Book of the hours

Christmas Eve I spent in midnight mass in Freiburg Cathedral, cold, and squished in on every side by Elliot and maybe a thousand other people, and seeing almost nothing, and hearing glorious ritual and music. There was also a tongue-in-cheek sermon by a rather charismatic priest, a slight twist on the standard New Zealand "Christmas is a time for God and family, so beware of consumerism": "Christmas is a time for God and family, so beware of overeating."

The very early hours of Christmas Day I spent outside and very cold, cycling to Emily's along a road that seemed endless. Christmas morning I spent waking Emily up (she has a fondness for dozing), and then making pancakes that changed on the fly to French toast when we realised that neither of us had bought milk before Christmas Eve shop closing. Christmas afternoon I spent visiting a really, really nice German family whom the university had acquired on its drive for holiday-day adopters for its lonely foreign students. We went for a walk in the Black Forest, and then I was showered with home-made Lebkuchen.

On Boxing Day Simon arrived from Princeton, safe, and with hair ruffled only to the correct degree, and intact apart from his suitcase, which British Airways had sent to London. (It was last heard of yesterday in Basel. With luck it will make it to Germany by the time he leaves.) On the day after Boxing Day we went shopping for replacement clothing, and studied ("studied") representation theory. Two days after Boxing Day, or rather yesterday, we left for Cologne, where we are still now.

It's a city of a million people. It's one of Germany's smaller big cities, and I picked it more or less at random to go see: it had Roman ruins and Rhine frontage, and less of a journey to get there than Berlin or Munich, and sillier and friendlier people than Frankfurt. We caught a lift up with Jutta, whom I'd found on the miraculous car-sharing website Mitfahrgelegenheit, the penniless German student's primary mode of transport. She was from a small town south of Freiburg originally, where she'd been staying with her parents over Christmas, but lived now in Cologne, where she was heading back to for New Year. She agreed that people from Cologne were silly and friendly: the local dialect is exciting, though she couldn't describe it, and on New Year the people stand on the bridges over the Rhine and let off fireworks. We went to the hostel and dropped off our bags.

We spent the evening with friends of friends, a middle-aged gay couple who run a dog-walking service in an eastern suburb. They were silly and friendly: they had a collection of miniature East German cars arranged on their mantelpiece, they served us pre-fizzed water, and we ended up chatting til midnight and crashing the night. They were also really interesting: we learned the German words for "nepotism", "deform", "taciturn" and "surveillance".

And today? The normal Saturday-sightseeing mix of sleeping in, wandering around, rushing through fantastic museums a little too close to closing time, and sitting exhausted in cathedrals pretending to pray. Dinner was a sausage Simon claims to consist of blood and fat, though I maintain it's only food colouring. Then we hung out in a cheap internet café with a loud Italian guy talking on Skype.

And then they all went home and had some toast. The end.

What we heard on high

It's Christmas Eve, and my 3000-resident "student village" has almost emptied for the holidays. Shops shut at 1 pm today, and will stay shut for the next two days. Despite having only the slightest dusting of snow out, it's bitterly, bitterly cold. I'm grateful for really powerful radiators, and for supermarket "Just Add Heat!" mulled wine.
Yesterday it wasn't cold. I went hiking in the snowy upper Black Forest, with Emily, and Elliot (American), and a couple of Kiwi tourist friends of friends. We took the rickety regional train 8 km east to Kirchzarten, the bus 5 km more to the village of St. Peter, and then walked 8 km from St. Peter to the next small village, St. Märgen. The route was high, white and full of Germans out for Sunday afternoon strolls. For the middle of a Forest, the countryside was surprisingly open, and surprisingly populated.

We reached St. Märgen in time to have a look around before the community choir carol concert we'd come for began. It was a small place (fewer than two thousand residents), with a lot of big decorative bed-and-breakfasts. I passed by a community notice board, according to which there was a lot going on. Nearer the church, we came across a sobering (Second World) war memorial: for St. Märgen's war casualties, it was unusual to be the only son in your family that was killed.

The carol concert was put on by the St. Märgen choir. It was amateur, but competent, and apart from an unfortunate trio of zitherists totally enjoyable. Elliot chatted up the locals with practiced smoothness, Emily and I burst into laughing at a heavily-Alemannic-accented rendition of Feliz Navidad ("We wanna vish-you-a Merry Christmas"), and we went home with O du fröhliche ringing in our ears.

I'm heading off now to hear midnight mass in the Freiburg cathedral, and then sleeping over at Emily's. Happy Christmas, everyone!

Under the weather, and really over the chill

I've been fighting a cold for the last few days, and consequently haven't been maintaining this diary in the manner to which it's become accustomed. A pity, too, since it means that my exploits downing tequila in antlers, and my long wait for 5 am (when McDonalds opens) in the Karlsruhe train station on the way back from Vienna, and my miraculous discovery of sparkly Christmas decorations in a back cupboard of the kitchen just hours after wishing for them, will go forever unblogged. Really a pity.

However, when times are tough, blogs must share in their writers' sufferings -- and I know mine bears its tribulations willingly. Thanks, darling.

Anyway, what I've been doing too much of this week to ignore -- apart from sneezing, and beating someone (he knows who he is) at internet Scrabble -- is goofing off with my classmates in honour of Christmas. On Wednesday afternoon, most of the way up the four flights of stairs to representation theory, I encountered Janine, who's also in the class, coming down. "Too boring to stay?" I wondered. No: the tutorial had been cancelled, by unanimous vote, in favour of a class trip to the Christmas market. We headed over, crocodile formation, and drank mulled wine in what even the Germans considered to be a cold breeze for an hour and a half.

After forty minutes' pretence of work, the same thing happened in differential geometry on Thursday. On Friday was our model theory tutorial, and there the celebrations had even been planned beforehand: everyone brought a plate of Lebkuchen, and we made tea. I should mention, in view of previous remarks, that the Lebkuchen produced by our mostly-male class were quite fabulous -- enough to make Emily and my jam circles (the result of a four-hour Wednesday bakeathon) look rather frumpy. And that only some of them were store-bought.

Somehow, I find Christmas festivities at university just indescribably cute. But I suppose it's really only the novelty: I've spend half my schooling in a country too fiercely multicultural for public Christmasses, and the rest in one where (summer) holidays start too many weeks beforehand for them to make sense.

Conversations III

With Leander, a classmate: The German system of encouraging, and often drafting, people into a year of military or civil service immediately after high school isn't restrictive, it's character-building. Most people serve in the army or work in kindergartens or rest homes -- but the German government sent him to the Jewish community in Prague, where he spent his Freiwilliges Soziales Jahr as general factotum for some elderly Holocaust survivors. He ran errands for them, and helped with meals, and played lots of games of chess. They got on together quite well.

With Stefan, a local on exchange-student pastoral care duty: No, it's not true that German men are more domesticated than most. The lovely fluffy Black Forest cake that he brought to our potluck dinner? Doesn't count, he learned it at his mother's knee. My floormates that cook gorgeous meals for their girlfriends? Well, they're cooking for their girlfriends. My floormates that cook gorgeous meals for themselves? Well, they're students, and it's cheaper than eating out. (My floormates that spontaneously wash other people's piles of dishes, and that spend afternoons baking cookies, and that cook gorgeous meals for themselves, using private stocks of obscure vegetables and personal kitchen utensils kept apart from the common hoard, and wearing big efficient-looking aprons? I didn't mention this; I doubted he'd be able to respond.)

My own theory, by the way, is that men are indeed on average somewhat more domestic in Germany than elsewhere. The only New Zealand guy friend I've ever known to bake was gay. But I suspect that because the guys I know here are older than the ones I know in New Zealand, my data is biassed.

With Emily: How on earth will we be able to break the news to our schools back home when we fail our horrible representation theory paper? But of course, since our results notices will be in German, maybe we won't have to. Having the result for one class different from that for the others might look suspicious, though. Perhaps the best chance for deception would be to fail all three.

I'm going to Vienna again (briefly) this weekend. I'll be local for Christmas, but Simon's coming from Princeton to visit over New Year, and we're wandering north. People with great sightseeing suggestions or long-lost friends for us, as far as Koblenz or Cologne, should speak now (and please, do!), or forever hold their pieces.

Monday morning, maths department

I've been keeping quiet about it here lately -- but German's hard, and keyword-spotting has its limits. Survival doesn't necessarily entail competence. And of course this blog thrives on total honesty. So, to destroy any illusions that have formed . . . well, I suspect that when speaking German I still typically sound like a cross between a caveman and a person with ADD.

Like, with a classmate yesterday,

Clemens: Hey, have you seen David?

me: Heya. Who? What?

clem: David, you know, he's in the differential geometry course too. I was just looking for him there.

me: Diffgeo? Oh, yes, I know I saw you in there a second ago, but that was just to hand in my assignment. I'm actually skipping the lecture there today to go finish my model theory assignment for later this afternoon.

clem: Ah. No, I'm looking for David. He's IN the differential geometry course. He's in representation theory with us too. You know David, you speak to him sometimes, don't you?

me: Ohhh -- yes, I know I sometimes speak up in class in representation theory. I know it's a pain for everyone else, since my German's so bad. But it's a hard course, and I need to ask questions sometimes, even if it takes the tutor ages to work out what I'm trying to say . . . . I hope it doesn't get too much on your nerves . . . .

clem: No, don't worry about it. But it's David I'm after just now. You know each other, don't you? He told me your last name, it's very funny!

me : Aha! Yes, my last name . . . yes, I've been getting teased about it for years.

clem: Haha. I'm not surprised. But, er, anyway, I should go find David. You haven't seen him, I guess? See you later.

me: Oh -- David, you say? No, I haven't seen him. Ciao then.

But I promise, my comprehension has been getting better. For example, it's good enough now to occasionally overhear things in the supermarket. Like, last night,

woman whose purchase included several kilograms of birdseed: Aagh, these seeds are spilling everywhere!

check-out lady: Here, wrap up those packets in this bag. You don't want to walk through town looking like Hansel and Gretel, do you?

A sphere-packing problem

If Alsace is everywhere in view from Strasbourg Cathedral's spire


and if the corresponding proposition holds for every diocese

then there exists either some spot that belongs to two dioceses, or some spot that belongs to none.

The end of some loose ends

Caught up in errand-running and Christmas shopping and Christmas-wards socialising in the last week, I've been experiencing more of everyday life than usual. Some of it's fun. Among the mundane things I shall miss from Germany are:

• bicycles and thermoses
• self-seating in restaurants
• self-vegetable-weighing and self-grocery-bag-providing in supermarkets
• wearing hair long and loose and frizzy
  
• crumbly spongey sandy-feeling public toilet soap
• shop assistants who get rid of you by answering "you're welcome" before you've had a chance to say "thank you"

Among the mundane things I shan't miss from Germany are:

• unreliable student-dorm internet that's been broken for the last four days

Oh well. Some of the people who frequent internet cafés late on Saturday nights are quite interesting.

Another Friday, another visit to the bicycle collective. Yesterday I went in hopes of repairing the lumpiness of my bike's gait. It turned out, surprisingly enough, to derive from a flat tire. I fixed it, and stayed on to straighten my handlebars, re-wire my back light, and replace the generator that powers it. Now the bike just flies! And of course with the newly-working lights it's visible for miles. I've been celebrating by temporarily eschewing the trams.

Today I daytripped to Strasbourg with a couple of exchange-student friends, to see the Christmas market there. It was lovely -- though a bit more expensive and a lot more crowded than the little Colmar one. The Strasbourg cathedral is just as impressive the second time round.

And I can see why a classmate of mine (whose father comes from Alsace-when-it-was-German) told me rather sentimentally the other day that Alsace is "everywhere in view from Strasbourg Cathedral's spire".

Away with the fairytales

“Flemish people like having things nice,” said Gloria, and so it proved. I was in Belgium for the weekend, visiting her – an old friend of my father’s – in Oostende and being shown the area around, and wherever we went it was prosperous and pretty.

Like the Netherlands, it’s a land where the brick is king. Brick houses, brick bridges, bricky-like cobblestone alleys – even brick churches, which threw me for a bit, because as well as being cute they look suspiciously as if they’re made of Lego. (The traditional staircase shape for the roofs of buildings helps keep up the illusion.) It also rains a lot, which I won’t hold against it, since it’s raining a lot in Germany at the moment too.

Friday night was in Oostende, a medium-sized city located by the sea, and (I hear) not really at all to the east of Westende. Saturday was spent in Brugge, a fairytale-pretty medieval town – guildhouse, turrets, moat, cathedrals, canal-front hospital (naturally all in brick). Oddly enough, my ability to spend hours wandering through nice old streets hasn't at all worsened with practice. Appropriately, we checked in at the oldest pub in Brugge. Sausages with mustard are also traditional, it seems – anyway, they go well with cherry beer. And Saturday night I stayed in their country house, four hundred years old, multi-staircased, high-ceilinged.

Of course, having towns full of impeccably-kept-up gorgeous old buildings instead of of low-maintenance new ones costs money, and so does supporting vast numbers of breweries and confectioners and lace-makers, and so does teaching every schoolchild three foreign languages. I checked, later, and Belgium is indeed a very well-off little country. Why? Wikipedia answers that Belgium exports chemicals, auto parts, finished diamonds, and other things that sound similarly profitable. It doesn’t address the question of why such industries are so keen to install themselves in such a sweet wee place. But – “Flemish people work hard,” said Gloria – and maybe that explains it.

And, Flemish people are patriotic – towards Flanders, that is. There’s a slight constitutional crisis in Belgium at the moment that I wish I knew more about, something to do with elections, and tensions between Dutch-speaking Flanders and the French-speaking part Wallonia, and a latent separatist movement. On Sunday Gloria took me to Flanders Fields, and we went through a museum dedicated to the First World War. It was sombering. It was also fiercely pro-Flemish.

Sunday night railway inevitabilities:

• A train is overbooked.
• A train is late. (Yes, even in Germany. Even in Switzerland, I bet.)
• It’s raining.
• There’s a pair of khaki’d army guys on the way back from weekend leave.
• Your neighbour on the first train has been visiting her grandchildren over the weekend.
• Your stopover’s too short to accept your nice-looking second neighbour’s suggestion of “a drink, somewhere?”
• Your smiley third neighbour has taken the seat allocated to you.
• Your fourth neighbour is asleep.

Out. About.

One of the nice things about missing train connections is that you get to see small bits of new cities. I'm stranded in Aachen at the moment for an hour on the way to Belgium for the weekend. I headed straight and slightly left from the train station, and within a few minutes discovered . . . . a giant statue of a horse . . . . and a lot of neat classical whitish-blocky-stone buildings with pretty windows. It was as much like Paris as Freiburg -- unsurprising, considering the map.

I also found lots of the familiar German chain stores that already inspire a sense of comfort in me: banks (Dresdnerbank, Commerzbank, Sparkasse), pharmacies (DM, Schlecker), groceries (Basic, the "frische Bio-Supermarkt"). And had time to blog about it before catching the train out.

Today in class, while explaining the solution to a problem on the last model-theory assignment, my tutor was heard to mumble, "Iteration is good, iteration is good, iteration is good . . . ."

Christmas come early

I spent today in Colmar, in France. It's a very pretty Alsatian country town of seventy thousand people. I was there to see its famous Christmas market, one of the first to open for the year. Judging from Wikipedia, most other people who end up in Colmar are there for the same reason.
By very pretty, I mean that even the suburban residential neighbourhood we (Emily and I) accidentally wandered through made our eyes pop, and also our brains tickle. (Why were the roofs so pointy? Indeed, practically equilateral . . . . Were those actually heart-shaped holes that we'd just seen in that house's window shutters? And who, on earth, was affording to live in these streets and streets of rather quaint old mansions?)

By Christmas market, I mean what Der Spiegel describes as "an oversized crafts and bake sale": shiny balls on every evergreen in town, stalls selling Christmas toys and deca-ations and cakes and biscuits and cheeses, a nativity, mulled wine. We wandered, and got plump off free samples. I encountered a craft stand selling framed, illuminated nameplates, charming because of the funny French first names -- Sandrine, Didier, Enzo, Aude -- they were providing for. And before heading home we also hit the coffee shops (for Emily), the bookshops (for me), and the cathedral (for the sake of the amazing stone it's constructed from, red and brown and bluish-grey as well as pink, that makes it look like Freiburg or Strasbourg gone quilting).

Further to last post's complaints on workload, I should mention that perhaps I was being unreasonable. Or naive. I'm beginning to realise that maybe Emily and I are the only ones in the classes who actually do all the homework.

• Helene submits assignments jointly with a friend, and the tutor doesn't bat an eyelid.
• Philippe only bothered doing one question of model theory last week, because he was "busy".
• Leander's assignments are typically a couple of pages long; either his writing's five times smaller than mine, or he makes judicious skips.
• Achim does no homework whatsoever; he's going to be assessed on the course later on, during his final Magister examination, and only needs to know the material well enough to withstand ten minutes' oral questioning.

Of course the assignments are a delightful challenge. But slacking's increasingly tempting.

Revenge of the Hausaufgaben

The week's been full. I've been introduced to a still cheaper spaghetti restaurant. I've discovered that Terry Pratchett's a good solvent for model theory. I've learned the wonderful word Reiseweltmeister ("world-champions-at-travelling"), and also that the Germans are them. And I've enriched a friend's Thanksgiving dinner with pumpkin pies worthy of my mother. But I'm afraid the headline of the last few days goes along the lines of "The Work Strikes Back". For, trust me, it does . . . .

It's just that it keeps going, and going, and going! And my tender New Zealand caffeine-absorption habits aren't ready for it. This Monday was the first time that a classmate of mine has ever expressed surprise that fourteen hours of train journey plus a Sunday all-nighter was enough time for me to do all the weekend's homework. This semester's the first time I can ever imagine not snorting with laughter at such a comment.

I can't really complain -- the exercises are often hard and usually interesting. Or at least I find them so, which I suppose means that I need them. And if I need so much more effort to absorb the stuff from my lectures, I can only assume that we're moving much, much faster than I'm used to at home.

Of course, the mystery presents itself: so many more maths students at each uni, so many more years studying for each student, so much more stuff learnt on average each year -- what's Germany going to do with so many more people per capita, all up, who can define a Borel measure or eliminate quantifiers? (Or, perhaps -- how is New Zealand managing to survive without them?) According to Helene, they all go into "er, business, or something". On the other hand, no one I've chatted to has had particularly clear plans for survival after uni, even the ones who'll be done in a semester or two.

Naturally, I'd never question why anyone would want to learn lots of beautiful mathematics. But it's still rather curious.

A happy hop to Holland

The Lonely Planet entry on the Netherlands (which, as always, I spent part of the train ride there reading) was brilliant. The cheapest sleep in Amsterdam is the "Hans Brinker Budget Hotel". The country's liberal attitudes on almost everything have begun to conflict: banning smoking in bars restricts freedom of weed. And Amsterdam's very picturesque, but you should stay away from canal edges once you've had a few drinks.

On arrival I installed myself in a hostel and went to bed. I had a day and a half for sightseeing, seven hours' train trip there and seven hours back taking up the rest of my weekend, so on Saturday I was up early for my day in Amsterdam.

My first destination in the morning was the Rijksmuseum, and accordingly from the city centre I headed south. Walking, I got my first taste of Amsterdam. Apart from the canals, which I'd expected, I discovered it to be a city that specialises in brick buildings of various shades of brown, all with chunky white windowframes in not-quite-perfect alignment that make it feel like a drawing by a kindergartener. It was rather drab, and like nowhere I've seen so far in Europe, but as charming as I'd been told.

The canals, aside from being pretty, force a labyrinthine layout on the place. After forty minutes of walking straight, I ended up -- to my great surprise -- exactly at the train station where I'd started. Resorting to the street map in Lonely Planet, I headed south again, more carefully, and eventually made it to the museum.

So I found out about what the Netherlands has done with itself for the last four hundred years, looked at some Rembrandts, and then occupied myself outside for the rest of the day, getting back to the hostel lateish that evening. I spent some time in the afternoon browsing in a tiny secondhand bookshop, enjoying being in a country whose national language is minor enough for the selection of English reading material to be extensive. I found a wonderful history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North American attempts at demography. (Quoting a guide for new immigrants from Europe: "In the old countries an average family has perhaps four births; in America the figure must be more like eight. Now, if we assume that half of these births reach adulthood . . . .")

On Sunday I went to the (Lonely Planet: "refreshing and vibrant") town of Leiden, slightly south of Amsterdam, to meet Birgit, whom I know from Vietnam, for a few hours of sightseeing and deadpan harebrained nonsense. She's doing a Ph.D. at the university there, which is one of the Netherlands' largest. We climbed up to a circular fortress on a mound near the town centre which was probably high enough to qualify in Netherlands parlance as a hill. Then we nosed through the university (avoiding the maths building, which according to Birgit confirms my theory that every building housing mathematicians is ugly).

I heard about the need to double- or triple-lock even the oldest bikes for safeguard against theft, the cheap government-subsidised housing in Leiden which takes only seven years on the waiting list to obtain, and the Dutch Sinterklaas who rides a white horse onto rooftops and is accompanied by by a troop of Black Petes (pictured below, as seen in toyshop window).We went to the local museum, where I found out what the Netherlands did with itself for the ten thousand years immediately preceeding the last four hundred. (It made ceramic pots, of increasingly large size.) Then we climbed up a windmill. Then I had to hurry back to Amsterdam to catch the train back to Germany.

So delightful . . . .

And today it really did snow!
Though not too much; people were still attempting to defend themselves with umbrellas.

Getting colder

Today -- very briefly -- it snowed! It was midafternoon; I was sitting in the maths library reading about cotangent bundles; the rain suddenly seemed rather loud, and I looked out the window and saw it was hail. A couple of minutes later the hail turned white and slow and silent, and (abandoning all pretence of work) I watched it drift down. But before it had lasted long enough to stop melting on the ground, it had stopped snowing altogether, and we were back to our long rainy week.

When it started snowing, I'd pointed it out excitedly to the girl sitting next to me in the library, and a conversation of my usual random-chat-with-strangers style ensued: she said things, I listened carefully for key words, and then tried to make replies that would follow sensibly from as many of the things she might have meant as possible. (There's no point asking someone you'll never see again to repeat casual pleasantries.) I'm getting better at the technique; this exchange lasted a good ninety seconds.

I have these sorts of chats fairly frequently. Contrary to popular belief, people seem to strike up conversations with strangers more often in Germany than in nice little friendly New Zealand. Of course it's possible that I'm just more conscious of it here, because of the need to snap to mental attention to understand well enough to reply. But I think the difference is in the reality as well as in my noticing it. I can't remember the last time that a man on an Auckland bus exclaimed to everyone in earshot how crowded it was, or that a woman passing me in a Christchurch supermarket made a comment on the available pasta varieties.

The snow may not be quite here, but winter habits are settling in. My classmate Leander turned up to model theory today with a thermos of tea and the most wonderful sleet-protection hat (the photo's not mine, unfortunately, but it looked almost the same). I find myself reluctant to venture outside, and perhaps everyone else is too. My 9 am lecture today was suspiciously empty. Emily, my Canadian exchange-student buddy, appeared later, just in time for our second class. I reassured her that she wasn't the only truant: "I was the first person to arrive in class this morning," I began, and -- knowing my unpunctual tendencies -- she needed hear no more.

In which our Heroine discovers that her bicycle is rotten to the core

I went to the bicycle collective again yesterday, hoping to fix a stiffness in my bike's joints that made the handlebars very difficult to turn. The problem had developed quite suddenly this week, and I imagined it should be easy enough to fix -- perhaps a bit of grease in the steering mechanism, and then voila! As I wheeled my bike over, I was daydreaming peacefully about how I'd spend the rest of my afternoon.

Alas, crippling rust was discovered in hidden places; fixing the joint turned out to require the total replacement of a small but crucial metal cylinder deep inside my bike's front bar and of two ball-bearing mechanisms, and took three painstaking hours. The bicycle mechanic supervising was the same patient, rather taciturn little man as last time. I'm quite proud of the mess my bike must have been in for the repair to cause him such apparent enjoyment. At any rate, on at least three occasions he made the cheerful discovery that the problem wasn't what he'd thought, but actually something considerably subtler.

His instructions were half in German, half in broken English. I was pleased to find that the mathematical German vocabulary I've been acquiring lately is helpful for bicycle mechanics: such phrases as "straight" and "separating" and "hold fixed" carry over directly. The optimistic meaning of "relatively easily" is also a common feature.

Let them eat cake

No class on Tuesdays. I slept very late, did a little work and then set out in pouring rain to meet a couple of exchange-student friends in town for afternoon tea. Being my kind of girls, they were also happy to have an excuse to eat sweet. We went to a confectionery shop promising "Freiburger Spezialitäten".

Inside it was warm and cramped. There were lace curtains at the windows, wood on the floor, and two stories of small tables well full of (mostly middle-aged and older) patrons. At the counter were shelves and shelves of elegant, and hugely varied, and very complicated, cakes and chocolates. Altogether it felt rather fussy. It was as if everyone involved were trying to rationalise their bestial lust for gluctose, by colluding to make the enjoyment of chocolate a very complex business. Maybe if you construct an elaborate ritual around the eating of sugar you strengthen the psychological barrier against overindulging.

Anyway, we picked out our eats, and found a table upstairs, and passed a happy half-hour or so. Fulfilling a months-old promise to myself, I had a slice of Black Forest cake: layered cream and chocolate, rather fluffier in texture than I expected, and yummy and rich. Mmmmm. It was with difficulty that I brought myself to go back out into the rain.

My dinner later consisted almost entirely of vegetables.

I was mildly disconcerted to hear the pair of elderly women next to us in the café addressing each other as "du". I've gotten used to using the informal German second-person with people my own age, but the formal -- at uni and in offices and shops -- whenever I speak to adults. I suppose it's surprising to remember that grown-ups can have friends, too.

Conversations II

With Anna, a classmate: It's nice that I'm managing to understand the differential geometry lecturer's German. Everyone else in the class is having trouble with it -- he's from somewhere anglophone and has a difficult accent. Of course, my German accent is also often incomprehensible. Maybe the two cancel out.

With Helene, another classmate: I'm from New Zealand? That's interesting. Her flatmate last semester was from New Zealand too -- or at least he claimed to be; there was a rumour that he was actually British. He never spoke to her, so she wouldn't know.

With Max, my floormate, a law student: How many people live in New Zealand? . . . . Oh, that's very sweet. So, er, what are the job opportunities like for [stifled laughter] New Zealand law students?

Today after class I went shopping for a warm winter jacket, having discovered that cycling in a long coat is rather less picturesque than expected. My success was rapid; I wasn't in a mood for deliberation. This weekend I'm going to visit Bad Liebenzell, a small town in the Black Forest about an hour from here.

I shall conclude this post by confirming that yes, everything's better in Germany, even the safe-sex campaigns. (Click to see properly.)

On autopilot

The stack of maths-to-be-done (part heavy coursework, part Lie groups catch-up) continues, and I'm lovin' it. Hard problems! Abstract generalisations! Subtle distinctions! And a marvellous simplification of my life; no obligations to deal with anything else, since the math backlog's obviously the priority. It's a glorious and exhilarating state of mind, and welcome. I haven't felt this way for -- well, at least a couple of months.

As always, my concentration comes in long but sometimes elusive blocks. The resulting devotion-of-self-to-mathematics is neither complete nor structured. I've spent plenty of time procrastinating (lying fallow, I call it). I've also been having very late nights -- it's easier just to keep going -- resulting in a characteristic alternation between the Thinking Days and the Others.

Today, for example, was one of the Others. I got up for school after not-too-many hours' sleep. The four hours of lectures in the morning were okay, the four hours of tutorials in the afternoon a bit more trying. By the last couple, my mind was accepting little other than disconnected daydreams of Prague and bicycles and Takapuna Beach. I did, however, emerge from my stupor on occasion, usually to make helpful suggestions ("direct product of two circles", "Pascal's triangle") to the tutors as they struggled with solutions to the exercises they were meant to be demonstrating.

Of course, I'm still in an exotic foreign country. There's no Halloween and no Fifth of November, but to mark All Saints' Day tomorrow there's a public holiday -- my second in less than a month. Germany loves opportunities to shut up shop. (Did I mention that shops close on Sundays here, too?)

But people's errands are just redirected to the days before and after. University tutorials are too, hence today's über-long day at school. So I suspect that the total time spent on useful activity isn't really varied, but rather just made more irregular in its distribution . . . .

My kind of country.

Just procrastination . . . .

No, life's not perfect, even in Germany. Like,

• I split my time between feeling frustrated, because I'm talking in German; feeling guilty, because I'm talking in English; and feeling lonely, because I'm not talking to anyone. It isn't enough to seriously dampen my spirits, but it is enough to make me grateful for the internet and the friendly people who talk to me through the internet.
  
• Work's already plentiful and hard -- though this is of course also a good thing, because it's stimulating. (For you mathematicians, here's a nice problem from my half-finished model theory assignment, due tomorrow: prove that there exist uncountably many linear orderings of a countable set of elements.)

I went out hiking in the Black Forest yesterday with my Canadian exchange-student friend Emily, round Schauinsland, the highest peak. We climbed halfway up, got tired, and wandered back down, feeling decidedly superior to the tourists who were taking the six-minute cable car to the top.

Bicycle, bicycle

This post is a tale of quest and fulfillment.

Soon after arriving in Freiburg, I started yearning for a bicycle. Since I can get around perfectly well with my Semesterticket for the trams, this whim wasn't really utilitarian in origin. I'll attribute it partly to the desire for belonging (since it feels like everyone here cycles -- bicycles on streets here frequently outnumber cars, and the front of my building looks like this) and partly to the hope of improving my self-image by association (since cycling's so picturesque here -- professors with books; housewives with baskets of groceries; girls in long coats, hair streaming helmetless in the wind).

Anyway, rational or not, I wanted a bike, but the secondhand shops I visited quoted me terrifying prices. I resigned myself to a stable and comfortable transportational existence on the Straβenbahnen -- and then heard by chance last week that there was going to be a municipal bicycle auction that Saturday in Müllheim, a tiny agricultural-centre town twenty kilometres south of Freiburg.

So, very early that Saturday, I headed along the main Mannheim-Basel train line down to Müllheim. There were plenty of bikes, presumably rescued from the clutches of gangs of bicycle-stealing gangsters. Caught up in the exhiliration of my first real-life auction and the excitement of finding prices a tenth of the ones in shops and the optimism that results from a general ignorance of possible pitfalls, I quickly obtained a solid-looking green specimen, and then headed back to Freiburg.

It was only later that I discovered that the thing had no brakes. More precisely, it had brakes, but the brake-wire had snapped, or been cut, so that pulling the brake-lever had no effect. At any rate, it was not really a bicycle, but rather a thing that had the potential to become one.

I put the almost-bicycle in the sheds out front of my residence, and forgot about it in the excitement of first classes.

Today, in the lecture-free Friday afternoon which is a delightful feature of my studies here, I got around to paying it some attention again, and took it in to a shop I'd heard of through the grapevine. The shop was said to be cheap, which was what attracted me to it. And indeed it was. For it turned out to be essentially just a large, well-stocked workshop, that anyone can use for a trivial hourly rate, called a bicycle "collective" because you do the repairs yourself, with help (in my case, lots of it) from the wise people in charge. It was in a courtyard off the main street, squished in with a community art studio and a secondhand-clothing shop and suchlike hippy-type businesses, and it had that familiar rather alternative atmosphere that's generated among people who really love their bicycles.

It was delightfully full. The other customers were all under 35, otherwise seemingly a random sampling of Freiburg's population. I spent an hour and a half replacing the wire and lever of my brake, feeling as if I was being initiated into true German-ness, and then cycled home.

First day of school

At breakfast, I joked to Achim that today would be "der Moment der Wahrheit". The literal English translation is "the moment of truth", and Achim's English is perfect enough for him to know exactly what I meant. But he didn't even laugh. It seems the phrase is used in German too, and so I'd stumbled into idiomatic Deutsch in spite of myself.

So I went happily off to my first day of lectures in Germany, and found that the truth isn't actually that bad. Depending on the clarity of the lecturer's voice, my comprehension can be anywhere from almost everything he (always he, so far) says to almost nothing. And I haven't yet managed to get hold of textbooks. But the blackboard is my saviour. Like in New Zealand mathematics courses, the exposition proceeds in neat "Definition"-"Lemma"-"Corollary"-"Example" format, and everything gets written on the board; once it's there, I can squint and re-read it and mentally translate it at leisure. My other great help is that the German vocabulary used is very limited, and often the same as in English anyway.

So I may spend less time than expected struggling with the language, and be able to devote myself mostly to struggling with the mathematics. The greatest struggling will be with my paper on representations of compact Lie groups. I'm taking it here because nothing much similar's offered in Auckland. Consequently, however, my background in the area is somewhat skimpy.

Lectures are two hours long, with a break of ten or fifteen minutes in the middle. I had three lectures today, and was at uni from nine til six. Class sizes are huge, by New Zealand standards: thirty to sixty students in courses whose Auckland equivalents might have five. In anticipation of German winters, there's a coat rack at the back of every classroom.

There's an lecturer (originally European) in Auckland who's beloved for his habit of washing the blackboard with a bucket of water after every lecture he gives. Here, however, it's the norm. And every lecture room comes equipped with two little thingamabobs: one like a mop, for washing the board, and one like a razor, to scrape off the excess water afterwards. Drips form, and run down the side of the blade-thing as it's pulled across the board, collecting in a long skinny puddle on the floor underneath.

At the end of each lecture there's a round of desk-thumping, to signal applause.

Amateur economics

Some things, like milk and meat and vegetables, are more expensive in Germany than in New Zealand. Some things, like books and cell phones and booze, are cheaper. On average the costs for various goods and services seem roughly the same.

And the standard of living in Germany -- by blunt economic measure, the amount of these goods and services that the average person consumes -- seems roughly the same as well. It makes you wonder where all Germany's extra $10,261 GDP per capita goes. A recent theory of mine (caveat: real Germans are skeptical) suggests that it goes to provide the average German citizen with perhaps three years more "holiday" time -- in the form of education and society-sanctioned leisure -- than is enjoyed by the average New Zealander.

The evidence, at least, is friendly: Germans start school a year older; they have the same total thirteen years; German guys then have a year of compulsory civil service, which some German girls choose to do too. Then, for those intending to go to university eventually, the gap-year tradition is also more firmly entrenched. And so (I discovered to my surprise at Maths Orientation), most first-year university students are 20 or 21 -- older than me. They then stick around uni longer, since most degrees -- science, arts, law -- take five years rather than four or three (although this is changing). So by the time they start "proper jobs", Germans will be considerably older than their New Zealand counterparts.

(My German friends have tended to rubbish this theory, instead blaming the discrepancy on European Union membership fees or on support payments to the old East Germany.)

Even if it doesn't singlehandedly reduce German's standard of living to that of New Zealand, the older student population does have one noticeable effect: the student residences are clearly built to house semi-adults rather than teenagers. The bedrooms are much bigger. They're also much emptier, and furnished by their tenants. The walls are thicker. (Fortunately.) Kitchens are provided, to be cleaned by student elbow-grease, and students cook (or not) for themselves. The university authorities act more like normal landlords would -- you lease a room for six months at a time, with first dibs on the room when the lease ends, so that students often never move out of their initial spot. When they go, they often leave things behind, which no one bothers to dispose of; hence the collections of kitchen utensils in the cupboards are really extensive, and so are the collections of junk on the balcony.
It's very comfortable, and I can't help wishing the New Zealand government would make similar efforts to provide cheap and efficient and easy housing for its youth.

Conversations

With Hans, who lives on my floor in the hostel: The English word "load" is only used in the context of putting stuff onto something portable. You can't load a house, for instance. The corresponding German word is "einladen", but it has no such restrictions. How would you translate into English a German sentence about einladen-ing some furniture into your new home? You'd have to resort to some generic word like "move".

With Ece, an exchange-student friend from Turkey: Her German got as good as it is from attending at a German-language high school. No, they're not at all unusual in Turkey. Weak Turkish high-school students go to trade schools; good ones go to grammar schools, where they get prepared for university. The language of instruction in a grammar school is always something other than Turkish. There's an exam at the end of primary school that determines which type you'll be sent to.

But the exam decides not only what type of high school, but also exactly which -- the best students go to the English-language schools, the next best to the German ones, the next best to French and the very worst good students to (that natural language for slackers,) Spanish.

With Achim, another floor-mate: Yes, Germany has a lot more smokers than New Zealand. (Achim lived in New Zealand last year for six months.) Maybe it's because the New Zealand government (and the Australian and American and British ones too) is a lot more agressively anti-smoking than European ones. The frequency of corner cigarette-machines (like chocolate or Coke machines in New Zealand) might also have something to do with it. Constant temptation's hard to resist.

I also played Mafia in German yesterday night. (This is a cult math-student game of psychological manipulation. At an IMO, you will usually play your first Mafia round within five hours of arrival. It should come as no suprise to hear that my Mafia games here arose during Math Orientation.) I learned a few useful German words ("dead", "detective", "murderer"), but otherwise understood almost nothing.

I was by necessity one of the silent players I always despised in English-language Mafia, who vote when needed but never say a word. On the other hand, it was a great chance for me to test the folk theorem, often cited by those about to make improbable accusations, about it being "not people's words that matter, just their faces and voices . . . ." (Result: It's balderdash.)

End of the good times

The dull fortnight spent navigating German educational bureaucracy has had some use, it seems: International Orientation began today, and I could understand the speakers close to half of the time. I'm now freshly stocked with data on the population of the university (25,000), the major sources of international students (China, Bulgaria, the US), the locations of free campus internet (library, departmental labs) and the price of the university cinema (1.50 €). They had free pretzels at orientation, too!

At the moment, my other metric for the quality of my German is how often I understand when a stranger makes some quick casual comment. I still usually don't, but I picked up one today ("that cash machine is out of order") and even managed to reply.

I caught an early train back to Freiburg this morning from Paris, where I'd stayed over the weekend for what will be my last Touristic Adventure for a while. I saw all sorts of marvellous things --

• a neighbourhood full of streets named after mathematicians
• the France-England RWC semi-final, projected onto a huge screen behind the Eiffel Tower, in a thousands-strong French mob first attentive, then impatient, then sullen
• Van Goghs and Cézannes, in real life
• a high-end department store being ransacked by autumn-season-sale Paris crowds.

I feel tired and frivolous from all the sightseeing, though, and am rather looking forward to lectures and security and structure.

Bonus! insider travel tip: To avoid paying necessary surcharges, feign sleep when the train's ticket inspector passes your row.

Strasbourg highlights

On my second day in Strasbourg I went to Mass, continuing a run of three consecutive cathedrals and three consecutive Sundays. (I'm not Catholic, just curious.) The Prague Mass had been subdued: few people, an empty half-church roped off. The Vienna one had an oddly cosy feel, with lots of parish notices (German, half-understood) at the end, and so much artwork in the cathedral that the walls and pillars were almost hidden.

The Mass in Strasbourg was the most spectacular. The cathedral was huge and medieval and bare, and of stone a beautiful pink. The congregation was large; the singing was loud and clear (helped, I suspect, by some sort of hidden microphone and boom box); the organ music was more and better than elsewhere. A man with no legs came on a stretcher, and the big front doors (usually not used) swung open for him.

Afterwards I went sculpture-seeing in the museum. Among the jumble of stonework salvaged from churches and abbeys now collapsed was a scene labelled "Temptation, and the two foolish maidens, and the four wise ones". Temptation was offering an apple; the two foolish maidens were holding upside-down egg cups and the four wise ones were holding ones the right way up. I'd love to know what the egg cups represent . . . .

I came across a junk market full of stalls offering secondhand novels or used clothing or old dishes and knickknacks. My favourite sold only ancient French posters: "Coca-Cola!", "Bostik: for joins and gluing", "Queen of Pleasure, by Victor Joze -- at all bookshops", "Tell your mama to buy Chicorée Nouvelle".

I splurged in a bookshop (it was a cheap splurge, books here are $10-$15) before heading back to Freiburg. I read French much better than German, and have been missing having comprehensible novels.

Freiburg (Scene-setting)

Church bells and a celebratory (virtual) cigarette: I'm in France for the first time! I crossed into Strasbourg for the weekend, motivated by two free weeks before lectures start and by the France-NZ rugby quarter-final yesterday evening. For the obligatory remark on the quality of net cafe, let me note that the rates are similar to Germany and much lower than in Austria, but that the keyboards are like nothing I've seen.

The two free weeks may in fact be not quite as free as I'd been hoping, thanks to the sort of German bureaucracy that requires foreign students to visit (and queue at, and present a respectable facade in broken German at) some seven different government offices before obtaining a university enrolment. Clever me, I've raced through five in the four days I've spent so far in Freiburg. But everything shuts on the weekends, so I feel justified in taking off for now.

The rugby I saw last night in a smoky bar somewhere by the river, packed with French twenty-something guys watching the rugby and French twenty-something girls watching their boyfriends. The guy on my left was reading a comic book. The girls on my right were drinking beer from shapely things that looked like oversized cocktail glasses. The cheers at the second French try and at the end were matched only by the gales of laughter at the haka. For the sake of my mourning friends back home, I'll say no more.

So I'll spend some time talking about my week in dear little Freiburg, where I'll be studying for the next five months but which (due to lack of net access) I've so far had no chance to introduce.

It's a town of 200,000 people in the bottom-left corner of Germany on the map, close to Switzerland and closer to France.

It's very flat, with lots of trees and grass and a river running through the middle.

It's in a valley, and if you walk for twenty minutes* in any direction the town suddenly stops and steep hills covered in forest suddenly start.

(*I speak from experience. I managed to arrive in town on a public holiday I'd never heard of. Absolutely everything was closed, including the office at my residence which would let me move in, so I had a lot of free time to wander round.)

It's very sunny.

It's surprisingly dense, with lots of people and lots of cars and even more bicycles.

It has a university which is celebrating its 550th anniversary, and is a thorough enough student town to have cheap beer gardens and Italian restaurants and ice-cream parlours.

I have a large and very empty room to myself, and share a kitchen and bathrooms with a dozen other mostly German students, most of whom haven't yet moved in. It's one floor of one building of a giant three-thousand-resident student village set in a park with nice woods and pond twenty minutes from city centre.

I've spent most time so far with the other exchange students (mostly European -- the Americans can be heard, sometimes, but they don't turn up to outings) and with my housemates. People are friendly and intelligent, so far as my limited German can judge. My limited German's rapidly improving, from necessity.

I got complimented on it on Friday night, in fact -- "much better than most English people's, you can actually be understood".

Anyway, time to go see some Strasbourg sights.

Off the track

I went yesterday to Baden, a small town just south of Vienna, for a day of what turned out to be mostly sight-non-seeing.

Enterprising second-century Romans had turned the place into a thermal resort (hence the name, "baden" being German for "bathe"), but (Misadventure the First) the famous hot pools proved elusive. The closest I got was a swimming pool called "römertherme".

In Misadventure the Second, I took the bus out towards the mammoth Cistercian abbey Heiligenkreuz (discovered on Wikipedia). Misled by a highway sign, I panicked and got off too early, finding myself ten kilometres from anywhere in a stretch of healthy but exceptionally boring Austrian forest, with an hour and a half to wait for the next bus back.
Serves me right for going somewhere not in Lonely Planet.

It was a nice enough town, though, with an averagely-pretty (my standards are rising) church and some parks and a large oldish central area full of old shops. My German went down better there than in Vienna, too, and I had several quite coherent conversations. From twelve til two there was what seemeed to be an Austrian version of a siesta -- all the little one-man shops shut, and the streets emptied, and mushrooms of people appeared in cafes.

I went back to Bratislava yesterday evening to say goodbye to Eyal and Lauren and pick up the luggage I'd left with them. I'm taking an overnight train tonight to Munich, and from there to the university town in south-west Germany where I'll be studying for the next few months.

Vienna, in Ernst

The third-worst part of speaking a foreign language are the moments, several sentences into a so-far successful conversation, when you discover you've no idea what's just been said, and are forced to break the other person's illusion that you comprehend.

The second-worst part are the occasional realisations, midway through a sentence you started confidently, that you don't know the translation for the most important word.

The absolutely worst part is the dismay of finding after what you thought was quite a fluent sentence that the other person hasn't understood a thing.

Today, being in Vienna alone, I started trying seriously to speak German. I had a couple of great, formulaic conversations that could have been lifted straight from a German 101 textbook, and not-so-great ones of the types listed above beyond number. It was rather discouraging . . . .

At least I've a whole three weeks before I start attending German lectures.

Vienna sightseeing was complicated by self-imposed restrictions on language, by difficulty in navigation (the streets go in odd directions), and by having almost no cash on me. In the morning I got lost in the hobby-shop district, and saw all sorts of fantastic shops selling Turkish carpets and model trains and used stamps. In the afternoon I got (mostly) bored in the Museum of Natural History. In the evening I attended Mass in the big cathedral, relishing the sit-down and the nice slow clear German narration, and then happened to run in to a free organ concert on the way home.

Shopping

What with the security of a week's residence in one place, and the illusory freedom of newly-issued bank cards, I've been able over the last couple of days to buy a few little things I've needed. Or, at least, I've been able to try.

Yesterday, I spent hours with Lauren trying to find a shop that would sell me a needle and thread. It was difficult, because the Impromptu Sign Language for sewing is easily confused with that for a number of other things. Getting halfway there (a needle) seemed a good place to celebrate and stop. So we did.

Along the way, I wandered through a few Slovakian chain clothing stores, which seem nicer, and cheaper, than New Zealand ones. For you style fanatics out there, the big thing in European fashion this autumn is black-and-white print.

This morning, I bought a cable for my laptop that plugs it into European wall sockets. The shop guy was friendly, he knew the word "notebook" (of course, as I've mentioned previously, so does everyone), and he was fairly certain that the cable I was pointing at was almost but not exactly the sort that would fit my computer's orifices without destroying it. Fortunately, the cable was in fact exactly and not almost what I wanted, and fortunately, I was strong-minded enough to buy it against his advice.

This afternoon, out walking with Eyal and Lauren, I bought shampoo from the supermarket. At the checkout just before me was a very old man, exceptionally small and thin. "As if he'd spent a decade in malnourishment," I mused for a moment -- then saw his shopping basket, which contained bread rolls and a pickle jar and perhaps a dozen bars of chocolate.

Unnecessary coffee

The excellent Hotel Akademik, where I'm lodged, has no internet connection, so I'm driven to subterfuge for my web kicks. At the moment I'm sipping -- very slowly -- a cheap coffee in an posh Bratislava restaurant, taking advantage of free town square internet in the only place in range that's both inside and public. My insensitive-tourist shell's hardened enough to intend to stay put until actually removed.

I've been living the quiet life for the last couple of days, spending lots of time in my hotel room in my pyjamas with curtains drawn typing mathematics. There was a long and fiddly proof for the paper I'm writing with Tomas and Jana, whose writing-up I'd put off for some eight months and whose details proved just as nightmarish to explain as I'd expected. Other times, I spend hours sitting with Jozef in his office gazing at his whiteboard and daydreaming vaguely about a new problem of his which I at least have no idea how to attack.

I go out in the evenings, like now, until sunset or shortly after when I retreat into safety. I'm not really worried, but you can tell from things like the power-saving measures (traffic lights off at night, unlit hotel hallways) and the graffiti and the weird juxtaposition of gorgeous old buildings and crusty ones that Bratislava's not so prosperous as elsewhere. I don't like feeling like fresh meat.

Though some of the graffiti has an explanation: there's a graduation tradition at the university of spraying a celebratory tag.

Bratislava, and Prague, appear to be just west of what I shall term the "Deutsch-Russkiy Meridian": the German translation on signs for tourists is usually, but not always, above the Russian one. English is generally ahead of both.

Arrival in Bratislava

We took the Sunday evening express from Prague to Bratislava. When we emerged in the train station, there was a quick fumbling for Slovak change to buy bus tickets, and then we were lurching through the Bratislava night, with Eyal and Lauren pointing out shadows of cathedral and Presidential palace and Danube as we passed by. They live in a neighbourhood of ex-Communist housing in the city south: families of apartment buildings, huddled round supermarkets and facing the motorway and separated by scrubland. We made it to their building and crashed in their (surprisingly large and comfortable) flat.

On Monday we woke late. Lauren and I snooped on Facebook. Lauren made coffee. Eyal and I talked about his Ph.D. -- me sprawled on the sofa, Eyal waving his arms and hopping across the living room to demonstrate the tendencies of his graphs.

In the afternoon Eyal and I walked in to the university, across the motorway ("Check left!"), past the cathedral ("Very old, very nice. Never been in."), and by the Number One Slovak Pub ("Not bad at all"). At uni with Jozef, we talked about maths things, and then Jozef took me to the Proper Grown-Up Visiting Mathematician Hotel Room which is my accommodation for the next few days. I got groceries from a downtown Tesco with an astonishingly extensive selection of sausages, gesticulated at reception for a kettle, made sandwiches, and wrote a paper fragment, and went to bed.

In search of castles

I went to hear a Mass on Sunday morning in Tyn church (gorgeous and delicate and Gothic, think Disney-logo castle) in Prague town square. When I met Eyal and Lauren afterwards, we decided to spend the day visiting a couple of castle sites around old Prague.

The famous Prague castle is Hradcany, which we'd wandered through yesterday admiring the classy architecture accumulated inside over the course of a millenium or so. Today we saw some more functional fortresses. First we went south, to Vysehrad, on the opposite side of the river from Hradcany -- nowadays a public park with some walls and a great view over the countryside south of the city.

We ate the remains of our generous hostel breakfast, and speculated about why Prague seems to have such a concentration of castles.
Me: "Maybe they were built by two hostile warlords, to defend the frontier between them."
Eyal: "Maybe."
Lauren: "Maybe a king in Hradcany built a baby castle, for a son of his to live nearby."
Eyal: "Maybe."
Me: "Maybe the stretch of river in the middle was a fantastic harbour, and the castles were the north and south lines of defence."
Eyal: "Maybe."
We didn't reach a satisfactory conclusion.

Afterwards we bought a picnic lunch and took it up Vahrad, on the Hradcany side of the river, with solid walls and peep-holes and complicated antechamber defences to make it difficult for enemies to enter. Nowadays on top there's an observatory and a rose garden.

Prague Saturday

My first adventure of the day was visiting the appropriate police station to report my stolen wallet. It was tucked into a corner of Prague railway station, two rooms defended by forbidding metal doors with a slidable peep-hole and by four closed-circuit TVs which when I visited were disconnected. I told my story to the English-speaking officer on staff, who was perfectly courteous and concealed whatever contempt he must have felt. It took an hour, on and off.

The rest of the day was spent adventurously visiting Prague Castle, and wandering the streets and riverbank of Prague. All over Prague are these old big blocky buildings that do little things to their windows or their proportions and manage to look The Incarnation Of Elegance. Somehow Prague seems to have much less trouble than New Zealand's towns in stopping the owners of historical buildings from bulldozing them and in making them keep them in repair. Maybe they're old and well-known enough that it's financially worth their while.

The castle was high enough up to let me see looking down that the rooftops of the buildings in Prague are just as beautiful as their facades. St Vitus' Cathedral inside was I think my first giant church, and succeeded in making me feel insignificant (and insufficiently decorated) in comparison.

Idiot tourist, part I

Eyal and Lauren had left early, so I took the train from Plzen to Prague with three of the Czechoslovakian mathematicians from the workshop, a journey of an hour and a half. I spent most of the train ride talking to one of them, Andrea, from Kosice in eastern Slovakia.

It was an interesting talk. She came from a small town of eleven thousand people near Kosice, which survives on a couple of factories (producing light switches and copper). Slovakia and the Czech Republic are much less urbanised than New Zealand, and have lots of such small towns. I'm sure at least part of the reason this works is that the countries are (geographically) small enough for people in small towns to be close to the big cities anyway. The reason that Andrea gave, though, was that Slovakians tend to get attached to the areas and houses in which they live; they rarely move house, and if they do it's often only to another town nearby. Even academics -- elsewhere notoriously unstable -- seem to follow this pattern: Andrea, for example, and then I realised that most of the other Czechs and Slovaks I'd met at the workshop had been at the same universities all their lives, and had answered when I'd asked that their hometowns were at or near the universities where they were now.

Andrea studied originally to be a mathematics teacher; a number of mathematicians start by training as teachers, and switch quite easily into research later on, which says a lot for the academic background of school maths teachers in Slovakia. She'd once run an after-school maths olympiad program at a local elementary school for bright eleven- and twelve-year-olds. Lots of similar classes are run by other people all over the country.

I was waiting in Prague railway station for Eyal and Lauren, thinking about all this and daydreaming about whether it would be possible to set up a similar program for junior high school students in New Zealand, when I realised that mysteriously my wallet was missing.

Some excuses for mathematics

I arrived in Europe intact, and have spent the last couple of days in Plzen, in the Czech Republic, being wined and dined at others' expense for a workshop on graph theory, and wiggling my way over a Czech keyboard to profit from the free conference internet. My invitation to the workshop came thanks to Jozef, the Auckland mathematician for whom I did some research last summer on the topic. The other people here are largely Czechs and Slovaks, plus some Western Europeans and Aussies and Kiwis who are past or present students of Jozef or Mirka (conference matriarch, now Australian-based) or other Czechoslovakian expats.

I gave my talk yesterday. I was rather disappointed with it; I've done better lectures to olympiad kids with five minutes' prep. Despite a beautiful set of slides written during a 16-hour Hong Kong stopover, it didn't go nearly as well as I'd hoped -- probably due partly to nerves and partly to being almost entirely impromptu. I spent an unforgivable (to a mathematician) amount of time trying to justify my interest in the area. I also had the bad luck to get confused when trying to explain the history of work on the topic -- this when the majority of the mathematicians whom I was citing were actually in the room watching! -- and didn't really present the most interesting idea of the work I'd done well enough to make it look particularly impressive.

Sample reactions --
Eyal, fellow Aucklander, a Ph.D. student of Jozef's and now studying in Bratislava for eight months: "Nice talk!"
Tomas, my Slovakian co-author- (on a different piece of work) to-be, Bratislava Ph.D. student of Jozef's: "Nice talk -- though we Slovakians couldn't really understand your accent."
Mirka: "Nice talk, but why didn't you consider the diameter-3 case?"
random French guy: "Nice talk -- I look forward to hearing your main results."
Feeling kind of outclassed now.

If I stop thinking of maths and start thinking of it as a kind of glorified summer camp, the workshop begins to seem much more fun. Gorgeous faux-farmhouse accommodation, a room to myself, lovely Czech meals with breads and meats and fruit and ridiculously strong-flavoured radishes and mustards and pickled onions, and all the beer etc. we can drink. The afternoons are free for sightseeing and the other mathematicians are lovely.

On Wednesday we climbed up to see a local fortress overlooking the area, with a mysterious stone-walled pit in front of it, right down to water level, whose purpose I could only guess at. Yesterday we took the trolley-bus into town to visit the Pilsener brewery (with "informative historical videos" which in New Zealand would be considered advertising misleading enough to be banned from TV), the local cathedral (huge and stone, with little tiny lamps hanging from the ceiling in a seemingly impossible attempt to light the place) and a local cake shop (with cakes from a special brittle Czechoslovakian biscuit I'm told you cook by pressing batter between two hot pans). I'm getting used to the way Czech words look and to how to pronounce the various accents. I saw an electronics shop in town yesterday advertising "notebooky", which made my day.

To Prague this afternoon after the end of the conference, with Eyal and his girlfriend Lauren, and to Bratislava to visit Jozef on Monday.