Physics, Taxis, and Fancy Underwear: "Day" 1 in Germany

So I left Boston yesterday, that was thrilling in and of itself.  Catching my connection in The Windy City: all well and good.  Well and good pretty much lasted me up until hour 5 of my flight to Germany when my laptop and iPod died, I finished my book, and the guy in front of me who had been leaning back as far as he could and slamming my food tray into my knees yell at me for kicking his chair and waking him up.  Three hours later and not a minute of sleep: landed in Dusseldorf.  Fancy!  Descent over the big green fields with the tiled, stucco-esque houses and the heavy fog sure fit all the cliches.  So that was neat.  Then of course, to immediately counter the stereotypes rising in my mind of lush fields and mastered logistics, the Dusseldorf Airport promptly lost my baggage.  No big deal, I was just going to have to wait and reek while they sent it to the hotel.  Rad.  Anyways: turns out Germany is huge and just because a train ride lasts three hours doesn't mean I'll be able to sleep during it.  But no big deal, Hanover is a rockin' town upon my arrival.  Amidst growing sleep deprivation and increasing stankosity a fellow IREU-ite and I find our way to a pretty nice pita joint that does a decent veggie.
To help us fight the jet lag the professors-that-be organized a field trip/tour of GEO, one of the first ever gravitational wave interferometers, located just outside of Hanover proper!  Fifteen minutes by train and a pulse-pounding taxivan later we're out among apple trees and electric wind mills.  It's beautiful and still and there's like,several hundred meters of pipe laid with massive high powered lasers being fired down them because science is cooler than everything else combined.  The basic idea is this: gravitational waves are 'ripples in spacetime', which cause length as we know it to get all screwy and warp and release in a wave-like manner.  You then split a laser and piping it down two, perpendicular paths, put them out of phase, and then bring them back together.  Hopefully by aligning the GW warping along a laser path you can have the wave increase the distance the laser travels and allow it to come back into some kind of phase with the other branch.  Then when you recombine them, some light will flash.  This has yet to work anywhere, let alone in the GEO detector, but nonetheless GEO remains incredibly important as a prototype.  The big, 2km interferometers would cost a fortune to play around with, GEO can be very easily modified and upgraded, allowing new techniques to be tested on the field of battle, but where the stakes are low.
Anyways, it was cool and pretty and I was falling asleep where I stood.  So I got some dinner and now I'm typing this.  Pictures to follow tomorrow, as well as regales of German taxi drivers, but until then auf wiedersehen.