As I type this I am sitting in a hotel in Anacapri, Italy, some 300m above the bay of Naples. I was one of the lecturers this year for the Neutrino Factory Summer Institute--this is a 9-day summer school 
whose main goal is to getting particle physics PhD students more interested in accelerator physics, but also to give them a bigger picture of neutrino oscillation experiments and theory . Then, after the school is over, the students are in principle ready to go the Neutrino Factory Workshop that starts tomorrow in Frascati, near Rome.
I've been a lecturer for all four years that the school has taken place, and I feel like it's this great chance for me to get to teach, and a chance to see how other people teach as well. It's funny, I have now seen Kevin McFarland's lectures on Neutrino Interactions four times, and each time I see it I learn something new about the topic and something new about how to lecture and get students motivated to answer questions.
The location of the school rotates each year between Europe, Japan and the United States, and so this is the second time the school has been in Europe. This year the school was held in a hotel that is literally perched on a cliff overlooking the bay of Naples. The structure of the school, carefully crafted this year by Vittorio Palladino and Pasquale Migliozzi 
(shown at the left), is that the students get three lectures in the morning, then a nice long break for lunch, then the students get three tutorials in the afternoon, which means that each lecturer can come up with problems for the students to solve, or go over things 
again that weren't clear enough in the lecture in the morning. The afternoons of the tutorials must have looked funny to an outsider--the pictures at the left are of students working on their problem sets. 
Now, if my camera could only capture the smell of jasmine which is now in bloom and all over Anacapri, the description would be much more accurate.
When people organize international conferences, the way they organize the converence has a lot to do with the pride they take in their home country. Vittorio and Pasquale definitely made sure we'd 
all want to return! Part of the idea of this school is that the students and lecturers eat all their meals together (here I am with Kevin, Ben, and Panos, or 10% of the MINERvA collaboration) so we can talk about physics and anything else that comes up. It was a real luxury having gelato for dessert twice a day and not worrying at all about where or what I would eat next.
One thing that was different this year was the mix of students: over half of them 
were Italian, and most were European. As a result one (spontaneous) part of the school was a football (soccer) match: Italy against the world. As we heard during one of the tutorials the next day, Italy won, by one point scored as the whistle was blown. But for me the real treat was watching the students present the answers they had worked out in the hotel patio.
Tomorrow morning I catch the first flight back from Naples to Illinois, and I can't even describe how ready I am to see Isaac and Sonia 
again. As much as not having to worry about anyone but myself feels like a major vacation, it's certainly not one I can stand taking for long. At this workshop I had to make do with playing a bit with Pasquale and AnnaLida's son over dinner, but this mostly reminds me of what I am missing at home (and how much I have forgotten about playing with four-month-olds).
