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.