Argentina take II

First of all, greetings to those physicists I've met over the last few days who, unbeknownst to me, have been following my travel adventures (hi to Joe and Jorge in particular) - it's nice to know that my random walk across the globe has brought some light relief from the task of enlightening our views of space and time!

Today is the last day of the conference in Buenos Aires, which has seen three days of really fantastic speakers, and me, giving talks on all aspects of quantum gravity. My talk (strings on bubbling geometries) was yesterday and in half an hour I managed to get through the material but felt that the last ten minutes or so was really rushed - given that the last part of the talk leaves the most impression, I left feeling a little underwhelmed by my performance but I've had some good conversations since with people who were interested in the work. A few new possibilities have also emerged and I'll be looking into these when I get a spare moment.

After 9 days of around 5 or 6 hours of seminars daily I'm feeling a little saturated. I'm also feeling itchy to sit down in one place for a few days at a time and do some work (I think that the next time I have more than two weeks in one place will be in Beijing in October!). Currently I can only snatch a few minutes here and there to read papers and go through calculations which my collaborators are tearing ahead with - a couple of night sessions has insured that I don't fall too far behind but over the last week or so I've not been able to do my share of the work.

I have this weekend to look around Buenos Aires, which I haven't done at all yet (apart from day one of the trip) and then I'll be flying to Bariloche, in Patagonia, on Monday evening where I'll give a couple of talks over a four day period. It's going to be a fine balance between taking advantage of the time available to sit down and work, and seeing what is supposed to be some of the most stunning countryside in South America. A bus ride into Chile a week from now should be a good opportunity to see the Andes up close but I fear that a full exploration of any area is not going to possible with such a short time here.

Anyway, lectures are restarting now but I'll try and upload some pictures from the conference in the next few days.