“The first time I came to Munich, I fell in love with the city,” says Sandra Horvat. She was born in Zagreb, Croatia, and her parents and brother still live 20 kilometres from the city, in Samobor. “It's a lovely and cosy place, one of the oldest and favourite recreation places for many Croats. I like it a lot!”

Yet Sandra believes Munich is the perfect size: “It’s a big city where you can find anything, but on the other hand, you feel comfortable. It is not a mega-city; you don’t get lost.” She can enjoy the concert halls and theatres, and still, she has no trouble finding a peaceful green space for reading and relaxing. One of her preferred locations is the park near Schloss Nymphenburg, built as a summer residence for the Bavarian monarchs.

“Before I came to Germany,” says Sandra, “I’d heard that Germans are all somehow reserved.” But living in Munich, she found it wasn’t true. “They were all very helpful, and trying to speak English with me.” Although she’d learned some German in school, her speaking skills needed improvement in those first years. Four years later, she had achieved fluency. Sandra also found that one young German physicist was particularly warm toward her, and they have been together since 2002.

“Usually I don’t have time to think about missing something in Croatia,” Sandra says. In fact, she misses only people – her parents and brother, who she does not have the chance to visit very often, and her colleagues at Zagreb University.

Enrolled at the university, Sandra first visited Munich in 1999. “It was kind of accidental I guess,” she says. One of the professors, Dr. Krešo Kadija, was recruiting students for a diploma project on laser alignment for the ATLAS muon system. Hooked on the city and on ATLAS, she returned for her Masters, this time with the laser alignment of the tracking system.

In 2001, during her PhD, she she began her long-term affiliation with the Max Planck Institute. “We built about ten percent of the muon chambers here in Munich,” she says. She spent part of her time on that, and wrote her dissertation on the Higgs to four muon decay channel, in connection with her work on the muon spectrometer.

As construction drew to a close, Sandra intensified her work on Higgs decays, as described by both the Standard Model and the Minimal Supersymmetric version.

A passionate physicist, Sandra works intensively and spends most of her free time just trying to unwind. Music is one of her outlets. “A couple of years ago I was listening to heavy metal but not anymore,” she laughs. She likes all kinds of music, particularly classical piano. It’s hard for her to reserve tickets – since she likes to leave her schedule open for work commitments – but once in a while, she enjoys a concert.

She also gets away on weekend trips out of Munich, into nearby mountain villages and more distant cities. Rome, visited three times, is among her favourites. “With so many ancient monuments, it's almost as if one would feel the two thousand years of history sneaking underneath the skin,” she says. At the same time, she enjoys the vivacity of the Italians.

“I would go back there anytime, but only for vacation,” she qualifies. In a city so chaotic: “Even crossing a street feels like an adventure there.”

Sandra made her first attempt at visiting downtown Geneva in 2001, during a test beam run of some muon chambers. After days of fighting to keep the system stable and taking data, she had a few hours off. Unfortunately, the visit was cut short: “Ten minutes after I arrived to the city and admired ‘the big fountain on the lake’, my mobile phone was ringing – the person who stayed on the shift was calling for help.”

Sandra has explored Geneva since, but still prefers Munich. She admits that part of Munich’s charm is its special status in her life: it is where she grew into full adulthood, deciding her own priorities. “Here, I explored my own freedom,” she says. “For me, it’s the favourite town.”