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.