Budapest and the end

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? 

Belgrade

 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.

Udine

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.