So, I am actually back in Christchurch now but I thought I better fill you in on the last week of the trip.
Mike and I spent some quality time getting lost in Belgrade.
Belgrade was full of awesome street art
We stumbled across a contemporary art gallery with a "non-exhibition". The gallery was meant to be refurbished in 2002 but those clever artists hadn't bothered to finish it, just opened the gallery-in-progress as the art piece. Genius!
Slightly sickening Moire patterns
Art?
I was determined to see the modern suspension bridge (that turned out to be much farther than it looked) and was also sure that there would be some kind of pedestrian crossing to an Eden-like park on the other side of the river, which there wasn't. On the bright side we got a really good look at the busy road and a more industrial part of town in the refreshingly brisk rain.
After I got shrunk
Mike flew home, I took a slow train through the sunny corn fields to Hungary and met up with my pal Adam in Budapest. Everyone had looked at me a little oddly when I mentioned this holiday destination but I still don't know why cos it's a really lovely city. Adam had met a local girl called Livia at an astronomy youth camp so she showed us around and fed us various sweets made out of cottage cheese. We went to a mineral spa which was a little odd, since the temperature was in the thirties but as the saying goes; spa is spa.
Szechenyi spa: Looks like a refreshing swimming pool, don't be fooled!
Budapest was full of fountains and people making out. I took a photo of every fountain we saw (Adam will make a collage) but not every pair of engaged lips because I embarrass easily.
Livia knew heaps of good stories about the city. There is this bridge called the chain bridge. The guy who designed it was so confident in his work he said if there were any mistakes in the finished product he would jump off the bridge. After it was done, some pedant pointed out the lions on it didn't have any tongues. Being a man of honour, he did jump, but also being a good swimmer he survived with everything but his pride intact.
The tongueless lion
Chillin and Illin
Adam said he learnt this trick from watching ever-prepared Japanese tourists in NZ.
While they were building one mall in Budapest, they casually found some mammoth bones. Europe eh!
The outside of the mall
Bits of mammoth
All good things must end, so I found myself in Frankfurt airport waiting for my plane homewards. As it turns out, Frankfurt airport is particularly dull so I snuck out to the city centre for a couple of hours to catch the last of the summer. It's a nice enough city and I wandered around the old town and - of course - ate a Frankfurter.
Occupy Frankfurt
Frankfurt dom
Well, that's it! Of course I left out heaps of stuff in order to have some yarns to tell you in person (and because I'm lazy). I don't think my Christchurch life is exciting enough to blog about but if you've enjoyed this, why not leave a comment to my professor pleading to fund me on another overseas adventure real soon?
The first impression of Belgrade after sunny and gorgeous Udine was kind of grim and smelly, but consequently I have begun to think: Belgrade's alright! People are cheerful and stay up late to drink cocktails and eat desserts on warm nights. They don't mind that I can't speak Serbian or even read the street signs. The town is on the confluence of the rivers Sava and Danube. Mike grumbled: "I thought it was supposed to be blue!" The whole region has a really complicated history involving constant wars with Turks, Byzantine, Romans and Austrians which makes it really interesting. Konstantin and I may have skipped an hour of the conference talks to visit the military museum today - but in our defence it's good to be reminded not to get so distracted with equations you forget about the important things. Tesla came from Belgrade and at one point suggested a super-weapon so destructive it would make war impossible - oh Tesla, you silly scientist!
By the way, has anyone noticed how handsome Tesla was? I may have swooned.
Turkish fort to hold off Austrians
Felt in a daze all weekend thanks to the mad train ride, but I never let axhaustion stop me tramping all round a city in the heat of the day before, and I'm not about to! Found some riverboat restaurants on the bank of the Sava in states of various repair, from quite nice to this:
The worst place to eat in belgrade
A complicated tussle in Kosovo in the 90s led to NATO bombing Belgrade in 1999. I thought it was earthquake damage but then I realised - just lame old humans being horrible to each other.
Buildings that I guess were bombed in 1999
The conference is super by the way - there are enough interesting ideas and people to easily make up for the intense confusion I feel a lot of the time.
Got to Udine in Italy and had to start working! Met up with my professor:
The gruelling work begins
The conference was a week long. Every day we would get up, go listen to a whole lot of scientists talking about the awesome stuff they were getting up to with lots of breaks to drink espresso and eat little cakes and ask each other what that last talk had been about and feel cheerfully bewildered. I had a big poster explaining my research which I had to stand beside and field tricky questions about, which is way easier than giving a talk.
Since physicists also enjoy learning about history, we went to Aquileia, a nearby Roman town. They have a church from about 400AD. The guide said that since people couldn't read they had to learn about Christianity through the mosaics, which turned out to be bizarrely abstract. For instance: A turtle is evil (because it can retreat into its shell) and a rooster is good (obviously?) and therefore, Jesus and all that?
DO YOU GET IT NOW?!
In order to do science and networking well it was necessary that we eat at really nice Italian restaurants and have a huge cake at the end of the conference.
everyone getting excited about the cake!
Took the overnight train to Beograd in Serbia where the next conference is! The overnight train was great if you like constantly being woken up to have your passport stamped for exotic countries like Slovenia and Croatia. Which, okay, I totally do.
A problem with staying in the middle of Venice is that I arrived sweaty and exhausted and then had to haul my suitcase over what seemed like an infinite number of charming arched bridges and cobbled pathways. Once I got to the hostel and dumped my stuff I went to bed early and despite all the lights being on and the bass thumping from the next room passed out immediately.
Everywhere looked like this
I could just swing my camera about wildly
Yum!
All there really is to do in Venice is look at the beautiful
architecture and the beautiful tourists and eat nice food. There are a lot of tourists, but they tend to trudge around one circuit of the city with wider paths (there are no cars, no room) so as soon as you veer off into a sidestreet you are alone. And it's impossible to find a part of venice that's not beautiful; the whole place is almost suspiciously charming.
The best pizza I've ever eaten
Venice is cool because it is also a functioning town wih locals walking around, who I found not at all jaded and sick of loud english speakers but happy and friendly. A lot of them have dogs! I tried to photograph every dog I saw but soon gave up; I still have a lot of blurry photos of dogs if you want to arrange a viewing.
Cane!
The afternoon got brutally hot so I headed back to the hostel, where I got chatting to some cool people: A baker from Portland who ad just been building a straw bale house in Croatia; a guy from Chicago who was working for google in Paris; a business student in Madrid originally from Hong Kong; a Californian who had quit her job at whole foods to go on a dance course in Austria. We hung out for the evening and the next day.
Paris! It's smelly and it's seedy and it's wonderful! I arrived in
the evening and stumbled my way to Netta and Fionn's lovely and tiny
studio apartment in the 12th arrondissement. We bought bread and cheese
and cider and wine and went down to the Seine.
I'm worried this blog doesn't have enough lonely planet vibe so: Great times for under ten bucks tip: Drinking 2 euro wine from a plastic cup on the bank of the seine is pretty close to perfect. After a little while Fionn suggested a walk - Paris at night is just so wonderful. The buildings are beautiful and lit up and the people are happy and the air is warm. We stumbled about and finally home clutching nutella and banana crepes.
Casual brass by the Seine
Paris!!!
Good times
Next morning was more crepes (home made this time) then the city.
Paris has a huge number of bike stands which you can hire out - Netta
lent me her card which meant I could pick up a bike, ride it for half an
hour, return it to another stand and go for a wander or get another
bike. Since loads of Parisians leave town for the summer the traffic was
easygoing and biking was lovely. I gawped at all the standard and most
magnificent sights - that big ol tower included - and came back to meet
fionn for lunch. He works as a bike-taxi mechanic beside Notre Dame.
While buying amazing falafel (ten buck tip, people) he struck up a
conversation with the next couple in line and one of them turned out to
be in the same punk band as his workmate! We ate together in the park,
where we met the most lovely and cheerful homeless guy - Fionn reckons
it's harder to get the grimmer sorts of drugs in Paris so the homeless
tend to be less terrifying and sad than in other big cities, which I
certainly noticed.
A goat chillin' at the Champs Elysees
OHH MAN I KNEW I FORGOT SOMETHING
Velib station in Paris
When Fionn went back to work I followed our new friends along to the Pantheon where I saw the Curie's graves (wooo!) and some guy "Voltaire" who is a writer or something I think. They went off to shotgun beers at Jim Morrison's grave but I decided to get some culture. Netta had told me if I was going to a gallery to go to the P and she was totally right - it is in this amazing building and the modern art collection from 1905-present is really class. It's arranged by time and movement which is helpful if like me you're kind of an uneducated yet enthusiastic creten. By this point it was getting late and I was le tired but pretty happy with the quantity and quality of my day-tour.
Pompidou
We went out for dinner and had: CREPES. With smoked salmon and cream cheese and lemon. Walked around a little but I felt pretty brutal so we came home in order for me to get up a bit too early for comfort to catch the train to Italy this morning. The view has been amazing though - castles on clifftops, rural towns, rivers and forests.
One of the many sites at which crepes were consumed
In the last two days in sheffield I became obsessed with seeing ALL THE SIGHTS so made Sophie go on a mad dash to all the museums and art galleries. Sheffield is famous for spoons and horrible working conditions.
Fascinating
It's lovely now though! We also found the best and coolest pub, called "the wick at both ends" so I have a lot of photos like this:
Woooo
Friday afternoon I hugged Sophie and caught a train to Manchester. I went to high school there for a year and I have a bunch of people who are amazingly welcoming and cool despite the fact I have seen them once in the last 8 years. I stayed with my mate Lav and her bloke Jay, who have two SUPER CUTE kids. Immediately Lucas, who is 3, took me around the whole house and showed off items such as "the couch", "pictures", "table" and "my pants". Sunday is the only day Jay and Lav don't work so they usually go somewhere - this time Jay picked the Eden Project - which is this amazin garden with the world's biggest greenhouses. The only problem was it's in cornwall, which is 300 miles from manchester. Jay didn't really see this as an issue "well, we'll just get up at 5am." We got back about 2am Monday - Lavern started work at 4am. Totally worth it though.
BIODOMES!!!
Cornwall beach
WOO SUNFLOWERS
Horsie!
The greenhouse (also known by the much cooler term "biodome") had a big metal platform suspended from the roof with a see through floor. Luckily there was one woman much more terrified than me that distracted the cool people from my nervous stumbling and quiet moans. It was amazing to see the whole place - unfortunately all my photos are hurriedly taken while I try not to think about plummeting to my death in the greenery.
The terrifying platform
From the platform
I caught up with a few other old mates and had dinner in the curry mile - more the 70 curry houses in one stretch of road - and the trafford centre, which is a ridiculously huge and tasteless mall. Well worth a visit even if you're not much of a mall type, it's still an amazing spectacle. One of my friends was having a weekend holiday - in the mall. Extreme.
I'm writing this on the train - be in Paris tonight.
Far be it from me to dictate what you do, but I think it will enhance your consumption of this post if you listen to this while you read it:
Sophie and I took the coach to London! It's a big and exciting city and it was full full full of people because of those running jumping swimmin games they have. The coach station is in Victoria so I had to put up with Sophie singing Victoria by the Kinks THE WHOLE WAY DOWN.
Nelson was really getting into the spirit of it
We trundled to Speaker's corner in Hyde park where people who have something to say get up on a soapbox (or stepladder) and say it LOUDLY. There was an African Englishman talking about racism, there was a guy talking about a guy who had gone to hell. There were a lot of hecklers. Apparently Karl Marx and George Orwell used to hang out there! Probably not together.
Like an internet forum but in real life
As Sophie found (to her despair) it's quite a lot harder to get sushi in England than New Zealand. In London you can buy it by the individual cellophane-wrapped piece. Ridiculous! We carefully unwrapped and consumed them in Gosvenor square.
DELICIOUS
Do you know what London has? The BIGGEST TOY SHOP IN THE WORLD. Do you know what Sophie and I are not? Grown-ups. So we were quite excited.
Like a kid in a toy shop
Hamleys (the toy shop) has got 5 floors. The top one is filled with lego! It had a life-sized lego queen which was mostly realistic except for the way she was smiling.
The real one would have just been a disappointment after this
That night we could have gone to the olympic closing ceremony except we were not organised enough to get tickets months in advance. I'm not upset it's better on telly anyway. I'M GLAD. Instead we went to Leicester square and watched improv comedy with the comedy store players (including Paul Merton!) who were so professionally hilarious I almost wept. We eventually limped back to our incredibly cheap and grim shared dorm room and slept fitfully on disposable pillowcases.
London at night!
London is full of marvels, like a 3-floor M&M shop with every colour that exists in the visible spectrum.
I wanted one of each but Sophie wouldn't let me
Next day we went to the national gallery (which was stunning and HUGE) and giggled at the many painted bottoms and exasperated Christs. We were both wearing brand new shoes so walking became slight agony but we stumbled to the natural history museum. We reviewed their earthquake room (as Sophie said, a lot more like being smoothly moved by hydraulic machinery than an earthquake) and looked at some rocks and skeletons and things. It was also huge and impressive, and all the galleries in london are free thanks to it being a socialist paradise :)
Slightly pained but the shoes look so good!
London is just full of beautiful buildings. We spent a lot of time wandering around posh areas looking at designer shops in our rumpled tshirts and enormous backpacks. Then onto a coach and back to Sheffield.
