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The facts:

XIRAF

The CU EGG!

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Eat @ Heraklion
French Cheese !
French Wine !!
Belgian Fries ?!

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ou peut-être pas ...

A Shameless promotion of
Vassilis Charmandaris

This page is following its author, who, in the summer of 1985, left his home in Greece and has been traveling around the world searching for Ithaca. It moved from the great planes of the Midwest, to the city of lights, and back to a server located in upstate New York. Finally in the spring of 2005, nearly 20 years after the trip begun, he ended up in Crete the largest island of Greece and the southern most point of Europe.

In the fall of 1995, I was encouraged to fulfill my doctorate requirements. I did some teaching in the spring of 1996 and visited the Australia Telescope National Facility for a couple of months during that summer. In the meantime I was given the opportunity to continue doing research in astronomy while living in Paris - France NOT Paris - Texas...

After some serious pondering which lasted about 3 seconds I decided to accept the offer. I had great time working as a postdoc^[1] for a year at the astrophysics section of CEA/DAPNIA, which is located at the southern suburbs of Paris. Then things got even better since I moved for a couple of years as a Marie Curie postdoctoral^[1] fellow to the Observatoire de Paris, in its millimeter and infrared astronomy department (DEMIRM) which is now part of LERMA, and is located in downtown Paris, 50m above the catacombes...

In late August 1999, I started my 5.5 years "IRS venture" working as a staff^[2] astronomer with the Spitzer Space Telescope group at the Astronomy Department of Cornell University. Cornell is located in Ithaca, a small city of the upstate New York. Not surprisingly, just a few miles west of Ithaca one can find the town of Ulysses (aka "Odysseus"). A bit further north it's the city of Greece and just a few miles east of Ithaca one may enjoy the abundant snow which covers the region for at least six months a year, by going down the slopes of the Greek Peak. In case you don't remember your classical greek studies though, there's another Ithaca around which is 3000 years or so older. Winters there are just bit milder as well...

As mentioned earlier, things came to a nearly full circle by moving in 2005 to a faculty^[3] position at the Physics Department of the University of Crete.

Other famous quotes - some more useful than others, as well as some thoughts from Calvin.

^[*]Thanks to an astute colleague, I was informed that there's also a Dr. Charm, M.D! Check the last paragraph...

... and a wealthy distant relative in africa....

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