On Friday I had a excursion with my physics class to a science research site in Madrid. The place was called CIEMAT which stands for Center for Investigation of the Environment and Technology in English. Or something similar to that. We meet up at 8:00 at the train station and went down to Madrid. From there we took the Metro with the thousands of other college students going to Madrid’s Ciudad Universitaria (University City). Once there we went to the CIEMAT area and were taken into the section dealing with photovoltaic cells and solar panels. The researchers were doing some things with solar panels and some other things trying to harness energy from the Sun. There was some research that was completely new with the researcher having to create everything from scratch. This was a device that uses mirrors to focus a lot of sunlight on a specific point. I noticed that this opportunity was only available to me because I was going to a normal school, it wasn’t something I could see as a tourist. Although it wasn’t super interesting so if I was only a tourist I don’t think I would choose to see it. Anyways, afterwards we went to another part of the CIEMAT area where they are doing research about plasma with a particle accelerator. This was a lot cooler and actually what we were told we were going to see on the excursion. However, the accelerator had a problem and they were fixing it so we couldn’t see it. We were able to see the control room and get a talk from an engineer who works there though.

When the tour finished the teachers left and we were able to hangout in Madrid. We had lunch in a university cafeteria that was decent for cafeteria food, but nonetheless still was cafeteria food. Then we went down to Moncloa in Madrid and got some ice cream and walked around a park. Later in the evening we went out around Villalba as a class which was fun.