Well it's about time...

Everyone else has been doing it, so why not me. Long, long ago, I learned that often crazier things happen to me than to other people. Maybe this will help me remember them. Even better, I'll finally have a forum to rant, keeping me from screaming on street corners for a few more days.

Thursday, June 30, 2005

New Addition

Well. Lots has happened since my last post. I'll try to hit the important details. I realized that this `blog serves two purposes. First, it affords everyone who reads it a tiny bit of insight into my mind and life. Second, it serves as an electronic memory. Lots happens, but I remember in the end sadly little. I hope that I pick this back up again more regularly!




Most of my time at the MFO was spent attending lectures and talking to people. When I wasn't sitting in a classroom, I wandered around the Black Forest. This had some delightful consequences, especially when I started heading out on my own. I took my camera a few times, and I was richly rewarded with such finds as a baby deer, beautiful beetles, and loads of wild flowers. I tend to photograph mostly bugs and flowers. For one thing, they are easy to photograph. For another, they tend to be the things I notice first about a scene. Guess that speaks volumes about me.



After the conference finished up, I took a train with Little Red Corbett and E. M. to Mainz, a semi-industrial city on the Rhine river. We got to our hotel in the early evening, so we decided to check out the conference site. What a dump. The university at Mainz was built in this absurd 1960s blocky style. The oldest buildings are actually beautiful, harkening back to more classical styles (not a surprise, since many are original buildings in those styles), while the new ones were just terrible. Luckily, the conference was housed in some of the newer buildings. We returned to our hotel and just relaxed for a while. The next day was the conference proper, and it was, in truth, not one of the better ones I've seen. In fact, it was pretty poorly organized it seemed. We left early, and I used the time to wander around the city some. While doing so, I ran into pretty much everyone I knew there. I would leave one group of people to head off again only to run into a second group and then the first again. It was a bit of a surprise. The next day, I again wandered around the city to pass the time before my train back to Paris. I ended up going to this natural history museum where I made a complete fool of myself trying to hand money to the ticket woman in response to her saying to me in German, "Free". Hilarious.

Back in Paris, I had just about a single day to kill. I wandered around the city for a bit, and then I decided to see a movie, since it was quite hot. I went to see "Batman Begins", which I very much enjoyed, actually. It was pretty entertaining. I met up with my friend D. R. for dinner, and we went to an old staple: Cafe de l'industry. Apparently the owners have expanded a good bit, buying the space across the street from their old place, but we just stuck with what we knew and sat in what is rapidly becoming a regular spot. It was really nice to just kick back and shoot the shit for a while in French. I was psyched to see how quickly it returned to me, especially since I haven't spoken it in a long time.

Now I'm back at home. Things here have been really good. My Senate Contact and I spent a quite nice weekend down at the beach and then bumming around Boston. I managed somehow to avoid getting any color to my skin, even though we sat out in the sun for hours. Thank God for strong sunscreen! He did manage to get some sun in, and it seems that his burn is fading. Work is going fine, and in a few minutes I am due at a function where I will meet the high school students whom I am to mentor for the next month. Unspeakable joy.

Having run through all of the less exciting stories, I can get to the fun one: my Senate Contact now has a kitty! Last week, he and I went to a local animal shelter and found an adorable, tiny kitty. She is two years old, meaning that she is fully grown, but she is just slightly bigger than a kitten. I was instantly smitten with her, and as luck would have it, so was he. He talked with his landlord and squared away all of the details, and he picked her up today! After my meeting, I am going to head over there to see her in her new home. I am really excited. Kitties are my favorite.

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Oberwolfach


I am currently in the heart of the Black Forest in Germany, in a little town called Oberwolfach at a place called the MFO (www.mfo.de for those who are curious). It is beautiful. I'm attending a conference on "Geometric Topology with Applications to Physics". It has nothing to do with anything I actually work on, but I was invited and many of my friends and adviser are here. Plus there is little to do around here besides work. I've already worked out the details for something that had been troubling me for a while, and I plan to next work on my thesis project for a time. If what's happened so far is any indication, I'll get a good bit done. Wish me luck!

One of the really neat things about this place is that meals have assigned seating. I would have probably just sat with the other MIT kids and the Notre Dame kids. Instead, I've sat with different people each meal, meaning that I've met a lot of quite famous people in my field (none of whom anyone outside of it would know, but still, big names to me). Since it's lunch or dinner, we have the option of not talking math, so often we just end up talking about people's families or hobbies or whatnot. Quite a nice way to make things more personable.

My room is fantastic. The MFO is situated at a sort of high point in this valley, and it overlooks the rest of the valley. You can see for miles, and all around are little farms with cows or little churches. Surrounding everything is of course the Black Forest, so it's this really cute little oasis in the dense woods. Anyway, my room has a single bed, a large desk, and huge windows that open out onto a very large porch. I can also see two dairy farms from my window, so that's fun. I awoke this morning to the sound of cows!

This evening I went for a long hike with my friend from ND C. R. We walked up a trail behind the MFO, climbing the large mountain there. Well, this is a great little trip, and a great workout. We were sweating by the time we reached the top, and people who've see me after the gym know that this takes a good bit of effort. On the other hand, we left the MFO at 9 PM, so we reached the top of the mountain at about 10. It stays very light here until quite late, but by 10 PM it is getting quite dark. It is even darker in a forest, let alone the Black one, so we were almost unable to see the trail coming down!

Luckily, it wasn't so dark that I missed my new little friend: a tiny German toad! It was about 2 to 3 inches long and covered with the dry knobby skin that toads have (this is how I knew it wasn't a frog. Well, this and the fact that it was quite far from a water source). I picked it up to show C. R., but he wasn't as excited in it as I, so I just put him down. I managed to get it out of my hands (safely for it) before it peed on me (as they are want to do), so I considered it "win-win".

I've three more days here, then I am going to another conference in Mainz. I'll meet up with even more friends there, plus it'll give me a chance to show the stuff I've been working on to some people interested in it. All told, this has been a great time so far. I'll take pictures and put them up when I get home, since this place is really one people just have to see.

Friday, June 10, 2005

Another Day, Another Park

So I've just returned to H. L.'s after wandering around the city for a while and seeing a lovely garden. While I am sure that I will go out again later, I'm not sure if I will get a chance to 'blog then, so it seemed best to put down now the things I remember about today and some from before.

First the old. I took the Silver line from South Station to the airport! For most people, this is mind-numbingly mundane, but for me, it was quite an experience. It was also quite an adventure for the little girl sitting behind me. She was probably two or three, and she was still so short that to get off of the Silver line, she had to sit on the step and hop off. It was really cute.

Now the new. My first order of business today was to get train tickets to Oberwolfach. H. L. had directed me to an SNCF (the French train people) office near where he lives, but it was jammed full of people when I got there. Since waiting is for losers, I hopped on the nearest Metro (after buying a day pass for 5.30€. So much less than in Boston) and went to Gare de L'Est. I managed to buy my tickets for the first two trains, but they told me that to get the last leg, I'll need to stop by a ticket window in Germany. Still, not too shabby.



Having finished my pressing business items, I grabbed some lunch in the Latin quarter and headed out to le Jardin des Serres d'Auteuil (the garden of the greenhouses of Auteuil). This is a beautiful little park which I found out about on the plane, reading this article about REM's favorite spots in Paris. Man, were they right! There were very few tourists, and the whole place is a collection of 19th / early 20th century greenhouses surrounded by beautiful gardens. Even better? Since I went in early June, everything was in bloom. I have some pictures of flowers which I've never seen before, as well as picures of more mundane things like buildings and trees. They also had some really neat plants, some of which have super complicated life cycles. For example, one plant reauires a bug called a heironymph (or something) to crawl into its fig and lay eggs. The bug's eggs hatch and the nymphs mature and breed in the fig. The males die off and the females crawl out of the fig, getting covered in pollen, and fly off to other figs to repeat the cycle. Kinda complicated. If this were Kansas, I'd be screaming "intelligent design!"

Tomorrow I'll probably see a park on the other side of Paris. There also seems to be a French version of the museum exhibit "Gross!" about the human body and fun, kinda nasty facts about it. I'd read about this on CNN, so it might be cute to visit. It's not quite the sqme as visiting NY for the Gates in Central Park, but close enough for the likes of me.

As a quick final comment, I got my hands on a copy of the EU's constitution. I was expecting something like that of the States. Nope. It's hundreds of pages of dense legalese and internal references. No wonder people rejected it. It's impossible to understand what's going on!

I'm in Paris!

Quick note before I head out on the town. I'm back in Paris for a few days. I'm leaving here on Sunday for Germany, where I will spend a week at a conference at a place called Oberwolfach (it means something like "above the black forest"). It's nice to be back in Paris, since I haven't been here in months. Actually, I might not have been here in over a year. I'm staying with A. W.'s boyfriend, H. L. in an apartment which was occupied by another friend of mine before H. L. moved in. It's really cute, and he has done a lot with it.

Yesterday was my big travel day. I arrived in Paris a little after 7 AM, and I immediately went to change $ to €. The woman in line in front of me was taking for ever to exchange her 50€ note, and then I realized that the problem was that the teller didn't thing that it was a real note! She showed it to the other tellers, and then agreed, so she sent the woman on her way. I'd thought something a little fishy was going on, since the woman was "talking on her cellphone" but not making any noise...

I made it to H. L.'s apartment without inscident, and I took a brief nap after firing off a few e-mails to let people back home know I'd arrived safely. After sleeping for a bit, I went for a long walk around the western part of Paris with H. L., window shopping and visiting little parks. Today he has class, so I am going to wander around a good bit more, maybe seeing some other parks along the way.