously mentioned. All throughout the square, bars and cafes line the perimeter. This square was also incredibly crowded. I saw some Japanese tourist groups and a mob of Europeans. I actually ran into a segway tour as well. I didn't try to go on that tour though, it doesn't seem worth it since you can just walk around and the see the sights on a regular tour. The segway tour travels fairly slowly, so it's not like they're zipping through the city.

As I was reading through my travel book, it suggested I pick up a bag of homemade chocolates from this store called Wittamer. Wittamer has stores in several countries, as you can see from the cities listed on the awning. All throughout Brussels and Belgium itself, there are tons of chocolate stores, since the country is well known for this sweet. Some chain stores include Godiva, Leonidas, and Neuhaus.

So when I bought the chocolates, it was about 12 pm. I didn't get back to Leuven until 8 pm. After storing the chocolates in my bag this whole time, they now look like this:

I swear they were much prettier when I first bought them! Oh yeah, I bought 6 pieces for 3.60 Euros, so it's a little more than $0.60 for each piece, which I guess isn't TOO ridiculous. I realize there are only 5 chocolates in the picture above. I was too eager to try one before actually taking a picture of them.

Speaking about food, I indulged in another Belgian waffle. The store where I got it from was absolutely packed, and they had over 15 different types to choose from.

I ended up getting the strawberry with chocolate and whip cream. The waffle itself was glazed in sugar, with fresh cut strawberries, whip cream, and hot chocolate syrup to top it off. I thought the waffle I had in Bruges was good, this one was absolute bliss. The only drawback about this waffle was that it cost 4.5o euros. It's quite a bit since 1 euro is almost equivalent to $1.50. It was definitely worth it though!

Continuing with my travels, I found the Manneken-Pis. It's a VERY small bronze statue of a boy urinating into the fountain's basin. For certain holidays, the city dresses him up in costumes. There's a museum somewhere in Brussels that showcases all of his costumes, but I didn't see it during my excursion.

To put it in perspective, here's a picture of the crowd all coming to see this statue. The statue is literally just on the corner of a block. There are many legends about the origin of this statue, but none are believed in more so than the others. Legends date the original statue back to the 12 century up to the 17 century. The original statue was stolen and destroyed, however the statue was recast from the broken pieces and what we see now is that recast statue.

Wandering around Brussels still, I come across the Notre-Dame du Sablon. It's a late gothic style 15th century cathedral.

For lunch, I stopped at a restaurant recommended to me by my travel book. It was called Brasserie de la Roue d'Or. In terms of beverages, I made the mistake of ordering bottled water. Next time I need to remember to get tap water. That small bottle of water, 0.2 L, cost 2.25 Euros. That was my mistake, hopefully I remember next time. Anyway, for lunch I ordered the vol-a-vout. It consists of a flaky biscuit stuffed with chicken and mushrooms, with more chicken and mushrooms on the side, all doused in a house-made cream of mushroom. It even came with a side order of fries, which I didn't order. I guess here in Belgium it's customary to have a side order of fries, since it's one of the nation's most famous offerings. The food was delicious! Oh my, it was phenomenal. The entire lunch set me back about 23 euros, but again, it was well worth it.

I also found my way into a little garden in the middle of the city. There are a couple parks dispersed throughout the city as well.

After spending hours walking around and sight seeing, I decided to shop around a bit. When I came to Belgium, I wasn't expecting the weather to be so chilly, so I didn't pack a whole lot of warm clothes. So I went out to some stores and picked some up. There's a big department store here called Inno. It reminds be of a Nordstrom's. There are lots of expensive brands, with some more affordable brands as well. I tried going into some boutiques, but as expected, their prices were outrageous. A pair of jeans at these shops was about 190 euros. A little too much for my taste...

That pretty much concludes my trip to Brussels. Once again, the architecture here is very gothic, seeing as how most cities over here have a lot of history. I imagine I'll be back here eventually. There are so many restaurants over here and I'd like to try a couple more.

Random observations

2009-06-11T14:03:00.006-05:00

In my previous post, I had mentioned how I was a little worried about finding housing. Maybe I misunderstood the situation, but everything is all settled now. I've moved into a new efficiency that's probably 27 square meters. It's clean and all kitchen utensils, pots, pans, and microwave are all provided. I'm actually renting this place from a landlord, I'm not subletting from a student. Although I initially have to pay the bill for housing, I'll be reimbursed later by IMEC.

Anyway, there are a lot of interesting things that I've noticed while I've been here in Belgium and I wasn't sure how to go about describing them, so I'll just list them.

-At a lot of public restrooms, there is an attendant that you have to pay something like 0.50 euros in order to use the facilities. I didn't want to pay to go to the bathroom, so I can't say anything about the cleanliness of it since I never went in.

-Since I'm already talking about bathrooms, all the stalls I've seen have actual doors on them that fully close, so you don't have that awkward gap between the swinging door and the rest of the stall.

-Also, the sinks in the bathrooms over here at IMEC only have cold water. I can't attest to other public bathrooms since I haven't used any of them.

-That's enough about bathrooms. As I mentioned earlier, bikes are the dominant form of transportation throughout this city. Next to the main roads, there are dedicated lanes for vehicles on 2 wheels (including motorcycles, scooters, mopeds, bikes) and separate lanes for pedestrians. Riding my bike around the city, cars ALWAYS yield to bikes unless there are dedicated street crossing signs. I've never seen a car accelerate through a cross walk to beat the people on bikes. Even though they would have had plenty of time to pass the crosswalk, they still stop and wait.

-A large majority of the taxis that I see here are Mercedes. I've seen several Volkswagon stationwagons, but I'd say approximately 90% are Mercedes. I just found it odd that the cars used as taxis are more expensive than the cars everyone else drives. Also, tipping here isn't necessary. Even for taxis, you only pay the fare on the meter. When I was switching my housing, I needed to take a taxi in order to transport my suitcases. In total I traveled about 4 km, with an additional 5 minutes of wait time for me to retrieve my luggage. The fair ended up being 17 euros, which is about $25. I feel like that's rather expense, considering at Hopkins you can get a taxi from campus to Fells Point, which is significantly further away, for about $16.

-The education system here is a little different than the States. In most European countries, it's customary to go to a university for 5 years to get both Bachelors and Masters degrees. Very rarely do students go to a university just for a Bachelors. Right out of high school, they expect to be at a university for 5 years, regardless of the school.

-All the digital clocks here use 24 hr military time.

That's all I can think of right now. Please feel free to ask questions in the comments.

Oy

2009-06-10T11:24:00.006-05:00

The last couple days have been a little hectic. On Monday, I was told I had to vacate my current housing by Thursday. On Tuesday, I started my frantic search for a new place to live for the next 3 months.

I'd like to mention that I was aware that I was only temporarily placed in my first dorm until Thursday, and that I was told by people at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven I would need to find other permanent housing. By the information that I received from IMEC (which is a separate entity than the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), I was lead to believe that I could actually stay in the dorm permanently. Everyone else in the dorm is foreign, and everyone permanently settled there, for durations ranging from 3 to 9 months. Somewhere throughout all this housing shenanigans there was an unfortunate miscommunication.

In this INBT IRES program, I was formally enrolled at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven as a visiting scholar. This university essentially makes up the entire city. Offices, lecture halls, and whatnot are scattered all over the city, and students bike around everywhere. During the academic year, a very significant portion of the population are students. I was told by some of my colleagues at IMEC that I should expect the city to be noticeably more empty in a couple weeks, when students are finished with their final exams.

Anyway, where I'm going with this is that since I'm enrolled as a visiting scholar at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, I have access to their facilities and their housing services. On Tuesday I went to the housing office and picked up a list of available rooms/studios for rent. That's all the help you really get. It's the individual's responsibility to find housing once you get to Belgium. This list comprises of addresses and costs of the rooms/studios being rented or subleted from students and landlords. Wow, that was a lot of conjunctions in one sentence. Anyway, on Tuesday I sat in the housing office, googled the addresses, and began calling away. They have a dedicated phone for students to use to call places. Good thing, because the roaming charges on my phone would be been astronomical.

The rooms/studios on the list weren't very helpful for me since a lot of the rooms were unavailable until July, so my options were very limited. I got a little bit of help from the people over at IMEC, in that they provided me with websites of some local companies that rent flats (studios/efficiencies). After viewing several places, I finally settled on a studio on the east side of Leuven. Biking to IMEC from this studio should be a little less than 15 minutes, so I guess that's not bad at all.

I would have preferred to have just stayed in my initial housing. There's always people around to talk to and everyone is foreign and working at IMEC. We could all really relate to each other. Additionally, it's close to the IMEC facilities and there is a grocery store about 300 meters away. This location was just very convenient. Oh well, I've tried everything I could to stay here, but alas I'll be kicked out by the end of tomorrow and moving over to a new flat. Speaking of which, I haven't exactly figured out how I'm going to transport my suitcases. It's a 1.5 mile trek from my current location to my new studio. I don't really trust myself to ride my bike with one hand and pull my suitcase with another, although I have seen people doing this. I feel like biking around is already dangerous enough, I don't need to complicate it by dragging a weight behind me. I guess the tentative plan right now is to go to IMEC and call for a taxi to usher me around everywhere.

Antwerp

2009-06-07T14:56:00.006-05:00

Today, me and 2 other interns from IMEC went to visit the city of Antwerp. It's in the north eastern part of Belgium. When I asked some coworkers earlier last week about Antwerp, they told me that it was a popular area for shopping. I would soon see that for myself after an hour long train ride.

Seeing that it's Sunday, the majority of the stores here in Antwerp were closed. The only ones open were some restaurants, souvenir shops, and museums. All we could really do was walk around the city to sight see.

The above buildings are 16th century guildhouses.
And next to them is the Antwerp City Hall.

I'm not quite sure what this structure is suppose to symbolize. I tried looking it up after I got home, but I haven't found an explanation yet.
This is the Het Steen. Antwerp used to be a completely fortified city, but all that remains of those fortifications is this restored building.

For lunch, we stopped by at a Greek restuarant, where I got this lamb shank, with seared vegetables, rice, and square of feta cheese. The menu did not have a single word of English on it, so we had to ask the waiter to go through each item and explain what they were. This dish was 14 euros, which is approximately $19.50 USD.

Bruges Take 2!

2009-06-06T14:21:00.014-05:00

After briefly seeing Bruges this past Monday, I wanted to get a longer stroll around the city. So I hopped on the train and an hour and a half later I was back in Bruges. Today was a rather cloudy day, but at least it wasn't raining.

Walking around in Bruges is like taking a step back in time. As I had previously mentioned, the medieval architecture in Bruges is still intact, so this makes an excellent sight-seeing trip.

This is Béguinage. Founded in the 13th century, it was a place where several sisterhoods of the Roman Catholic Church resided.

The above is the Basilica of the Holy Blood. It was built in the 12th century as the chapel of the residence of the Count of Flanders. Wikipedia tells me that it houses a "venerated relic of the Holy Blood allegedly collected by Joseph of Arimathea and brought from the Holy Land by Thierry of Alsace, Count of Flanders."

This building is called the Belfry. You can pay 5 euros to climb the 250+ steps to the very top. I think I'm going to save that for another day when it's nice and sunny outside so that I can get a better view of the city. As you can see, it was very cloudy over here today.

This is the city hall building.

As I mentioned before, there are literally thousands of bikes parked outside train stations.

While walking around the city, I saw a lot of people in line outside a store getting waffles. I couldn't just stand there and not get one, so I bought one! I guess it was fairly priced at 2.50 euros, considering how yummy it was. Freshly made waffles with hot chocolate topping, yum.

In addition to waffles, Belgium is known for its fries, mussels, chocolates and beer. Considering Belgium is the size of Maryland, it's amazing that it's famous for so many things!

First week at IMEC

2009-06-03T11:04:00.010-05:00

As with any internship or job, there's always a ton of paperwork to fill out. With weeks of preparation and two days into the internship, I was still filling out paperwork and sorting out housing arrangements.

When I first got to IMEC, I was surprised to see that the majority of the employees were very young. In total, there are about 1,600 employees, with several hundred being PhD students. The average age here seems to be around mid-30s, which is surprisingly low for a corporation. At my internship at ExxonMobil last summer, the average age was easily in the high 40s to low 50s. Additionally, the dress code is surprisingly casual. On my first day, I came in wearing a tucked in button-up. I figured business casual would have been the most appropriate. When I was waiting for my supervisor to pick me up from the lobby, I saw people coming in wearing t-shirts, shorts, jeans, and even sandals. Apparently I had overdressed. The next day, I figured I would dress 'appropriately' with jeans, a polo, and sneakers. I don't know how common this nonexistent dress code is in Europe. It may have resulted from the fact that the majority of the employees are so young and the company has adapted itself to the younger generation, but that's just my guess.

For these first two days, I didn't do much other than fill out paperwork and take care of some formalities to get into the company's system. I vaguely have an idea of what project I'll be working on. The whole point of being here at IMEC is to work on a collaborative project combining the research we do at the Gracias Lab at JHU with some of the research done here. In the Gracias lab, we lithographically fabricate 3D self-assembled nano/micro structures based on 2D templates with sizes ranging from 100 nanometers to 2 millimeters. For more information about our research, please visit the group website. The group that I'm working with over here has experience with plasmonic nanostructures, which, with relevance to optics, are structures that induce field localization to generate strongly enhanced local hotspots. The end goal is combine our two structures to develop a plasmonic nanoscale 3-axis sensor.

This past Tuesday and Wednesday was all about finishing registration and paperwork. Thursday and Friday I spent a large amount of my time reading papers that the group had published to get a better understanding of their plasmonics research. I had a lot of discussions with the group members about their research and IMEC facilities. Additionally, I got a tour of the clean room where I'll be doing most of my fabrication. I was impressed by the shear size of the clean room. The total area of all the clean rooms is 5,200 square meters, where 1,750 square meters is considered a class 1 area. This is all compared to the 14 square meter clean room that we have at the Gracias lab in the Maryland building.

One of the little neat things here is that, similar to the Jcard at Hopkins, the access badge serves as a form of payment. There are vending machines here that dispose coffee/tea/water/hot chocolate into a small plastic cup that probably holds 3-4 ounces. You can manually alter the strength of the coffee/tea and the amount of sugar/milk by pressing the touchpad. Everyone also gets 1 free drink per day, if you get more than 1, I think it's 0.25 euros for each one after. Although I don't really think it's worth paying for the small volume of the beverage you actually get, I'll still take advantage of my free drink per day.

I know it's a bad picture. It seems like whenever these badge pictures are taken, they never tell you when they're actually going to take the picture. The woman just said, "This is where you look." As I said "Okay," she said, "we're all done!"

Whit Monday

2009-06-01T15:45:00.012-05:00

In Europe, June 1, 2009 is Whit Monday, a holiday celebrated the day after Pentecost. It's a public holiday, so a large majority of stores are closed. The only stores that are open are in places that surround popular tourist destinations.

Today, my floormates and I would take the train to Knokke, a city on the Belgian coast lined with beaches. Our group consisted of 7 people, originating from France, Italy, Macedonia, Finland, and the US, so it was quite an eclectic mix of individuals. The train from Leuven to Knokke is approximately 2 hours. One thing we didn't realize on the train was that at a certain point, the train splits into two, one half heads in to one city and the other heads to a different city. Unfortunately we found ourselves on the wrong half of the train. We ended up being stuck in Bruges for an hour. Bruges itself, however, is a medieval city with much of its architecture still in tact. The architecture is purely stunning. There was actually a movie based in this city called In Bruges. It came out in 2008 and stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0780536/)

One hour in Bruges was all too brief. I'll definitely be making a full day trip to this city later in the coming months.

After getting on the train, we arrived in Knokke. It's a very touristy and posh area of Belgium. There are plenty of expensive condos with ferraris, porsches, bentleys, bmws, etc. lining the streets. The beach itself was not the prettiest that I have seen. The sand had a muddy hue and the water was far from crystal clear. It was a rather windy day in the high 60s, so it wasn't ideal swimming weather. We all relaxed and laid out on the beach for several hours. We had actually met some other Americans interning in Brussels, Belgium.

First day in Belgium!

2009-05-31T07:27:00.012-05:00

So after a long struggle to get the IMEC program running this year, it has finally become reality. I left the the states on Saturday, May 30th 2009 and arrived in Belgium around 7:30 am local time the next day. I departed from Houston, TX and had 1 layover in Newark, NJ. The flights were fairly short, Houston to Newark was approximately 3 hours and Newark to Brussels was about 7. The last time that I had airplane food as a meal was 8 years ago. Back then, it was abysmal. This time, it was surprisingly decent. The lunch was a side salad with a chicken enchilada wrap and dinner was either a choice of chicken with rice or pasta with meat balls. The food was actually pretty good. I chose the pasta with meat balls and it actually tasted similar to what you would get at the freshman FFC.

Once I dropped off my suitcase at my temporary housing, I went out to explore the city of Leuven. I'm temporarily placed in a dorm very similar to the style in the freshman AMRs back at Hopkins, with the bathrooms and showers shared communally with everyone on the floor. The room is a single bedroom similar to the size of a Charles Commons bedroom. IMEC owns a section of the dorm housing of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven so that everyone on the floor works at IMEC.

Suffice it to say that the room is so small I can't fit it into a picture.

After getting situated, I decided to travel around the small city of Leuven. Walking around the streets, I noticed that all the signs are in Dutch. Apparently in Belgium, half the country speaks Dutch and the other half speaks French. After dropping off my bags, I blindly started roaming the city of Leuven. The city is essentially a giant roundabout with small streets zigzagging in towards the center, so I figured it wouldn't be that hard to get to the middle. Apparently I was wrong because I spent the next hour and a half getting lost in all the side streets. For future reference, wearing birkenstocks on all these cobbled stone streets is not a good idea.

Anyway, eventually I found my way to a main road and then took out my map to guide me into the city center. One thing to note about Leuven and in several cities throughout Europe, bikes are the mode of choice in terms of getting yourself around the city. There is a bike rental store where you can rent a bike for about 20 euros, with an additional 6 euro or so extra per month. Having a bike is definitely a life saver. There are bike racks all over the city and the local train station has a parking garage just for bicycles, where it houses thousands and
thousands of bikes.

While traveling around, I found the city hall building, a university library with a structure of a fly stabbed with a thread needle. I asked some people about what this structure was supposed to symbolize, but no one knew. They could only tell me that it had recently been put up about a month ago.

At night, my floormates took me to the city center filled with bars and pubs. Belgium produces over 500 types of beer and many bars have their own house-made brew. By the way, the legal drinking age here is 16 for beers and wines and 18 for anything containing >22% alcohol. It's also noteworthy that the beers served here generally have an alcohol content ranging from 8-11% (by volume), as opposed to the 4-5% in the US. This night, I tried my hand at a Belgian beer called Duvel, which is a dry beer with a sweet aroma.

The above is a daytime image of the square filled with bars.

This late night visit to the local bars concluded my first day in Leuven.

I'm in the process of adding the rest of my pictures to a flickr account, however they take a considerable amount of time to load. Once this is finished, I will update this blog with a link to the pictures.