Jonstraveladventures

End of year 1 in Munich

2011-12-17T13:23:00.000+01:00

We are still not 100% certain of the mass of the Higgs, the life-sustaining properties of Kepler-22 are still unknown and the role played by quantum mechanics in biology is still thoroughly perplexing, but the one mystery I am, without a shadow of a doubt sure of, is that time is speeding up (or my brain is slowing down). A year in Germany has flown by, and in theory I have just one more year here (more on this in the coming year...).

It took a while to settle into Munich life, though thankfully having made these moves enough times before, and with great contacts from Couchsurfing and a friend I know from Spain, I was able to meet a lot of great people very quickly. I set up a Chinese speakers' group within the first month and there are now around 30 of us in the group. We haven't had a chance to meet so regularly recently, but it's been lovely to bring together a lot of people who now consider themselves good friends.

So, I thought I'd break this year down a little and see what next year holds. I arrived to a snow covered Munich on January 2nd this year and spent the first few days exploring the museums and gardens, and working in an empty department as the rest of the staff slowly filtered back after the 5th. The first month was a pretty ghastly combination of the usual beurocracy of getting official papers arranged and finding an apartment, an apartment which took a month to get, but was well worth the wait in the end.

In my not terribly large apartment on Elisabethstrasse I've now hosted around 25 people this year through couchsurfing (from the US, Taiwan, China, Finland, Spain, Scotland, Russia, Sweden, Denmark and beyond) and fed a cumulative total of over 200 - this has been a huge amount of fun, and the wealth of ingredients that I wasn't able to find in Spain has been more than made up for now. I've also had two long term couchsurfers who have been spectacularly fun to live with. Next year I have a number of couchsurfers already booked in, including a couple from Papua New Guinea and Mongolia - that feast I am thoroughly looking forward to!

And of travel adventures there have been a fair number but somehow having spent the last two months in Munich without leaving the city, it all feels like a long time ago. The highlights have been a few days in Poland for a conference in Warsaw and a talk in Krakow, a two week holiday in California, truly relaxing, and a two week trip to China where I gave talks both on my research and to school kids, up to 200 at a time, on the history of the universe and of our cutting edge understanding of particle physics. Trips back to Santiago, to Portugal, Paris and a couple of trips back to the UK have all, also been lovely and it was great to collaborate again with my old boss after six years away.

As a result of the China trip I've now been made an official scientific consultant (unpaid) of one of the top schools in Beijing, which means that they contact me for advice on scientific topics, examples for complicated ideas they're trying to wrap their heads around and thoughts on future careers. The most surreal part of this particular visit was having an entire orchestra play for me, alone, as I stood there grinning from the shear lunacy of the situation. Talking to 200 kids about the big bang and particle physics was a huge amount of fun and I hope to do similar talks next year.

On work, things have been progressing, and I've written three papers this year that I'm very happy with. I also have one coming out in the next week or so which is very much off topic for my normal work, and I will probably have a couple more like this next year - I'll link to this work when it's accepted, though this is going to be a somewhat longer-term submission than the usual Arxiv uploads.

Next year I have January completely full with work trips to Italy and Spain and a few days skiing in Switzerland after the New Year. Trips are also in the stages of planning to Cape Town, Korea and the Netherlands, though these will all solidify over the coming months.

Anyway, though I haven't really talked about it much here, I am now thoroughly enjoying life in Munich. I pondered for some time about the fact that Munich is a town which, in many ways, is a bit too perfect - everything works rather too well and both the buildings and the people are just slightly too attractive for their own good. It took a while to find the undercurrents which had more personality than the perfect exteriors in which they are housed, and now I feel that I'm beginning to feel the pulse of this city. We'll see what happens over the coming year, but living in Munich is currently suiting me pretty well.

On the language front, the German is coming on very slowly. I have a million excuses but the main two are that I just haven't been here consistently enough this year to settle into lessons, and the fact that everyone speaks English so damned well! I've got a good teacher now and will continue with lessons after the New Year. I would really be sad to leave this place without having at least basic conversational German, but we'll see what happens in the coming months.

Anyway, for now there is plenty to finish before I head off on Tuesday for England so I shall probably update things in a week or so....

Solar halos and autumn leaves

2011-11-05T17:35:00.000+01:00

The weather is getting colder and the skies these days are filled with cirrus clouds - perfect for ice halo displays. Especially now that the density is low, the patterns can change by the minute and you never know what's going to show up next.

I took a couple of photos flying over Poland a few weeks back and haven't had a chance to put them up until now. These are parhelic circles, and I've only seen these once before. If you're lucky they can wrap the whole sky, with a number of special nodes like these. Anyway, these were the shots I got from the plane, as we descended through the lower layers of cloud.

I went out for a photography session a few days ago in the English garden and as I was heading out I spotted the tail-end of a circumzenithal arc, like an upside-down rainbow wrapping the zenith. This soon disappeared, but as the sun set further a couple of strong sundogs appeared. Walking around with the fantastic colours of the leaves, I headed to the lake in the hope of seeing a reflection of the sun and sundogs and was not disappointed:

and a close up:

Heading back to the English garden with friends and colleagues yesterday afternoon the light was perfect and I got a few nice Autumnal shots:

I'd love to head back there at night to take some reflection shots in the moonlight, but I'm not sure that I'm going to have time in the coming days. Busy times...

Cycling Highway 1 - last day of the Steinbeck pilgrimage

2011-10-30T14:02:00.000+01:00

I'd been told many times that Big Sur was unmissable and I definitely wanted to visit it as I was already so close. As I wasn't driving in the US I was left with two options. The first was to catch a bus, or more accurately busses down the coast but this was going to take several hours and a number of changes and so, in the end it didn't seem worthwhile. The second option was to cycle along the historic Highway 1. I'd spoken with the guy at the front desk in the hostel who told me that it was a pretty easy ride, perhaps 20km or so in total. I haven't cycled much over the last few years but this sounded like a nice day out, so I headed out in the morning and took the bus to Carmel to start the ride. It took me an hour of walking around to find the bike rental store, as US towns are not built for pedestrians, but eventually I left, with my newly rented bike and my bag full of camera gear. I asked the guy in the shop for confirmation of the length of the ride and was a little surprised when he told me that it was more like an 80 km round trip, but up for a challenge it seemed like it was going to be a fun day.

I headed out into the cold ocean fog and felt fantastic cruising the roads down onto the coast, blood pumping and me quickly warming up even without much sunshine on me (though given the state of my sunburn this was a good thing).

Highway 1 wends up and down the hills of the coastline, rising up into the fog and down to sea level every few kilometers. Sadly the fog was too strong most of the time to make photography very worthwhile but I got one shot of the famous Buxby Bridge, which, with its lack of high sides and strong winds made cycling across it a rather sketchy experience

The rucksack with my Canon 7D and four lenses was pretty heavy and as I got closer and closer to Big Sur it quickly got painful and I had to stop every ten kilometers or so to stretch the muscles in my back which were beginning to spasm with the constant exersion.Along the way there are a few reasonably big hills and one enormous beast which just keeps going on and on. The main problem though is that there's almost nowhere along the route which is flat:

EDIT: Somehow I just lost the rest of this blogpost. I'll start again...

Anyway, the hill in the middle of the ride was hard on the way to Big Sur, and truly horrendous on the way back. It took me two and a half hours or so to get to Big Sur and by this time I was already exhausted and my back was in almost constant spasm. With the wind blowing North to South I was rather worried about the route back, and indeed after a quick lunch and a stretch I was back on the bike, and even on the relatively flat start I struggled with the incoming wind. I was worried that the big hill in the middle was going to finish me off and I pondered about how easy it would be to flag down a ride if I was really struggling.

Thankfully I managed to push through and didn't stop on the ride up the middle hill, but instead took my mind off the pain by counting down from 100 over and over again through each peddle stroke. The ride the other side was fantastic, though my back was giving me such big pains by this point that nothing was terribly enjoyable.

I should note that despite all the complaining above the ride was spectacular, and it has often been said to be one of the most picturesque routes in the US. I have to say though that I've done similarly spectacular rides in England, Scotland and Wales and would recommend anyone taking a ride along the Cornish coastline, or the Northernmost reachest of Scotland to see similarly breathtaking views.

Six hours after starting out I found myself back in the bike shop and still had another hour's walk plus the bus ride to get back to the hostel. I spent as much time stretching my upper back as possible, but the spasms by this point had turned to a monotonous tension that wouldn't go away. Before crashing into bed I guzzled up two burgers, a huge milkshake and a big bowl of clam chowder. By 8 in the evening I was in bed, and soon after had passed out completely.

The next morning I woke up expecting to be in agony, but in fact was feeling fine, though with a general feeling of muscle fatigue. My back on the other hand had turned from pain to complete numbness and I had no feeling at all in the upper left part of my back. I worried that I'd done myself some spinal damage, the rucksack somehow pressing into a vertebrae and it wasn't until I could see a doctor in Munich a few days later that I was told that it was probably just local nerve damage from the pain in the muscles and that it should be fine in a matter of a couple of months. One month later the feeling is slowly coming back and all should be fine again in a few weeks. Yet another tick for Jon's stupidity when it comes to pushing myself!

The morning after the ride I was due to head back to San Francisco and had put up a note in the hostel asking for a rideshare. A guy was heading to SF airport and offered to give me a lift there. He had been living on the East coast of the US for 30+ years but had origininally been born and raised in Steinbeck's hometown of Salinas. He asked me, very apologetically if I wouldn't mind if we took a quick nostaligic tour through his old haunts. On the contrary I assured him, it was about as much as I could have hoped for to have a personal tour of the town I'd read so much about. It was frankly the best hour of the whole time in the Monterey area and I couldn't have asked for a more perfect Steinbeckian tale to end the journey.

We went back to the old streets of his childhood, 40 or so years previously, and he recounted tales of his schooldays, and of getting in trouble in the surrounding hills and valleys, of local misfits and life in the factory for his father - in fact the same factory that Steinbeck worked for some time - the local Spreckels Sugar Beet processing plant. He told me about historic brawls and of the two Mexican kids in his class, of what has come of his old school friends and of how things had changed in the intervening years.

The dry hillsides surrounding Salinas and the gently rolling hills fulfilled every image I'd had of this part of the world, and frankly no biography or local history book could have given me more of a taste of where his stories had come from. We finally stopped off for half an hour at the National Steinbeck Centre which is well worth a visit if you're in the area and are a fan of his writing.

Anyway, I made it back to San Francisco and the next few days were a relaxed last Californian breather before heading back to Europe. I went to see friends in Palo Alto and spent time hanging out with my good friend Alex and his daughter Sahtah before diving headlong into work.

Since I arrived back in Munich a month ago I've been for one week in central Germany with a collaboration, a few days in Poland in both Warsaw and Krakow at a Marie Curie conference and giving a talk, and then, after five days back in Munich, I was in Beijing for two weeks giving a half a dozen talks and starting a new collaboration with a soon-to-be office mate in Munich. I'll try and update these stories in the coming week, though right now it looks like just about every minute is taken up with projects of various kinds.

To be continued...

Monterey - a Steinbeck pilgrimage - day 2

2011-10-30T12:41:00.000+01:00

So, we're still in Monterey and taking in the sights and sounds of a town I've imagined going to for 15 years. Having walked the boardwalks and taken in the lingering smells from Cannery Row's history I was ready to do some more exploring.

I spent the morning back in the aquarium which has enough to keep anyone occupied for a good few hours. The current highlight is the 4ft great white shark in the main tank and there's a constant crowd watching to catch a glimpse as it slowing glides around the enormous tank. The tank includes sun fish, hammer head sharks, tuna and a miscellany of other smaller fish.

As an aside, somebody sent me the following video when we talked about the speed of fish. Watch until the end, I can just about guarantee astonishment:

Anyway, given the low light levels in the aquarium I was having trouble getting sharp shots of the fish through the glass and so went for a long exposure, atmosphere picture, rather than something super sharp. The neon light shining through the water gave a lovely tinge to the fish trails and so I took a few shots of the crowds watching over a 20 second exposure:

The fog was still hanging over the bay at this time which made for some fantastically surreal scenes, looking out from the jetties at Cannery Row:

That afternoon I had no plans and so headed out on one of the whale watching boats to try my luck. Although the time of year is good for whale watching, there hadn't been much success that morning and so we were warned that we may not see anything. Our guide, a hugely enthusiastic woman transmitted her love for all things maritime with shouts and whoops of laughter along with a good dose of fascinating information about whale migratory patterns, the topography of Monterey bay, and the scientific research she does into a variety of cetaceans.

Our first find was a sun fish which came to eye us warily. These fish (also called Mola Mola) can grow to up to 2 tonnes and be 4 meters across. The one we came across was only a baby, at perhaps a meter or so across and quickly tired of our photo taking and took off. Shortly after we found a seal, hiding in some kelp, disguising itself from hungry killerwhales:

We carried on for another hour or so without any luck. We were about ready to head back when a scream from our guide told us that something had been spotted and we raced off out into the ocean to see what it was. Before any of us could see anything at all she was screaming excitedly that it was a humpbacked whale and indeed our first sight of it was the burst of vapour from its blowhole. For 20 minutes or so we watched as it came up for air and then dived down for a couple of minutes before we had to search around to work out where it would next surface.

The whale only breached once while we were watching it, and sadly with the zoom lens I didn't manage to find it, focus and take the picture before it was gone, but it was a truly beautiful thing to see the tail come out of the water and slip silently down. The highlight for our guide was that the wind direction was right to send the plume of vapour our way on one breath and so we were, for a few seconds, surrounded by the stench of whale breath. This is certainly not one of the experiences I'd expected from the California trip.

Another highlight and perhaps for me a bigger surprise was the sighting of a black-footed albatross. These mythical birds have always held a fascination for me since I read at a young age that they could grow up to 10ft across. The occupants of the other boat which came out to see the whale when we radioed the surrounding tour groups, seemed to miss the albatross, but I got a nice shot as it sailed by their boat.

After all the excitement we headed back inland and I made my way to the hostel that I was going to stay in for the next couple of days. Getting into the hostel was a great disappointment frankly. Though it was a beautiful hostel, things have changed hugely from a decade ago when I was frequently staying in hostels. It used to be that you'd arrive in a hostel and there would be people from all around the world, sharing stories and making new friendships. Arriving into the hostel in Monterey (and I understand that this phenomenon is now largely universal) I found a half a dozen people sat silently, each one of them plugged into a computer somehow, talking on facebook, typing on skype, reading the news, but not a single person interacting with anyone else.

This seems like a really sad state of affairs but rather inevitable as we become more and more used to having our lives split between the real and the virtual world. This is precisely the reason that I don't have the internet at home (or at least not easily accessible). When I have couchsurfers, or friends around, it's all too easy to get sidetracked from real interactions by the internet and I much prefer to make it as hard as possible to get online when I'm at home. I have neither TV nor wifi at home and so spend a lot more time talking, cooking, reading and generally feeling like I'm interacting physically rather than virtually with the world around me. This isn't to say that I shun such things - it's pretty clear that I don't, but I make a big effort to leave parts of my life where these forms are less pervasive.

I stayed in the hostel for three nights in the end and met three interesting people in that time. Back in the day it would have been a constant stream of interesting meetings, but now I felt like i was being intrusive if I tried to start a conversation with someone who was plugged in, so I sat and read my book in the evenings while everyone else typed away.

Anyway, next comes a mammoth adventure on highway 1 but I'll leave that for the next post.

Monterey - a Steinbeck pilgrimage - day 1

2011-10-29T13:27:00.001+02:00

Without a doubt Steinbeck is the author that has appeared on this blog more times than any other. I'm not quite there but I'm close to reading everything he wrote and I still get moved on rereading his simple but powerful writing. The first paragraph of Cannery Row is a perfect example of this. No fancy-schmancy vocabulary, just the building of layer upon layer of imagery, until you can smell, and hear the minutiae of his vision:

"Cannery Row in Montereyin California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality oflight, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is thegathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood,chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneriesof corrugated iron, honky-tonks, restaurants and whore-houses,and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flop-houses.Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers,and sons of bitches,' by which he meant Everybody. Had the manlooked through another peep-hole he might have said: 'Saints andangels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant thesame thing."

The first book I read of his, East of Eden, was his most epic and since reading these words I have wanted to go to Monterey bay, to sit in Cannery Row breathing in the air that caused those first incredible lines to emerge.

"THE SALINAS VALLEY is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay.

I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer—and what trees and seasons smelled like—how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich.

I remember that the Gabilan Mountains to the east of the valley were light gay mountains full of sun and loveliness and a kind of invitation, so that you wanted to climb into their warm foothills almost as you want to climb into the lap of a beloved mother. They were beckoning mountains with a brown grass love. The Santa Lucias stood up against the sky to the west and kept the valley from the open sea, and they were dark and brooding—unfriendly and dangerous. I always found in myself a dread of west and a love of east."

I started early in the morning from San Francisco to take the caltrain to catch the bus to Monterey The fog was still hanging over the valleys as we approached, and the homesteads and farm houses in the hillsides were exactly the images I'd had reading The Long Valley and the Pastures of Heaven. The arid fields fit my ideas perfectly and while I'd sat in anticipation, ready for a slightly disappointing trip having looked forward to it for so long, it couldn't have fit my imaginings better.

We arrived into the town centre, the low-rise buildings with old adobe structures dotted along the main street and I headed straight for Cannery Row. I knew it would be touristy, and indeed it is, but thankfully there is still a strong sense of the original here and while Steinbeck's picture of the poem, the stink, the grating noise is long gone, the light, the nostalgia and the dream are somehow still there and I sat in a cafe in the middle of it all, looking out over the sea, feeling very much like I was back in a familiar place.

I headed to the aquarium, one of the best in the world, and spent the last hour of opening time watching the displays and walking the boardwalks outside seeing the fog cut a curtain across the bay. I'll leave you for today with juts a few photos from Monterey day 1 and will attempt to finish this off tomorrow if possible:

Oakland Athletics versus Seattle Mariners

2011-10-29T12:30:00.000+02:00

Back in San Francisco I had just a couple of days rest before taking off again on my next adventure, but first I went with a few friends to see a baseball game out in Oakland. Going with a Seattle local it was the perfect match between the Seattle Mariners and Oakland Athletics. In fact it was an incredibly slow (or fast, depending on how you count it) game with just three runs in the extremely short hour and a half or so of play. Still, despite much excitement it was fun to watch and going there with a Japanese friend it was fun to watch a couple of Japanese heroes of the American baseball league, Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui. Anyway, I'll leave this one without too much commentary and just post up a few photos from the game. It was a great opportunity to play around with very fast shutter speeds and the light was perfect for capturing hundred mile and hour balls in flight.

I was lucky with the timing of this shot. The ball is just touching the guys hands if you look closely.

For anybody interested, the score in the end 3:0 to Seattle.

Yosemite trip day 3

2011-10-29T12:13:00.001+02:00

Waking the next morning I realised the full extent of the state of my back and realised that there was no way that I was going to be able to go into direct sunlight without being in agony, so I spent a good part of the day finding shady patches to hide in.

We drove back into the park and this time went to the valley floor. The first stop was the river which runs through the valley, and while the others splashed and dove, I sat on a rock in the shade, relaxing taking photographs and reading for an idyllic hour.

Next stop was perhaps the most photographed of views in all of Yosemite, the views that Ansel Adams is most famous for, and the views that live up to all expectations. I have to say I feel somewhat depressed looking at Ansel's photos, knowing that mine are absolutely nothing compared to these incredible images. Still, mine are my own view and I will keep improving my photography where possible.

We spent the rest of the day taking it easy in the valley floor and I took the chance to go to the Ansel Adams gallery, which is truly breathtaking. Every time I go to a new place like this I spend a day or two taking photos, come back and realise some basic errors in composition or lighting that I've been making. I'd love to spend a few weeks somewhere like this, gradually honing my skills for a single image or scene. I've now made it to Jiuzhaigou twice and I plan on going back at least another three or four times to get better and better photos. Similarly I'd love to make it back to Yosemite to improve my images of this incredible scenery.

We drove back to San Francisco in the late afternoon and the setting sun through the California countryside was the best we could have hoped for to end the incredible three days. Incidentally, the group that I'd gone with was the Incredible Adventures company and I can highly recommend going with them, and specifically finding out when Jordan will be taking the group. He's an excellent guide and a top class cook.

Yosemite trip day 2

2011-10-29T11:26:00.003+02:00

The first morning in the camp I woke at around 5 with the first light. I've never been able to sleep with light around and this turns out to be a blessing when camping. I got up when the camp was still completely silent, walked out into the still crisp morning as the sun still hadn't quite risen enough to warm the air, and went for an early run around the camp area, the light gradually showing itself through the canopy. The thought of bears in the area only added to the joy of the run and I came back exhilarated and with blood pumping. It was still going to be a while until the others were up so I went through a yoga routine I'd been taught by a couchsurfer a couple of weeks before, feeling about as much of a hippy as it's possible for me to feel, standing in the early morning light in a beautiful forest with only the rustling of the trees for company.

I got coffee started and gradually the others started to rise, looking rather tired and shivering in the cold. Everyone soon warmed up though and within an hour of breakfast burritos and camp coffee we were packed up and ready to hit the road.

We drove back into the park and took the road up to the high country, around 10,000 feet. On the way we stopped off at a lookout point, facing towards half-dome and the valley floor and were met with an arrangement of rocks and trees that any minimalist photographer would kill for.

Continuing up we actually went back out of the park to start the hike. Stopping up somewhere around 10,000 feet we hydrated with watermelon, slapped on sun screen and got ready for a good day's walking:

The Hoover Wilderness area is pocketed with beautiful lakes and rolls with meadows that could have come straight out of a Swiss fairytale. As we got higher up through the day we got up to glacier level and when we weren't fending off mosquitos we were pelting each other with snowballs.

Jordan, our guide:

I was expecting to be generally impressed by Yosemite, but the scenery was completely beyond my expectations. I've been lucky enough to see some incredible places over the last few years, and Yosemite is right up there with Jiuzhaigou, which I count as about the most platonically ideal views that can exist anywhere.

After a quick lunch we continued on our way and eventually found a lake with cliffs that were safe to jump off. I'm not entirely sure which aspect of this was more stupid, the idea of jumping from 20+ feet of rock, or the idea of landing in glacier water but somehow half of us were persuaded that this was a good plan. Jordan in mid flight:

I have to admit that I didn't jump from the highest point as the idea of jarring my spine is not one that I much fancy. I did jump from 15 feet or so and although I was ready for the shock of the cold water, I was not ready for quite how freezing it was (this, on my part was pretty stupid, given that the ice from the glacier actually sits in the lake). The shock was electric and I upon surfacing was instantly faced with competing emotions. One of complete surprise that my body could drop in temperature so fast, and a logical thought process that asked how the hell I was going to get out of there. I swam quickly to the base of the rocks and thought for a frightening second that given my freezing hands I might not be able to climb up the face (this is the second time in two years that I've found myself in water wondering for a split second if I might not have just made a fatal decision). Thankfully given a burst of adrenalin and with no possibility for my hands to get sweaty I pulled myself back up the cliff, panting with the combined effort and cold-induced palpitations.

I stood around for a few minutes to dry off before putting my clothes back on, and for a fateful half hour or so was in the belief that my sun-cream, which I'd been applying liberally all day, was waterproof. We continued the walk and after some time people started commenting that I was looking a little red. I quickly reapplied, but somehow it was too late. I'd been putting on factor 50 all day, but finally by the time we got back to camp I was lobster red and feeling truly shattered. This was me as the burn took hold, but in fact it was almost a week of applying burn cream until I could sleep comfortably.

The drive back was stunning with the crescent moon coming up between the trees, and the ten of us feeling elated by the day but completely shattered by the exertions at altitude.

Dinner was another feast, this time Italian and, with Jordan in charge again, we were given the order to slice a few hundred garlic cloves, ready to go into the most potent garlic bread ever. Sadly I have no photos of this mammoth effort, but by the time we were finished we had to worry about neither vampires nor bears.It was this second night that I took some of the lightpainting photos of the milky way up through the canopy, already posted here but I'll put up one again on this post for good measure:

I collapsed long before the others, my pulse building to a painful throb through my quickly tenderising back.

Yosemite trip day 1

2011-10-29T10:24:00.000+02:00

This was written around a month ago now but I've been on the road almost continuously since then, having finally arrived back on Monday afternoon from a trip giving lots of talks in Beijing. Today is mostly devoted to catching up on some much needed blogging, and the first order of the day is to complete the US trip as much as possible.

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Only four days until the next travel adventures start and I'm behind by three countries already. In the last installment we'd finished the first few days in San Francisco and I was couchsurfing in Ocean Beach, talking into the early hours with my host before getting up at 5am to head to catch a biofuel truck with ten others heading East to Yosemite. (Update: since speaking with my couch host, Songqiao, about the Khan Academy I've just recieved news that she has now met Salman Khan. I'm very keen to know how this came about!)

The group was nicely diverse with the group stretching across four continents. Our driver, Jordan, a Californian born and raised had spent a good deal of his life in the outdoors, and when he wasn't showing the wonders of Yosemite to tourists he was to be found on the surf or the slopes.
I was rather wary of taking an organised tour, but given that I haven't driven for a decade and the original plan of driving with a friend had fallen through, I didn't have too many options. Thankfully it worked out fantastically and we had an outstanding three days, seeing many of the highlights of the national park and getting much more information than I could have uncovered myself.

The drive to the park took just a few hours, stopping off along the way to pick up beer and fruit for the coming nights in the camp. Forest fires the previous week had meant that we couldn't stay in the regular campsite and so we were a few minutes drive outside the park proper. It turned out that the new campsite was far nicer than the other and we found ourselves camped, almost alone, under gently rustling canopies and with a river running a few meters from the tents.We got the camp set up, two to a tent, and then headed in for an afternoon's excursion into the park.

The first day's stop was to go and see the Sequoias. I'd been expected to be impressed, but after 20 minutes of walking through the forest, with large trees around us, the first sight of the giants really blew me away. Through the densely packed trees, all of grey or green, a wall of red appears to stand out. It's so much larger than everything around it that it takes some time to understand the perspective.I tried hard, but frankly failed to get a single photo that captured the scale of them, and without this, they are simply photos of red trees. Anyway, there are plenty of great photos around so I'm not too worried. It would be nice to find a way to really get the immensity of them in a single frame, without the need for the cliched photos of a dozen people hand in hand around the trunk.

The first hike was really a training run to see how far our guide could push us on the first full day of walking, and given that we'd done pretty well as a group he decided to go for a long, hard hike the next day up in the high country.

We came back from the sequoias and got to cooking. Jordan, an excellent cook, had organised us well enough that within a couple of hours we had a banquet of Mexican dishes before us and after an hour of gorging we were ready to drop,

An Oriental afternoon

2011-10-01T13:33:00.002+02:00

Written in Krakow airport on Thursday:

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Next week is going to be outrageously busy. I have three talks to write for an upcoming trip, two new project ideas which were sparked by conversations this week. A month's worth of restaurant food to work off in the gym, two important questions to answer about my last paper, and two current projects which need to be restarted. Apart from that I may attempt a couple of night's sleep and a day at the Oktoberfest!

I'll take the opportunity while waiting for my plane at Krakow international airport to put up another post from the California trip, though I fear that it may be several more weeks until we're up to date.

The last day in San Francisco before the Yosemite trip was wonderfully sunny (in general I was hugely lucky as San Francisco at this time of year is renowned for its cold, foggy days). I headed to Japan Town where a J-pop festival was on, not because I'm a fan of Japanese pop music, but because anything to do with Japanese fashion and style tends to be outrageous and amusing in equal measure. In fact there wasn't much J-pop in sight, or earshot. Arriving there at 11 in the morning we were greeted with a blast of the Japanese equivalent of Happy Hardcore, which took me right back to my early days of clubbing. Japan Town quickly filled with kids dressed in faux cos-play outfits, posing for the cameras, the lone non-Japanese guy standing by the side slightly awkwardly wearing his samurai costume, not drawing much attention from the photographers.

The main event that I wanted to see was a Calligraphy display by San Francisco resident and Hokkaido born artist Aoi Yamaguchi. I've been interested in Chinese calligraphy for a while, mostly because it confuses me. I still find it hugely difficult to understand what makes good calligraphy different from bad calligraphy, but, like whiskey and many other acquired tastes, the more time you spend with it, the more you understand the subtleties and can tell a 16 year old Jura from a bottle of JD. I'm still at the very early stages of this quest (re. calligraphy, not whiskey - I'm some way into my whiskey quest), but some things are making sense. Like a good pianist, the use of hard and soft in the appropriate places in the calligraphy, even within an individual Chinese character are one of the signs of artistry. Although a piece may look messy to the untrained eye (which mine still is) there is an exactness within the apparent chaos, and a single flick of the brush at the end of the line can turn it from pedestrian to genius for an aficionado.

Aoi Yamaguchi, according to the compere has invented her own style of calligraphy, and while I don't understand much of the uniqueness of her work, watching her write was fascinating and the application of brush and ink to paper had some of the same, strange mix of looseness and exactitude as perhaps a Turner would to a Western art lover. I don't yet get the pleasure of this art-form as I do from much Western art, but I'm beginning to get the idea and hope to continue this study in the future.

From Japan town I headed to Union square, a few blocks down where a Korean festival was in full swing. Women dressed in traditional hanbok and some very peculiar headwear danced, in between modern ballet performances and drum orchestras.

I chatted with a group of Korean guys for a while who were in the US studying English and we exchanged stories of travel adventures and San-nak-ji experiences.

That evening I headed West to Ocean Beach to stay with a couchsurfer before leaving very early the next morning to meetup with the others on the Yosemite trip, but that will have to wait until next time.t

San Francisco Green Flash

2011-09-25T13:27:00.000+02:00

This was half written a week or so ago but things have been far too busy to post it until today. I'm now in Warsaw, getting ready for a three day Marie Skłodowska event. I took a stroll around the city this morning and caught up on some papers in a cafe before coming back to get ready for the events which start this afternoon. Anyway, here is the finished post from last week:

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A non-stop week, but I've ducked out of a dinner tonight to catch up on emails which I haven't had a chance to go through for a few days, and to update a few details from the SF trip.

The first few days of the holiday were spent in San Francisco, relaxing and reading in cafes and working out what the next days should hold. I'd been to San Francisco a few times before, the previous two for work at SLAC and hadn't had much chance to explore the city so this was a good, relaxed few days taking in the atmosphere.

I headed out to the piers to find the Golden Gate Bridge, only to remember that it couldn't be seen from there. The fishermen there made for some good compositions though so I took advantage of the contrasts and spent some time chatting with the Chinese fishermen.

I did at least manage to get the bay bridge:

In fact by far the most exciting photo opportunity for me came towards the end of the first week, when I was couchsurfing in Ocean Beach, an area that I'd never explored previously. It turned out to have a completely different atmosphere from the rest of SF that I know and it's even more laid back than the rest of what is known to be a pretty chilled place. The weather was perfect and I'd scouted out the line on the beach previously from where I was hoping to catch the sunset. I headed there with my couchsurfing host and sat on top of a sand dune watching the sun descend. The sky was clear, but the convection currents of rising warm air made for layers in the sky above the ocean of more and less dense air. These different layers, called temperature inversions because the temperature does not go linearly down with altitude, cause the sun's rays to be refracted in complex ways and force the otherwise circular image to be distorted as it sets. These are the perfect conditions for green flash sunsets. Before it had gotten into its final stages of descent a flock of birds flew past, signalling the beginning of what was to be an exciting atmospheric optics session:

As the sun set further, the distortions grew stronger and, because of the uneven nature of the temperature inversions, you can get some strange, lop-sided images:

The green and red light from the sun naturally get refracted by different amounts as they travel through the atmosphere and the temperature inversion layers act to magnify the effect. As the top of the sun passed through the boundary between two layers the green light was momentarily magnified and caused a brief mock-mirage green flash:

As it set further the lower reaches of the sun can appear to be pulled from the rest and you see a strange, hugely distorted second image of the sun on the horizon. Really this is a mirage of the sun above. Another disconnection in this one had also appeared above the sun:

Further down and more distortion, with hints of green around the upper limb of the sun, birds accompanying the shot:

By a lovely coincidence the one boat that was on the horizon, also enhanced by a mirage effect was exactly in the setting sun's path

and stayed there until the sun made its final warped movements:

I took around 50 photos during the sunset, and the above, to me were the most interesting. I've seen perhaps five or six green flash sunsets now and every one has been completely different. As I tell people regularly, these effects are not rare, you just have to know when and where to look. On that note, of course one has to be extremely careful and even at its lowest level I will only ever glance in the direction of the sun momentarily and never stare through the viewfinder. This is the perfect time to use liveview on the camera, but one has to be very careful not to damage the lens or sensor of the camera. The best hint I think is that if you are going to try and take these sorts of photos, only let the camera focus there for the briefest time possible. For more information, as always, go to the fantastic Atmospheric Optics website.

Anyway, from San Francisco I went on a three day trip to Yosemite, but these stories and pictures will have to wait...

Without a moment to breath

2011-09-17T20:12:00.001+02:00

So, I have so many pictures from the last three weeks in the US and so little time...some things don't change.

I spent almost three weeks in California, in San Francisco, Yosemite, Monterey and around, in Palo Alto and in Santa Cruz. It was really a spectacular trip and I'm planning on telling the story through photos over the coming weeks.

However, I've been hugely jet-lagged until last night (falling asleep at 6am and getting up around 9am for work) and am leaving again early tomorrow morning for a collaboration in Göttingen which is going to keep me busy until Friday when I come back and then head straight off Saturday for a conference and a talk in Poland.

Today I've spent analysing data which has actually been fantastic and enlightening but has meant that blogging has had to wait until now.

I've only put up a few pictures so far so I'll have to jump half way into the holiday, to a three day camping trip in Yosemite. We were camping just outside the national park, and stories of hikes and glacial swims will have to wait, but I wanted to post some night pictures. The milky way was a rich stream across the sky and with the trees silhouetting, it looked quite spectacular. Some of the trees were naturally lit from the nearby campsite and others I tried lightpainting with a partially covered torch.

Anyway, here are the results of a couple of dozen attempts:

Still to come are the best shots of a green flash that I've ever seen. I'm super excited about these photos!Anyway, I'll see if I get time to put up some more over the coming days, but it looks like the next week is going to be busy!

Berlin by bike

2011-08-15T15:20:00.002+02:00

So, we finally got our paper out last week, after a huge amount of discussion, confusion and a few months of calculations and so I treated myself to a long weekend...

I arrived back in Munich yesterday evening from a few days in Berlin seeing a couple of good friends from Santiago days (Konrad and Merlinda, with whom I traveled to South Africa and Mozambique as well as Beijing last year). I arrived home yesterday at about 6 in the evening and quickly cleaned up the remaining mess from Wednesday night's Korean dinner I'd cooked for 8 friends (from Korea, China, Taiwan, Bolivia and Germany). I'll add some details about the Korean meal soon I hope when I get a few photos through, but for now I'll just note that Maangchi saved the day with her amazing videos! Samgyetang was one of the new dishes I tried:

Having not had much more than a half hour's sleep in Berlin on Saturday night (details also to follow) I was in a pretty dazed state but had to pull myself together as I had five guests arriving last night - all couchsurfers. I restarted hosting in Munich a few weeks ago and things have been pretty hectic on that front. Last night the new arrivals were a Finnish woman and her son plus three Swedes who had been in Munich for the European Juggling Convention - something I would have loved to have joined had I been in the city. They were all pretty pooped having spent the last week in a tent, but gave me some good tips on five ball juggling which helped immediately - I've been struggling with five for the best part of ten years!

Anyway, I'll backtrack a bit now to the Berlin trip before these memories disappear in the current chaos (incidentally, today is a holiday here - helpfully translated by the waitress in the cafe as "Maria drives to heaven day").

Car sharing is big in Germany so I searched out a lift from Munich to Berlin on mitfahrgelegenheit and found myself heading North in a Mercedes van with six others. I was rather looking forward to the 600km trip, ready to meet some new people and possibly to practice some German, but when I tried making conversation with the woman I was sitting next to I was quickly cut-off as it was made clear that she'd rather we made the journey in silence (not with those words, but her tone was pretty clear). So we sat, three in the back of the van, in silence for the next 5 hours! Still, it was a nice chance to see some of the scenery through central Germany.

I arrived around lunchtime, was picked up by Merlinda and we headed to dump things back at the flat before heading on a walk around the city. I shan't go into the details of the gastonomic tour we went on over the next couple of days, but somehow we managed to fit in trips to eat Iranian, Ethiopean, Mexican, Turkish and Thai restaurants, throughout the city - all great and a few photos will follow.

After Konrad turned up the next morning from Sweden we scooted around the city on bikes, though there had been a little misunderstanding and I was on what felt like a child's bike so spent the whole time standing up on the pedals so as not to get cramps - anyway, away from the gym I was still able to get a decent workout.

We started the tour with a trip to the Martin Gropius-Bau museum to see the very extensive André Kertész exhibition, went via Alexanderplatz and the parliament building, check-point Charlie, the Holocaust memorial and a dozen other points in between, finally ending up in a cafe escaping from the deluge of rain which had rolled in quicky in the late afternoon. After the downpour had become a drizzle we got back on the bikes and headed to an Ethiopian restaurant where we guzzled exotic beers and munched away at a great meal of Injera and curries before heading back to the flat in the late evening, legs tired but having seen a good chunk of the city in a short time.

Here are some shots from the holocaust memorial, a very powerful piece indeed.

and a few from the rest of the day:

Woken at 6 the next day by the bright sunlight we had a hearty breakfast and headed out again into a much warmer, sunnier day than the previous had been. We made our way along the river for a while, stopping off at cafes and flea markets as thirst and interest deemed appropriate.

After a busy few hours cycling around, Konrad and I headed off to the Jewish museum while Merlinda went home to recover for a few hours.

I think that the Jewish museum deserves a post for itself, so I'll not write too much about it now, but at least I'll note that it's one of the most interesting, best designed museums I've ever visited.

After a good few hours in the museum we went for an excellent Turkish dinner before heading to a club for a night of Balkan beats. The likes of this:

The nightlife in Berlin feels completely different from that of Munich and it was great to have a good experience of the Berlin way of doing things before I headed back South. We had a good few hours of getting thoroughly exhausted, dancing into the early morning light, getting a sauna/aerobic workout combination in the process. Arriving back home at 5am via a currywurst we had about half an hour until being woken again by the sunlight.

The next/that day, exhausted and somewhat hungover I made my way back to Munich via another car-share - this time slightly more communicative than the previous, but still somewhat awkward. Arriving home, by 9 my flat was again full with two acrobats, a juggler, a Finnish speech therapist and a bioinformatics major.

This week I want to get a couple of projects well underway before heading off next week for a long summer break in the US. More updates to follow on the Jewish museum and the Korean meal when time allows...

Lightning and thunder and drum and bass

2011-07-30T12:48:00.001+02:00

Blog posts remain half written and history becomes irrelevant. I've got a dozen minor stories from the last few weeks written up but they all seem rather parochial on re-reading them. A trip into the Alps a couple of weeks back with two friends, cycling through the forests and mountains was the highlight of the last few weeks. The weather has however been unseasonably bad and so good intentions to repeat the trip have fallen on soggy ground. The bad weather did at least bring one positive note which has been plenty of powerful storms. One of them came as I was safely at home and though the view from my window is mostly of trees and the block of flats the other side of the road, I carefully set up my camera with a 10mm wide angle lens and so was able to capture some of the lightening with long exposure takes:

Apart from this, the photography has been on hold for the moment, though I've found a shop who is keen on selling some of my work so I'll head out on a picture hunt this weekend for some more Munich scenery.

Work has been very busy and I really need a break, which thankfully is coming in about 3 weeks - I've got to the point where my attention span is seriously lacking and I have to lock myself up in a room somewhere, out of the way of any electronic devices in order to concentrate on reading. In the mean time I got a new paper out last week and have a new one due in the coming days. The one coming has been a big effort, of numerics and of understanding but in the end we're very happy with the result.

On the going out and having fun front I discovered a new place last night. Planning on spending a quiet night in I got a last minute text from a friend, suggesting we head to a drum and bass and dubstep event - This was not to be missed, and in the end it was as much fun as I'd hoped! I've been going out about once a weekend recently, last weekend to the tenth anniversary party of a magazine that a friend writes for - lots of good music, lots of fun, especially with the two Russians and one Ukrainian Couchsurfer who were staying at my place. Most of the events I've been going to are full of the pretty fashionable strata of the Munich scene, and frankly I can't keep up. I get the idea of fashion, and I'd hope that compared to the stereotype (not necessarily the reality) of a physicist I do just about ok. But I find myself questioning the meaning and motivation behind fashion frequently and frankly I find myself confused most of the time. A very fashionable friend lent me some of his clothes when, after a dinner party, I was considered not well-dressed enough to go out to the place we were heading (this wasn't as harsh a decision as it may sound - I just wasn't dressed right for the place we were going). I was given some great clothes and headed out. The result was that I got a fair few complements on my clothes - but this did nothing more than dissuade me. I was the same person as always, just with some different colours and cuts. I didn't see why I was deserving of a compliment, or, put another way, why I was supposed to be somehow 'better' than my normal self. Although I do understand it, the whole thing feels more or less meaningless when I try and analyse it and I end up frustrated with the seeming weight that is given to the different facets of those we meet. That said, yes, I'm human, and yes aesthetics are important to me too, I guess though that on the fashion front I just don't attach that much value, though I also, hypocritically, appreciate it when someone dresses well. Perhaps this is all a self-pitying statement trying to excuse my lack of fashion senses - who knows?!

Anyway, the whole point about the above schpeel is that the event last night was completely the opposite. At a drum and bass event nobody cares what you're wearing and this felt really refreshing. People are there to dance and have a good time and this lack of pressure is wonderfully refreshing. I'll continue to go to the more trendy places, as some of my good friends here are fashionable enough and kind enough to not only go there but to invite me along too, but it's nice to have found a good contrast to this part of the Munich scene as well.

Anyway, I have 1000 Chinese flashcards to catch up on, two papers to write and a dozen other tasks to finish before I can head to the gym - better get on with it!

Some new perspectives on food and perspective

2011-07-14T10:18:00.003+02:00

Any excuse to get out of the office these days is quickly pounced upon. Due to the status of the Max Planck Institute building we don't have air conditioning, and so on hot muggy days with computers buzzing and the heat of brains athinking on all sides, all I can do is try and keep from falling asleep at my desk.

Two papers are in their last throes right now and I'm wondering how best to approach another two very interesting projects, though now is the planning stage which just means lots of reading rather than shut-up-and-calculate time. Right now I'm just digesting and so thought I'd take a bit of a break to write up about the last couple of weeks' worth of events.

Most recently, last Tuesday we had the latest Chinese speakers' meetup which saw a group of 10 of us getting together and relaxing in a beer garden, chatting away in Chinese, while the tables around us looked on a little perplexed as to quite what this was all about. I started the group expecting to get mostly non-native speakers who would want to practice their bad Chinese, but in fact it's perhaps a 80:20 native to non-native ratio, good for us, painful for them! This week though we had a couple of French students who having spent just a year studying Chinese in Shanghai, already speak it pretty well (at least from my perspective). Next time we're going to try and get 40 people for hotpot and karaoke which should make for an awesome night!

On the cooking front we had the second gastronomic experimentation evening which was hugely fun. The menu was:

1) Steak tartare, salmon tartare and tuna ceviche
2) Guacamole made with some of the left-over ingredients from the above (I garnished the tuna ceviche with a very simple avocado salad) and an excellent lasagne from the next door neighbour - who it appears has some amazing Persian recipes up her sleeve.
3) Clams, quickly seared and served with two sauces. One was with a mango and curry sauce while the other was a tarragon bearnaise - I used a little white wine vinegar with the reduction and this was a mistake, as using lemon instead would have been a lot fresher.
4) Rosemary creme brulee, thyme creme brulee and an orange creme brulee - next time we'll add cardamon to the orange mixture and try to perform proper essential oil extractions from the herbs rather than just adding them to the custard mixture.

On the cooking front also I've just finished watching the Harvard course on science and cooking, which is a wonderful look at modern gastronomy techniques and the science behind food. I have to admit that the format of the lectures doesn't work very well for me, as the first ten minutes, an introduction to some of the equations that have been used in class time, either you know it already, or it'll probably go too fast to catch anything terribly useful. So, I've been downloading the movies and going through with variable speeds (easy to do with VLC)

Some of the recipes and techniques in this one are outrageously beautiful:

In this, the head chef from Alinea talks through some incredible ideas to get season and multi-sensory experience integral into cuisine

In this, Jose Andres talks about gelation and the incredible things that one can do with modern gelling agents. He's also one of the most passionate foodies you're ever likely to watch and talks a little about the use of solar cookers in the developing world in the last part of his talk.

and this one I still haven't worked out whether it's appalling or brilliant - a bit of both I think!

Also on the food-front there's the talk by Nathan Myhrvold here talking about his book Modernist Cuisine. I think that although it's a fun talk, you don't get the idea of quite how important this book is going to be. This is the new McGee and given that McGee is the book related to cooking that I read most religiously, I need to get hold of a copy of Modernist Cuisine!

Ok, enough for now, but I'll post up a picture I took last weekend in the church by Odeonsplatz here in Munich which I popped into with a Couchsurfer who was staying for a few days:

A little food experimentation

2011-06-20T09:53:00.001+02:00

The weekend has seen heavy downpours interspersed with blue skies and spectacular cloud cover. The rains have meant that I've been in the cafe, the gym, or at home reading and cooking.

Saturday afternoon I had a few friends around for an experimental food day. Two of us were cooking while the others assisted as tasters and judges. We'd been planning this for a while, and I'm sure that it will be the first of many.

I'd started things off early in the morning by salting three large Chinese cabbages, ready for preparing kimchi later in the day:

When people started arriving at around 5 we got the cabbages washed off, which in itself is hard work, cooked up the chilli and garlic paste and got our hands (in fact my kimchi gloves) dirty, massaging in the paste between the leaves. This was tasted a little later with the chicken, but really it takes some time to ferment and mature.

Next up was a tomato sauce-off. We'd discussed our recipes previously and realised that we had vastly different methods for making the perfect pasta sauce.

Mine isn't a classic recipe as such, though the basics are there. I start with an unhealthy quantity of olive oil in a pan, heating slowly and with around three large garlic cloves, roughly chopped infusing their flavour. I cook this up for around five minutes, just letting the garlic start to become translucent but never darken. The caramelised garlic flavours are great for some things (roasts especially) but I think that they add a bitter note to a tomato sauce which isn't good. I usually add a little fresh chilli at this point and then throw in perhaps four medium, quartered tomatoes, slowly bringing up the heat until they start to release their juices before putting a lid on and cooking for around half an hour on medium. Towards the end I add a little brown sugar, salt, and freshly ground mixed pepper corns. Once the tomatoes have really cooked down I blend up the whole mixture which becomes creamy and thick with the help of the garlic and the natural thickening agents in tomatoes. The pectins in tomatoes, together with the sugars (which draw the water away from the pectin) and acids, plus the olive oil bring a creaminess to the sauce which goes very well with pasta without the need to add any dairy. The final touch is a good load of roughly crushed pink pepper corns.

My opponents recipe was more classic with (as the technical term would have it) more in the way of visual solids and comes from cooking down a can of tomatoes after heating the garlic quite vigorously with some pine kernels (I'll be adding pine kernels to my recipe next time, they're an excellent touch). Although I've met plenty of Italians who use tinned tomatoes for their sauces, I can't help but taste the tin in these recipes - that being said, my opponents sauce was extremely good. (Sorry for the terrible photography!)

Sadly (or not) there was no victor as we had four judges split equally in the blind tasting. The two sauces couldn't have been much more different and this made the choice all the more difficult. Winners or not, it's great to see someone else's take on a simple recipe.

Next I cooked up thinly sliced aubergine which had been coated in a spice mixture of coriander, cumin, pepper, garlic and a little birds eye chilli, plus a pinch of salt with olive oil and a dash of balsamic vinegar then roasted in the oven on around 150 degrees C for more or less half an hour. I served this with a little sour cream as a dip.

The next recipe (after an intermission of a carrot, apple, ginger and lemon grass juice) was an experiment in pressure marinating. I'd come across this idea about a year ago on a molecular gastronomy blog and had been wanting to try ever since. The original blog in which I read about pressure infusion was here and this had been inspired from this Youtube video.

The idea is that by putting meat plus marinade under pressure, you force the marinade into all the air pockets in the meat, thus making a deep marinade in a very short time (seconds rather than hours).

Edit: In fact this doesn't appear to be the correct theory - though given the lack of success, it's hard to know exactly what is happening.

The marinade was a honey, soy sauce, guilin chilli paste mixture and the meat with chicken breast, thinly sliced (so that they would fit in the soda stream bottle). I gave it a blast for a few seconds to build up the pressure before letting it sit under pressure for around a minute.

In the mean time we had a control experiment, which was the same marinade having been mixed with the chicken and separated into a non-pressure batch. Apart from the pressure, the two dishes were the same (though I now realise that one of them had gone in the fridge for a few minutes while the other was under pressure - this difference in temperature before cooking may also have been crucial).

We got two pans up to heat (sadly very different pans), added a little sunflower oil and gave the two batches a quick stir fry before adding a pinch of salt and a squeeze of lime into each one.

The verdict was interesting, though perhaps a damning inditement of our scientific method. In terms of flavour the two dishes were said to be virtually identical. Unfortunately the two dishes used had been of different materials and this probably masked any effect that could have been seen in the different marinating methods (though it was clear that the pressure marinade hadn't made much difference).

The chicken cooked in a non-stick pan had given off a huge amount more juice, and thus left the chicken a little dryer, while the stainless steel pan seemed to have relatively little juice after the four or five minutes of cooking. As I mentioned above, the different pre-cooking temperature of the meat may also have had a big effect.

The conclusions were threefold:

1) On finely sliced meats, the pressure method seems to have little affect as the marinade penetrates the meat very well at the cooking stage and thus no major difference is seen. The first conclusion is thus that one should try this with thicker cuts of meat to see any difference.

2) The material used to cook the meat seems to be a far more important factor than I had realised and we should do some more controlled experiments cooking the same meat in different materials to find the optimum pan. Included in this conclusion is that given the different materials, different temperatures are reached and this again calls for more experiments.

3) The final conclusion on the recipe itself: The marinate wasn't bad and the sweet, sour, spicy mix of honey, lime and chilli with the salt to set it off was good, but not mouth watering - an umami addition (perhaps even a pinch of msg) may bring it out even more. (See here for research on this).

Note that msg gets a bad rap, though usual for the wrong reason. Frequently msg, which is simply a purified form of the flavours found in seaweed, meat and fish sauce for instance, is used to hide bad ingredients. As a cure-all for cheap products it'll give you more problems than solutions, but as a way of bringing together other flavours when you don't want the pungency of fish sauce or the iodine notes of seaweed, I don't have a problem with it. I do try and add something more natural if the alternative is as good, but sometimes it's the right choice to make.

Next up came some extremely good quality beef fillet cooked with three different sauces. The first was a classic tarragon Bearnaise, the second was a classic fresh green pepper sauce and the third was a dark chocolate, orange and chilli sauce. The first two sauces went fine, but the third, during cooking was almost a disaster as the chocolate split from overheating. I remembered that in McGee, the cooking/science bible, there was a section on emulsifiers (which bring together chemicals which will otherwise not mix - eg. fat and water), and realised that adding an egg-yolk to the cooled mixture should, in theory do the trick. In fact it worked like magic and before our very eyes the mixture came together again and thickened, on heating over a bain-marie into a velvety sauce again.

The fillet, cooked quickly in a copper pan with a little butter and then left to rest for a few minutes was spectacularly good, and the three sauces were frankly very impressive (Note that I can't take credit for these sauces, though I can for the saving of the chocolate and chilli).

Finally, there was a mango sabayon and the calorie content went yet higher with white wine and a little brown sugar cooked over a bain-marie before eggs yolks were added and whisked until foamy. I've always used the Italian recipe (zabaglione) which starts off with a fortified sweet wine, but this worked great on its own.

The garnish was basil, which goes very well with mango, and I added a little spun sugar to top it off.

Anyway, In the end we had two very happy chefs, and what appeared to be four other very happy customers and this is certainly going to be repeated in the near future.

Spare ribs, mock Korean style

2011-06-13T14:51:00.000+02:00

On a bit of a recipe roll from yesterday, I thought I'd post up last night's meal with photos.

In Galicia churrasco (spare ribs) is one of the meaty alternatives to the fine seafood on offer, but I never much liked the way it was cooked - relatively quickly on a hot grill, which leaves it tough and a challenge to rip off the bone. I'm all for interesting textures in food (pure cartilage and extremely fatty cuts where two of the new textures that I grew accustomed to in China), but in the case of ribs I'm definitely in the long, slow cooking camp. I came up with the following recipe for spare ribs a year or so ago and have been trying to perfect the timing and heating ever since. Last night was a pretty good success.

The marinade is made of several parts, the first being the base sauce used to make kimchi and can be found here. I would recommend going the whole hog and making the kimchi while you're at it. I normally do enough of the sauce to fill a couple of big tupperware containers and then add it in generous quantities to most recipes for the following months. It seems to keep, in the fridge for at least three or four months without a problem - it may last longer but by that time it's already been used up in my place!

Take two or three generously heaped tablespoons full of the kimchi paste and to it add honey, soy sauce, gochujang, and I normally throw in another few chunks of garlic which caramelize on the ribs. I'll leave the ratios up to you, depending on how sweet or spicy you like it.

Take the ribs and rub in the sauce with your hands - they need to get a good massage to get the sauace everywhere. Then marinate them for a few hours in the paste (I'm still not sure how much the marinating does, given the time that they have in the oven anyway).

Heat the oven to around 80 degrees, wrap the ribs in silver foil securely so that the moisture can't escape and put them in the oven. I normally give them about 4 hours or so at 80 degrees and then for the last half hour I take them out of the silver foil turn the heat up to around 170 and get them caramelizing on the outside. Slow cooking them leaves them moist and tender, so you have to be careful not to dry them out in the last stage. By this time they should be falling off the bone. In fact, it may be better to do them for longer, at closer to 65 degrees, but this would probably bump the time up to more like six or seven hours which I can't usually spare.

This time I did them with garlic roast potatoes - I would normally add some rosemary and thyme to the potatoes but didn't have any fresh. The potatoes are boiled for around ten minutes, then bashed around violently in a pan to get the outside floury. Then coat them in a pan with a little butter and olive oil with salt, onions and garlic. The ideal is then to cook them on a high heat for about an hour and a half, but with the ribs cooking slowly I had to adapt a little and gave them a good 15 minutes extra at the end on around 200. The aubergine was stirfried, after salting, in a mixture of garlic, ginger, one red Birdseye chilli, a dash of soy sauce and fish sauce, an inch of lemongrass and a squeeze of lemon, all having been crushed in a pestle and mortar.

Slightly unfocused, but here was the final result.

Thai green curry recipe

2011-06-12T17:04:00.001+02:00

I promised in the last blog post that I'd write up a recipe for Thai curry that a friend had just passed to me. It blows away any other Thai curry recipe I've ever tried, and the key is to make your own green curry paste. This recipe came from a friend in Australia that I met a few years ago in Korea, and while we didn't have much of a chance to talk there, we've since been swapping recipes and tales of gastronomic spectaculars online.

I'll copy here the bulk of the recipe she gave me, with a few edits of my own. The first part of the recipe is for the green curry paste, which makes a good deal and can be used for many curries if you store it in the freezer. The ingredients for the curry paste are:

25 large fresh green hot chillies, chopped up
3 shallots
12 cloves garlic
1 finely sliced fresh galangal (an entire root is fine - medium)
4 blades of sliced fresh lemon grass
1 finely grated kaffir lime rind (squeeze a dash of the lime juice into final paste)
5 kaffir lime leaves shredded
Small bunch of finely chopped coriander root and stems
1 tbsp of mixed peppercorns
1 tbsp roasted coriander seeds
1 tsp roasted cumin seeds
2 heaped tsp sea salt
2 heaped tsp shrimp paste

First, dry fry the peppercorns, the coriander seeds and the cumin seeds in a frying pan. Don't let them burn, but heat them just about to the point of popping and giving off their powerful smell. The difference between grinding them raw, and grinding them dry fried is huge. Also, make sure that they are good and fresh. Having some two year old seeds at the back of the cupboard won't do it for this recipe as the power of the chilli needs to have competition from the fragrance of the other spices.

Grind the seeds in a good pestle and mortar until they are super fine.

Place all remaining ingredients and salt (chillies, lime rind, lime leaves, lemongrass, garlic, galangal, coriander roots and shallots) into a blender and chop up. Make sure it's really well blended because the fibres of the lemongrass need to be well shredded before you start grinding in the pestle and mortar.

Transfer all blended ingredients back into the pestle and mortar and pound until it becomes a fine green paste. No water is ever needed for recipe as natural oils and moisture from vegetable and roots is sufficient.

Add the spice mixture from the first step and shrimp paste, continue pounding until smooth and fine. This should make about 3 jam jars of paste which can be frozen for around a year.

Now for the curry itself. The ingredients are:

400 grams beef or a large chicken breast (cut into thick slices)
1 tbsp cooking oil (sesame oil works well too)
3-4 tbsp green curry paste
1 large can of coconut cream (works better for thick, lush curry)
3 kaffir lime leaves, torn
10 small fresh Thai eggplants, quartered
1 fresh red chili sliced hair-like fine
1 small red bell pepper in fine slices
Huge handful of fresh sweet Thai basil leaves
4-5 large tbsp fish sauce
Wedge of palm sugar to taste (I used 60gms smashed wedge from larger piece)

Saute the green curry paste in oil over medium heat in a wok or saute pan until fragrant. It's pretty easy for this to burn but be careful because this will add a nasty acrid flavour to the curry even if it catches just a little. It needs to heat to release the oils and aromatics, but never too hot. Then add the coconut milk a bit at a time and heat, stirring continuously. You'll slowly see the oils from the curry paste rising to the top of the gently simmering coconut milk. Continue this until there's a good thin film of green oils on the coconut milk surface. Then squeeze in the remaining lime juice. The cut of the acid with the spices and the creaminess of the coconut really makes this recipe. In fact, the magic of this recipe is the perfect combination of sweet, salty, spicy and umami (from the shrimp paste and the fish sauce).

Now add the sliced meat and kaffir lime leaves, continue cooking until meat is cooked through. The lower the heat and slower the cooking, the more tender will be the meat in the end. Meat proteins denature above about 65 degrees (depending on the meat) and the meat becomes tough, so there is a competition between getting the centre cooked, and not overcooking the outside.

For a thick, concentrated curry, keep simmering slowly and reduce coconut cream.

Add the palm sugar and fish sauce. If not salty enough as desired, use tiny bits of shrimp paste and not fish sauce.

When the mixture returns to a boil add the eggplants and red capsicum. Cook until the eggplants are done, sprinkle sweet basil leaves and red chilies. In fact I threw in a big old bunch of sweet basil leaves and cooked for a couple of minutes, but the slightly aniseedy flavour of the basil leaves may not be to everyone's taste.

I would have given a full photo breakdown of this recipe, but I was rather too taken with the smells and flavours to get any good photos in.

With many thanks to Angela for this spectacular recipe!

Paris, Brussels, and around

2011-06-09T16:42:00.000+02:00

I feel a sudden urge to get back to the blog, which has been in hiding for longer than I care to calculate. Not having internet at home is the primary cause of the silence, plus the fact that the relatively sedentary lifestyle of Munich doesn't much inspire blogging at the moment. The odd street fair here and there, a particularly nice walk in the English garden, a trip to one of the surrounding lakes have punctuated the last few weeks, plus a very pleasant trip to Salzburg a few days ago made for a good, relaxing day, but none of these deserve an expansive post. I have a friend who has been staying here for the last couple of weeks, and because said friend enjoys good food (no euphemism intended) but not necessarily the actual process of cooking, I've been in full culinary mode in the evenings and have a couple of great new recipes to put up here soon. A Thai green curry recipe in particular takes some serious preparation but is infinitely better than anything I've produced before - I'll have to ask permission from the source of the recipe before divulging here, but this was stage two, after some dry-frying:

The last true travel adventures took me to Paris and Brussels a couple of weeks back. In Paris I gave a talk at the Institut Henri Poincare on my last paper and chatted to a few old friends about possible new projects, while eating as much steak tartare as I thought was advisable (ok, maybe a little more than was advisable) and sampling a good number of new Paris hangouts. Chez Denise, near pont neuf was a new restaurant for me, but one that I can highly recommend - the lambs kidneys were superb.

I got a few pictures with a new perspective on an old favourite here, but wasn't quite in the mood for intrusive street photography which Paris is generally so great for.

From Paris I went to Brussels, which in itself was a rather strange experience. Having lived in Brussels in 1989, I hadn't been back in over two decades, and my memories from the age of 9 were pretty faded. I remembered very little of the city, apart from the Grand Place, which was certainly less Grand than I'd seen from my slightly lower perspective, but the food I did remember, and the steak au poivre brought back floods of memories and pangs of nostalgia from an age where my visions are now mixtures of confusion, change and some not inconsiderable growing pains.

The conference itself was one of the best I've been to for a while, and the highlights from Shiraz Minwalla, Yuji Tachikawa and Jonathan Heckman made the trip well worthwhile.

From Brussels I took the train back to Munich where I've been for the last two weeks, and will be for the next two, until I head back to Southampton to complete a paper with collaborators there. Hopefully in the mean time I should have a new paper out with the team from Munich which has been in the pipeline for the last couple of months and has caused all manner of numerical headaches in the process. This'll be a good one to let loose.

Anyway, for now I'm waiting for a friend and collaborator who is visiting to go for a beer where we need to catch up on a number of physics threads before he disappears off again back to Princeton.

Of pulpo and parties and all things Galician

2011-04-25T13:37:00.000+02:00

Edit: In the end the door to door time from Santiago to Munich yesterday was 13 hours, an average speed of 80 miles. Thankfully the pulpo in my bag neither defrosted nor did the ice-packs which I'd wrapped it in, making it look quite convincingly like an octopus in a suicide vest, set off any security alarms.

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I have a five hour wait here in Barcelona in between my flights from Santiago and onto Munich where I'll be getting home late tonight. I've been in Iberia for around a week but it feels like far longer. It's been interesting to see Santiago from a very different perspective to that which I used to see it from when it was my home, and in fact I'm able to appreciate it a great deal more as a tourist. It's not a secret that I'm a fan of larger cities, and Santiago always felt pretty limited in many ways, and especially in its cuisine. Though I remain convinced that Galicia has some of the best seafood in the world, there are only so many times that one can eat octopus cooked in the same way, the only variation being in the quantities of salt and paprika before tiring of it. In terms of a city to live in I'm hugely enjoying Munich, the variety of food on offer is world class, the museums are truly spectacular (I went a couple of weeks back to the Alte Pinakothek where there's the most impressive collection of Rubens I've ever seen) and having one of the largest gardens in the world running through the centre is a great luxury which is only going to get better as the weather improves. However, on going back to Santiago this time, able to see the city without the foreshadowing thoughts of having to stay there for many more months gave it a new perspective and freshness.

On the day I arrived in Santiago, having risen at 4 am and having been traveling for the past 12 hours I came straight into the department and gave a talk. I'd spent some of the previous week experimenting with hand drawing slides and then scanning them into the computer, then playing with them in Keynote and had come up with a few ways of illustrating my last paper which I thought should come across pretty well. Unfortunately I only got four slides in before the computer froze and I had to give the rest of the talk on the blackboard, in the absence of slides. This was fine in the end, though thankfully a friend in the audience gave extremely useful feedback on my blackboard technique (which hasn't been exercised very much).

The next day, Saturday, as normal, I got dressed up in my Celtic Monk's robes, my sandals and headed out to the park in the middle of Santiago. I got a few looks, but not as many as the lady in the roman dress that I was walking with. We got to the park and were soon greeted by a crowd sporting everything from gowns and cloaks, to tunics, crowns and kilts. A funny sight though this must have been, this wasn't in aid of accurate historical reinactment, but part of the wedding of a couple of friends from Columbia and Galicia. We'd been requested to dress in traditional Celtic dress, and somehow a monk's robe was the only thing that could be found to fit me.

The wedding itself was a little out of Santiago in a former stables and now restaurant called O Fogar de Santiso, a truly rustic setting for the event. This place is known for the queimada which is held there every week and involves the chanting of ancient incantations over a cauldron of flaming alcohol with coffee beans and sugar. The brew itself is incredibly strong, but the combination of sugar, caffeine and alcohol gives you quite the kick.

The time spent partying was an interesting cultural experience, given that most of the participants were very definitely Galician Galicians. Songs were sung in Gallego and the gaita and drums pumped out the rhythms of local tunes. It was a lot of fun, but as a non-Galician speaker it wasn't easy to join in with this part of the party. I find also that the contrast between my Englishness and the Spanish fiesta ideal is sometimes a stark one and these cultural differences push me even more to an extreme. It's an interesting distinction which I'd like to know how to overcome - drinking more seems to be most people's solution, but somehow it's not something that I feel so comfortable with. Anyway, despite all this, partying with old friends was a lot of fun.

I never had much of an interest in Galician (the language) while living in Santiago, given that I struggled enough with the Spanish, but on returning I can see how rewarding it would be to speak a minority language in a relatively closed and protective culture. Though I can already understand Galician and Portuguese (at least as spoken by Brazilians and Mozambiquanos) I can't string a sentence together in either. As long as I kept up the Spanish actively, learning a variation on the same theme should be pretty enjoyable. Anyway, given that I'm flailing around with German and concentrating on the Chinese at the moment, the task of learning another Iberian language is going to have to wait for now.

A few photos from the event:

My usual Saturday garb:

(on the most part) Galician revellers:

Balkan dancers with Galician beats:

and the happy couple:

It took a couple of days to recover from the wedding and I was back in the office on the Monday, chatting with friends and former colleagues about various projects as the number of people in the department quickly diminished as Easter approached. On Wednesday I took the bus from Santiago down South into the North of Portugal to Braga, where a friend works and we've had project plans for a year or so now since we met last year in Buenos Aires. I was greeted at the bus stop with a bike and we cycled to the university a little outside the city centre and headed to a restaurant to indulge in Francesinha - I've suffered the wrath of the little French girl before and this time was no exception in terms of the barrage of calories which one is faced with. Blood sugar levels in chaos we went back to the department where I set myself up for another talk. I transferred my talk to another computer and got things set up in the seminar room before noticing that where the projector should have been hanging there were bare wires. Given the choice of hunting down another projector or just getting on with it I suggested that I scrap the original talk, and given that the audience was made up of non string theory experts I just gave a talk introducing the basic ideas of the calculations I'd been playing with and tried to steer things roughly towards the results of my last paper. There were plenty of good questions form the group who specialise in General relativity on the one hand and differential equations on the other, and I think that at least they got the basic idea which was all I could ask for.

After the talk we just had a couple of hours to set up our calculation and get things going before we would go our separate ways. Thankfully this was enough time to find all the right references and work out the angle of attack and the interesting questions to ask, so hopefully we've got things to a stage that we can now push things separately over the next couple of months. A meal of Bacalao in the evening, a local white wine and then a stroll into the city to watch the Easter parade which was putting on a pretty extensive set of bible re-enactments was enough to finish me off for the day and I collapsed into the hotel a little before midnight.

Back on the bus the next day after a quick stroll around the rather charming old town of Braga, and I was back in Spain before I knew it, heading on to catch up with old friends and relax a little for the weekend. On Thursday evening the rain was full on in Santiago and I left the flat, unusually for me without my camera. As the light changed and the last evening rays hit the churches with the background of heavy clouds, I realised that I'd probably made a mistake leaving my camera at home. Indeed the rainbow formed quickly and before I knew it we had the most spectacular double rainbow I'd ever seen. Something more interesting was happening though as below the first arc there were several other lines of red, an effect I'd read about, but never seen before.

The classic rainbow display can be calculated easily by looking at how light is reflected and refracted through spheres. However, if the size of the droplets of water is small enough compared with the wavelength of the light, another effect takes over and the wave nature of light becomes important. As light is diffracted through similarly sized water droplets an interference pattern emerges and distorts the rainbow to give the so called supernumerary bows which were clearly visible on the display I was watching helplessly without my camera. I phoned home desperately to ask my friend to try and find my camera and take some photos for me. Thankfully she did just this, and these are the results:

Anyway, this brings us up to Sunday and I'm sat back in the same cafe I was, last week, waiting for another flight and about to get back to the calculation which I've put on hold since leaving Germany. Once I'm back there are three projects which all need a lot of attention and will hopefully start to take form over the next few weeks.

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Edit: now back in Munich and hoping to be able to find some food today given that my house is devoid of it and the shops are shut. For now I'm just going with caffeine and I'll see how long I can keep going with just this.

I have a full two weeks now in Munich before taking off again early next month to give a talk in Paris and then go on to a conference in Brussels straight after. The adventures continue...

Back in Santiago

2011-04-16T10:59:00.000+02:00

Time in Munich has been passing quickly but relatively uneventfully, the sunshine comes and goes and we have hints of summer between the cold snaps in which walks through the elegant streets of Schwabing and into the English garden are really lovely. I've been meeting a few new friends here and there but I'm keeping to myself a little more than I was in Spain, mostly in order to not drown in the various piles which are taking up the rest of my life, the three active projects are going pretty well, though on the language front I'm finding motivation a little hard with the German given how easy life is without it. I discovered the main university library a week or so ago though which looks like it may be my refuge in which I can't escape from the study.

Right now I'm back in Santiago after an exhausting day on the road yesterday - a 4.30 alarm clock followed by a 7am flight to Barcelona and then arriving in Santiago at 3pm, only to give a talk at 4pm. The talk itself was on my last paper and while I'd spent a long time getting the slides ready, the computer breaking down half way through meant that most of the talk was given on the black board. I still need a lot of practice with blackboard talks!

Today is a wonderful sunny day in Santiago and I'm about to head off to the wedding of a couple of good friends, a Colombian and a Galician. Hugely looking forward to seeing lots of good friends again! This will be a super-traditional Galician wedding and I'll be dressed up in something akin to a medieval monks outfit which could be interesting, given the soaring temperatures. Photos of me perspiring are likely to follow.

Next week I'm in the office here for a couple of days before popping down South to the university of Braga in Portugal where I'll be giving a talk (though I can't quite decide what it's going to be on as the group there isn't stringy so yesterday's talk would certainly not work). I'm also hoping to start a collaboration with a friend there as we've been discussing a possible calculation for a year or so now.

Anyway, that's where life is up to at the moment. After I get back to Munich I have a couple of weeks and then the annual silly-season begins with too many travels to even think about, but we'll cross that boarding gate when we come to it....

The science of homeopathy

2011-03-19T10:28:00.000+01:00

It turns out that if you take intelligence and fact, and dilute them with a few centuries of woo, folk-lore, misunderstood quotations, here-say and shake for several years in the head of the gullible and the misguided, then repeat the process over and over again for a few generations, what you end up with is the science of homeopathy. For legal reasons I shall say nothing of the overall intelligence of the women presenting her ideas of how homeopathy works, but I can say quite confidently that she manages to get more facts wrong in the fields of mathematics, physics, biology and biography than anyone I've ever seen before. It's truly remarkable.

On another note, you may have noted my absence for the last few weeks. The normal excuses follow...I've just come back from a very busy two weeks in the UK, working with my former boss and some other friends in Southampton on a paper which we hope to be out next week. We're actually very pleased with these results, and the paper takes a rather different form to most of my previous papers in the fact that we're really trying to construct a framework for other people to use rather than applying techniques to a new problem.

The other things which are taking up lots of time are currently various language classes and meetings. I've set up a Chinese conversation group here in Munich and the first meeting, just before my trip to England saw a group of 12 of us getting together in a cafe to chat. The range of abilities was very varied from complete newbies to a few native Chinese and I think with a few more meetings we should find a good rhythm so that everyone can benefit. Second meeting is this afternoon, hopefully followed by hotpot.

Anyway, speaking of which I have homework to be getting on with, but just wanted to pop by to say that I'm still here, just on the verge of chaos.

The quickest of photo updates

2011-02-17T23:53:00.001+01:00

I'm just coming to the end of my days in Valencia, which have been excellent. The conference has been a lot of fun, seeing some good talks and spending lots of time with friends and collaborators and today I went for a bit of an explore of the city before going and hiding myself away to start writing a new paper. I'll put up some photos when I get back to Munich. In the mean time I promised last time a photo of my new apartment, furnished over the last couple of weeks with second hand furniture from across the city. The desk you see here I had to carry on my own through an evening rain back to my place and then up four flights of stairs. I was utterly exhausted in the end, but I think that the place is looking pretty good now. I've got a large Chinese calligraphy to put up, and a lot of photos, but apart from that it's almost there.

Edit: I notice looking at it again that the distortion with the 10mm lens makes the desk and table look tiny. The table is big enough to seat perhaps 6 people pretty comfortably and the desk is about 1.5 m for scale.

Of time to sit and think

2011-02-12T10:34:00.000+01:00

So, we're a little over a month into the Munich adventure and many of the teething problems have now been solved. I have a phone, I have a flat, and thanks to a huge forum of English speakers, called Toytown (named by its instigator because Munich, though a large city, doesn't have many of the things that we associate with such places - it's really a collection of posh villages welded together with cafes and bookshops), I also have furniture.

My place, as many places in Germany do, came unfurnished but I managed to organise a week of pickups from around the city, collecting bookshelves, cupboards, sofas plus some miscellaneous and probably not necessary additions (a soda maker which I will be using for high pressure marinades, though in a dream I figured out a way to do this even more easily...ok, I dream about some weird stuff!) either free or second hand, and now have a pretty presentable looking flat. Although there are only two rooms (plus kitchen and bathroom) there's bed space for seven (double bed, double futon, double inflatable mattress, plus a large sofa) and I expect to be putting up friends over the coming months.

Unfortunately, somewhere in the move the cable needed to transfer photos to my computer has vanished and so photos of the new place will have to wait.

On the work front, things are amazingly busy. I'm currently working very actively on three projects which seem to be making exciting progress, plus another three or so which are all on the back burner. It'll be good to get some meaty papers out after a year of networking but little sit-down-and-calculate time last year.

The other hugely nice thing about the flat is that there's no internet in sight, and no television, so I spend my evenings reading for hours and hours and catching up on the teetering shelves of books which I sent from Spain, or bought while I was in China last year. Read last week and thoroughly enjoyed: Harpo Speaks, Waiting for Barbarians (ok, enjoyed isn't the word, but appreciated), Suffer and Survive, and having got my parcel through from China, I went back through Landau Lifshitz on classical mechanics, a wonderful book, and one which I'd love to put into a Mathematica format to make it interactive. This video from the Wolfram blog, describes just the sort of thing I'd like to spend some time on in the future:

Previously, while in the guest house of the MPI I read Plato and a Platypus walk into a bar, a brilliant little book of philosophy told in the language of jokes plus Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, a book that had been recommended to me as I'm interested in finding out more about the KIPP system of education, having previously been a little disappointed by the lack of detail on the actual process in Bill Gate's TED recommendation Work Hard, Be Nice.

Language progress is still in its infancy, but after next week, when I'll be in Valencia for the Iberian strings meeting, I'll be starting morning lessons in German for an intensive couple of weeks, followed hopefully by Chinese lessons in the evenings. I'm reaching a bit of a plateau with my Chinese and feel that now's the time to give it a bit of external help.

The wonders of multidimensional German phone contracts

2011-01-27T21:37:00.000+01:00

I wrote this, and then reread it. I don't want to be posting lots of negative entries at the moment, but for now it's the most amusing, and culturally intriguing stuff for me. I'm still very happy here, despite the occasional hiccup and I'm slowly managing to meet a lot of very interesting people, and when I get the apartment sorted (news to follow) I'll actually be able to dive into the work that I've only been able to do halfheartedly for the last couple of weeks.

So...

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I almost lost it today. I was about 5 seconds away from doing something I would have regretted. Thankfully the situation was defused and all, in the end, was ok, but this was about as close as I get to boiling point.

I received a rather surprising email yesterday night. Two weeks ago I'd been into the O2 shop to get a mobile phone contract. I spoke to the woman behind the counter for half an hour, worked out the best options and the best phone for me, decided on the tariffs etc. then signed the contract. I then had to wait for half an hour while the phone was activated so I went off and did some exploring of the city. Half an hour later, plus a half hour wait in the queue, I was told, without a hint of apology that I had been refused a contract by O2, and it was because I'd only just arrived and had no credit rating (this, despite giving them a copy of my contract). I asked if there was anything I could do and they simply said no, that was the way it was. I left the shop pretty shocked at the treatment, having, half an hour earlier been very impressed by the sales people.

The next day I mentioned this to my bank manager and he said no problem, he would write them a letter explaining that all was good, and though I have no credit rating here, I wasn't a liability. He faxed it off, and I waited to get the phone through the post. Instead, two days later I received an email saying that this second attempt had also been unsuccessful.

Disappointed, but understanding that the rules are pretty unmalleable I was resolved to get a pay as you go phone, and gave up on the idea of the contract.

So, it was with some surprise that I received an email from O2 yesterday night telling me that they had taken the first month's payment for the contract out of my account and they hoped that I was very happy with the service so far. Shocked, but faintly amused by the stupidity of it I told myself that I'd go at lunchtime today to the O2 shop and tell them of the silly mistake that they'd made and we'd all have a good laugh.

Lunchtime today and I stroll into the shop, ready to tell the story. I wait, and eventually get greeted by a dour looking guy who seemed pretty annoyed that I couldn't speak German (this is one of the few occasions where I've had this - in general people are wonderfully friendly and seem to have no problem about speaking English. Note that this guy's English was perfect). Anyway, I explained the situation to him and he said, straight out, that there was nothing that they can do for me. I was in the middle of saying 'what the...!?' when he got a call from his girlfriend who spent the next five minutes giving him an earful, while I stood there confused and beginning to fume. Five minutes later I asked again, and he said that because I signed the contract I couldn't cancel it, and the fact that I'd been refused a phone was a separate issue. Flabbergasted, I repeated what he'd said, just to make sure: "So, I'm locked into a two year contract, but you won't give me a phone?". Yes, that's correct sir. You signed the contract and you can't get out of it (though he was sullen on the outside, I could hear the chuckles coming from within).

I asked him what he was going to do about it, getting close to boiling point. He paused for a second and then said again, sorry, there's nothing we can do, but that I could buy the phone for 120 euros if I wanted. What?! I said. But I signed the contract knowing that I could get the phone with it (It seems that I was wrong about this, and this was part of the problem, but at this stage I didn't know). I told him that I wanted to see the manager, and wearily he trudged over to the office and went in, telling me to take a seat. 20 minutes later, and feeling like he may have been fobbing me off the manager finally showed up and I ran through the problem again. He told me that it would be very hard to cancel the contract to which I basically told him that that wasn't my problem.

He explained that sometimes this happens and that, because there are really two contracts - one for the phone, and one for the use of the phone, that sometimes a client is refused the phone but not the service contract. I told him that I hadn't been told that and it seemed to be a pretty important piece of information when signing a contract. It was at the point that he said that it was my word against the woman who sold me the phone as to whether she had told me or not, that I almost blew up. Not only was I being told that I was stuck in a contract in which I wasn't allowed a phone to use said contract, but I was being accused of lying. I stuck to my guns and asked again what they could do. He explained, as the first guy had, that I could buy the phone for 120 euros. Again I stated that part of the reason for getting the contract was in order to get a decent phone at a very low price.

It was then that the confusion started to resolve itself (I think...I'm still wondering whether I've ended up getting screwed anyhow). The second part of the contract was for me to pay five euros a month for the phone itself (I had thought that this was within the first part of the contract, but apparently not). This is what had been refused. In fact by buying the phone outright I wouldn't be paying more than I would have done otherwise, it was just an upfront payment instead of a contract payment (a contract to rent the phone, in effect). Thankfully my red face and searing eyes let the guy know how angry I was, and he cut a quarter off the price of the phone.

I didn't have the strength by this point to argue about the first two weeks of the contract that I'd had to pay for without a phone, and I left the shop, new phone in hand and finally able to connect within Germany. That was painful!

The horrors of finding a flat in Munich

2011-01-24T22:23:00.001+01:00

There comes a time in every blogger's life when their blog is the obvious and most efficient direction for a rant. I haven't ranted angrily about anything for a long time, as far as I remember. The last times were probably at the beginning of my stay in China, when I was struggling with Mandarin and my thoughts about various aspects of Chinese bureaucracy there were far from appreciative. Looking back, most of these rants have turned out to be misguided, and I was simply not seeing the situation from the wider perspective that I should have been. Since then I've realised that as a traveler I should either be amused at the bizarre situations that I find myself in, or thank my lucky stars that I don't have to live with them permanently. Had I gone into the last Sichuan trip with a closed mind it would frankly have been hell. Luckily I saw it for what it was and spent a lot of time laughing at how ludicrous the various situations were.

Anyway, so that brings me up to now, and I hope that I will look back on this post with light amusement in a few months time when things have calmed down.

I've been in Munich for around 4 weeks now. I love this city already, the diversity is absolutely spectacular in terms of culture, cuisine and possible activities, and the people here are amazingly friendly. That being said...

I still don't have a flat! I've been searching now for almost a month and the situation is looking increasingly hopeless and I'm seeing (if not reaching) the end of my tether. I found a fantastic place yesterday, much more expensive than I had been hoping for when I first arrived here, and completely unfurnished (not even a kitchen) but my perspective has been starkly shifted as I realised that things weren't going to be as easy as I'd hoped and I had to alter my budget and possible scale. Unfortunately there were 10 other people looking around this flat at the same time and there had been many more before me. I told the agent that I'd like to take it and she said that I should send an email and I may be called in for an interview with the landlord. Unfortunately when I sent my details I was told that I wouldn't be able to take the place because I was only going to be here for 2 years! WTF am I supposed to do!!!!

The agent' fees are a joke here, they 're the highest I've ever come across. The sellers market rules. The famous 'provision' means that on top of the normal deposit, you pay the agent 2.4 months rent. and never see it again. That's it, agency fees for renting a flat, and at Munich prices that's going to be around 1600 euros, before you've even started moving in.

The prices themselves are very high, but what's worse is that most of the places are unfurnished - completely. They're bare walls, and a bathroom, if you're lucky. No kitchen, no bed, no washing machine, no nothing! If you want a furnished place then very often you have to buy the furniture from the previous owners - another 1500 euros, and then have to try and sell it the other end of your stay. Again, WTF!!!

So, I've now visited perhaps 20 flats (they go quickly so it's not every day that I can find a new flat that's gone on the market and hasn't already been taken) and either they've been ridiculously small (a kitchen and bedroom all in one for 700 euros!) or way out of my price range, or if they're withing budget and scale, I can't have them because I'm not here long enough. I don't know what to do!

Actually looking at flats isn't the problem. It's a pretty good way to explore the city and I've seen some fantastic areas that I've walked around before seeing the flats, thinking how amazing it would be to live there. The problem is that until I have a flat, I don't feel that I can start my life here. There are so many things that I want to do. I want to start taking intensive German classes in the evenings. I want to start cooking again. I want to take a photography course. I want to get into a good schedule so that I can get into the office early and work full days without having to go out for a couple of hours to see a flat. I want to start a regular Chinese exchange. I want to entertain for new friends. I want, I want, I want...I know, the cessation of desire and all that being the path to fulfillment, but frankly when you're searching for a flat, that all goes out the window.

So, I'm frustrated, not pissed, but really frustrated that I haven't even left the starting blocks here. This year is a very important one for me. I have only a two year position here, so I need to be thinking about applying for new positions again in 7 months (Why do I do this!?) so the pressure is on to get some good work soon (this is actually on pretty good track at the moment with quite a few projects running well with people in the department here and a few with various other international collaborators). But still, I need this sorted and I need it done soon.

Munich is supposed to be the hardest city to find accommodation in Germany, but it feels like extra effort isn't going to make it come any quicker. I feel like I'm swimming in the quicksand of the Bavarian real estate market and I don't really know which way to go to get to shore.

Don't take this post as a depressed moan, but just that I need to get out my deep frustrations at how bloody hard it is to find a flat here.

Rant over. For now.

Memories of Galicia

2011-01-18T22:48:00.000+01:00

I went to see a flat this evening. Actually it was the second time I'd been to see it as the first time nobody had been there. The area is incredible. There's a Japanese restaurant around the corner where the Nagoyan family who owns it have an entire section in the menu for okonomiyaki and the only people in there were Japanese. There's a Spanish restaurant across the street where the owner is Galician and there's both pulpo and caldo Gallego on the menu, there are local grocers aplenty, and there's a Creole restaurant around the corner where the owner from Martinique told me about the mouth-watering things on the menu that combined mango, fish, spices and exotic vegetables in the most incredible sounding ways. This is my kind of area! In addition, the fact that it's on the same subway line as my gym and the institute makes it really special. Unfortunately the house was not, and I'm going to have to keep looking, but at least I know have an idea of my ideal area, even if it is one of the most sought after in the city.

Anyway, coming out of the Galician restaurant, where I'd spent a while chatting to the owner about the wines, I was reminded of a photo I'd been editing for a while, from my first summer in Galicia when I went with a couple of friends up to the Costa de Muerte. On the way we passed an abandoned boat and I got some shots of it. I wanted to play a bit with this photo because the contrasts between the background and the boat are not that strong, so I've needed to do quite a bit of work to get it to this stage. After a dozen or so masked adjustment layers I'm getting happier with the results, and this sort of exercise is definitely something I should be trying more. When you stare at a photo for a couple of hours it becomes very difficult to be at all objective about it, but this is a part of the art that I need to work on.

So, re. the housing situation it's looking pretty bleak still, but I have a couple more flats to see this week and I'm still holding out hope.

Marienplatz and the Rathaus from above

2011-01-16T16:33:00.001+01:00

I spent over an hour yesterday organising my 'handy', only to be told at the end that I had failed the screening procedure, probably because my bank account here hasn't been open very long - a pain, but the people in the shop were very good about it. I'll head back in a week or two to try again.

After my failed attempts, I headed to a pleasant cafe and did some editing on a paper for a while before making my way back to the guest house (no flat yet, but a couple of viewings coming up). The cafe was nice, but not quite what I'm looking for in a 'local', yet.

On the way back to the U-bahn I passed the entrance to the tower of St Peter's overlooking Marienplatz and with the light of the late afternoon having burnt through most of the cloud I thought it would be a good chance to see the city from above. 15 or so floors up and you come out into the fresh air and have a fantastic view of the city and the Alps in the distance. I've only had time to edit one of the photos so far, but this is of the Rathaus and Marienplatz, facing North with the Frauenkirche on the left.

Of Munich and of crying in public

2011-01-12T22:15:00.000+01:00

I stood this evening, alone, in the central market place in Munich, close to Marienplatz with its magnificent town hall and rather lovely shopping area, and shed a little tear. I'd spent the last half hour walking through the slowly closing shops around and across the market square. I'd walked into the cheese shops, at least four of them, each specialising in a different area of Europe or Germany. I'd gone into the butchers, where they had told me which small, local farms the chicken, ducks and geese came from, and which forest the game had been taken from. I spoke to the woman selling vegetables in one of the stands and found that all the vegetables had their origins labeled and that there was both plenty of locally produced food as well as lots of exotic produce, including perhaps 5 varieties of chili and almost a dozen of mushroom. This along with the shop devoted to honey, and the bakeries selling the most amazing array of seeded loaves had just tipped me over the edge. On the way to the market I'd gone into the second hand camera shop with its several hundred lenses eyeing me up from the window which had already put me in an emotional mood. So I stood, surrounded by amazing food and the people who care for it, and I couldn't help but grin like an idiot for a few minutes, taking in the possibilities as my eyes welled up.

I really really like this place. I think that part of it may be due to the way my stereotypes of Germany are not playing out, at all The people smile on the streets and strangers say hello. There IS definitely a sense of humour. Munich doesn't seem to be as horrendously expensive as I'd been led to believed. I just picked up a couple of bags of clothes which fit me! something I've had a very hard time doing for several years!. The appreciation of good food is everywhere. I've just come back from a sichuan hotpot meal which would have satisfied the most critical of Beijingers (actually, it did), and I've already spotted where I can get what looks like a great bibimbap: just round the corner from the Vietnamese restaurant. This is all of course partly because I'm now living in a highly multicultural city of a million people. The Bavarian fare itself is a heavy, but very tasty mixture of dumplings, sauerkraut and pork in various combinations, but the two or three times that I've had this so far, washed down with a vast glass of beer, it's been fantastic winter fare.

So, I'm a week or so in, and have managed to get a fair number of the tedious admin jobs seen to. Today was tax office day. It was also the first occasion that I'd met someone who didn't speak English (I'm learning German now, but it'll be a while until I'm in any way conversant) - in general people claim not to speak much English and then put me thoroughly to shame with their vocabulary and perfect grammar. Anyway, the guy in the tax office didn't speak English and when i asked, he waved his hands saying 'vid aams', 'vee do vid zee aams'. I thought at first that he was sending me away to find someone else who could help with this ignorant foreigner (and he would have been quite right to do so) until I realised from his waving and his big grin that he was saying that language wasn't important - 'we do it with arms'. And so we got through the tax form 'with arms', and frankly without a problem at all. At the end, when we'd got through the questions he gave me another grin and bade me farewell with another 'see, vid zee aams'. I love it. People who are just willing to try, and make a fool of themselves if needs be. This I hadn't expected from Bavaria, but then, as I move slowly around the world, I'm learning that my preconceptions are almost always entirely baseless.

Work is also picking up quickly and I'm working in parallel on three or four projects here now. The group is big, and dynamic, with a great range of skills and knowledge and I'm feeling like I'll both be able to contribute, and learn from my time here. Work here along with a few other work visits mean that the first three months of 2011 are pretty much full already!

Anyway, that'll do for now, but I hope to update soon on the flat-hunting situation and if I make it into the Alps, just an hour away, I'll post some photos for sure.

First day in Munich

2011-01-05T01:00:00.000+01:00

Well, apart from 11 hours in the office spending lots of time chatting physics, I was witness to a partial solar eclipse, a 22 degree solar halo, an upper tangent arc and a circumzenithal arc. I only have the first three on camera, but I can promise that the fourth was spectacular. Most of the time the solar halo was completely behind clouds this morning, but I was able to get this one shot. Not the greatest shot ever (and NOTHING compared to this), but still:

and a half hour later, the cirrus clouds came in and I had a ten minute slot of this wonderful 22 degree halo and upper tangent arc:

Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be any reflection of the halo in the window on the right, which could be related to the polarisation of the reflected light, and the surface of the window.

When going for lunch later, the Cheshire Cat halo was out, but my camera was not. Still, not bad for the first day in Munich!

And on...

2011-01-02T23:34:00.000+01:00

I'm packed, insomuch as one can be for a cheap airline flight when moving from one country to another. (In addition to the 280 kilos sitting in Santiago ready for pickup tomorrow) I have my 20 kilos of possessions ready to go on the bus with me to Gatwick tomorrow and then on to a new life in Munich where I'll be based for the next two years. A new city, a new culture, a new language and much more awaits. I've had some time to think over the last few weeks of traveling about where my future might take me and the next two years will give me the opportunity to see what options are available for the longer term. I'll keep you posted.

The last ten days in the UK have flown by and I seem to have spent a lot of time somewhere between the kitchen and the gym, when I wasn't visiting friends in London for New Year. It's been a lot of fun to cook for the family again and I hope to be able to keep the cooking up in Munich, with a much wider set of possibilities available in the shops than I had at my disposal in Santiago.

The stroke of midnight this year was spent on a hill in Dulwich overlooking the skyscape of London and the fireworks from the distant vantage point, though without the noise, were somehow more moving with the scale than they had been last year from a freezing Vauxhall bridge with hundreds of thousands of other revelers.

I'd spent a couple of days before this seeing exhibitions in London including a great Eadweard Muybridge exhibition at the Tate Britain and Cezanne at the Courtauld. I'd also taken a trip specially to Portabello road to visit Books for Cooks, only to find it shut for the holidays. There's a Chinese recipe book apparently only available from this shop which I'd like to get my hands on.

Anyway, for the first post of 2011 I'll leave you with one from the penultimate day of 2010 from Somerset House together with iceskaters on the rink:

A Chinese bus tour to Jiuzhaigou - or a lifetime of cultural experiences in three days

2010-12-12T14:23:00.001+01:00

In response to a friend who told me that I would give an excuse about not writing this post due to too much current chaos in my life, thank you for giving me an extra motivation for getting this written, titivations and all!

I wanted to write a post about the trip I made last week to northern Sichuan where I had without a doubt the most interesting cultural experience of my time in China - spending three days on a Chinese tour-bus as the only foreigner.

I return to Europe now after two months in East Asia, six weeks in China and two in South Korea, tired, but very happy with how the program at the KITPC went. I'd been getting this ready for two years, on and off, and the last few months have involved a lot of work getting everything prepared for the start. Once the program began I had the dual responsibilities of keeping things going with talks and discussion sessions, as well as showing friends, colleagues and collaborators who had come out to the program, the Beijing that, thanks to my short time there I seem to know better than many locals. This was a hugely enjoyable task, though after six weeks I was about ready to drop and a two week trip to Korea, working at the APCTP in Pohang and CQUEST in Seoul was a welcome break.

On return from Korea I attended the last two days of the program, said a few goodbyes, and then took off again from Beijing Capital into central China, to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province where I was going to treat myself to a photography based trip for a long weekend. My destination was the northern Sichuan mountains, and in particular the valley of Jiuzhaigou, where I went three years ago and learnt a huge amount about photography in the process. Last time I had done everything pretty ad hoc, without booking hotels or arranging my stay during the days in the mountains at all, and it had worked out well. I had arrived from Chengdu, found a bus going the six hours in the right direction, got into the town late at night, found myself somewhere to sleep and then went into the park just before daybreak the next morning.

After asking a friend to help book a flight this time from Chengdu to Jiuzhaigou airport I was told that there was also the option of a deal with a bus trip into the mountains all the way from Chengdu, including accommodation, food and entry to the park for a four day trip for just 45 quid. This sounded like an excellent deal, and having flown in before, i thought the bus ride seemed like a good alternative.

My alarm went off at 4am and I dragged myself to the reception in the hotel in Chengdu, ready for a lift to the main bus pick-up point. By five thirty I was standing with 70 others being bullied by enthusiastic sellers of travel pillows and exotic breakfasts, waiting for buses to various destinations around Sichuan and by 5.45 I was on the bus, crammed in at the back with 35 Chinese men and women from all over the country. Two things were unsurprising at this point, 1) I was the only non-Chinese in the group and 2) I attracted a lot of confused attention. As normally happens in these situations I was spoken about for some time until they realised that I understood Chinese (to a greater or lesser extent) at which point a barrage of questions came my way. These questions came most of the time not in Putonghua, the normal Chinese dialect, but a range of dialects stretching from Shaanxi, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Jiangxi and Sichuan. I struggled a lot of the time to grasp what was being asked, and this continued through most of the trip, though there were a few on the bus who could speak the normal dialect, including the tour guide - I'm still not sure if this was a good thing or not. The guy I sat next to throughout spoke with a very strong Shaanxi accent and I understood perhaps a sentence or two a day of what he said to me.

At 6am we left, set for an eight hour drive ahead of us, and I sat back, ready to get some shut-eye. At this point the tour guide （导李 - 导游 is tour guide and his name was 小李）got up at the front, and with a perky 大家好！ started to tell us all about the trip ahead, and about Jiuzhaigou, and the regions of the Northern Sichuan, and the history of the area, and the number of kilometers of road constructed in the last decade, and the stories of previous tour groups, and the local dialects and....well, you get the picture. Three hours later he stopped his stories, admitted that he should let us rest for a bit and finally I drifted off, ready to doze until lunch.

Indeed, I managed to sleep deeply until lunch, but somehow lunch arrived very very early and at 10.30 in the morning we found ourselves in an unheated restaurant, with plates of simple food in front of us, mostly vegetables, the only meat on offer being processed sausage meat which was occasionally thrown in with the veg.

One thing that needs to be mentioned at this point is about heating, something that became an over-riding theme for me for the trip. In Beijing, although the temperatures in winter may dip below minus 20 on occasion, the buildings are heated with central heating - government controlled, and switched on some time around the beginning of November when the authorities deem it cold enough to give the people some warmth, the reverse process taking place some time around March. In the South of the country, roughly from the line of the Yangtzi river down, although temperatures may not get that cold through the winter months, they have no such luxury as central heating and spend the winter much much colder than their northern brothers and sisters. Indeed in Chengdu, where the temperatures may hover around the 5-10 degree mark this isn't much fun, but at 2500m in the mountains of Northern Sichuan, where temperatures spend most of the time below zero, this is not a joke.

I'm not good in the cold and I sat the first day in the unheated restaurant at 10.30 in the morning, shivering in my coat, scarf and hat, digging into 馒头 and simple plates of vegetables while a barrage of questions came my way. Cold, tired and a little confused, it wasn't perfect, but I was at this time aware of the fact that this was an interesting experience to be going through.

Interestingly, through the three days of the trip (it was cut short in the end by a day) I wasn't once asked my name and no name from anyone else was offered to me. This wasn't just because I was foreign, as I never heard anybody else introducing themselves, even though many strangers had come together for the first time to spend an intense few days together. I should also note that had I been introduced to everyone I would have had a very hard time remembering their names. Five years after arriving in China for the first time, remembering Chinese names is still something that I struggle with.

After a ten minute lunch (the first day was quite a leisurely lunch and by the end of the trip, restaurant lunches had been reduced to five minutes of quick slurping and scoffing, frequently taken standing up) we were back in the coach and continuing our winding route up into the mountains.

An hour or so later we hit our first problem as traffic was held up by a landslide on the mountain path. We, sat, patiently as people craned their necks and got out of their cars, but I didn't hear a single complaint about the fact that nothing was happening. Nor did people complain about the fact that smaller cars were overtaking the line of stationary vehicles, thereby blocking both lanes of the narrow road and, when finally the bulldozer arrived, making it virtually impossible for it to get through to the scene of the blockage. When the landslide was cleared we were then left with another conundrum. There were now two lanes of vehicles facing each other, as on both sides of the landslide people had vied to be first in line, and we sat there cars honking and people waving as nobody moved.

It was another half an hour until the congestion was cleared, but again, there was no pointing of fingers and blaming of the people who had blocked the lane of oncoming traffic, and on we went. Each time this happened in the future and I saw the inevitable log-jam build up I would curse the senseless drivers who, through their selfishness wanted to be first in line, thus holding up the whole flow. Of course I kept this to myself as everyone else sat back and either didn't think through the consequences of the overtakers, or just didn't care. This is one of my over-riding annoyances in China, that the selfishness of the individual on the road, although possibly helping them for a few seconds, will add to the burden of traffic and in the end, holds everyone up. The idea of a communist society where the group is more important than the individual seems to be left behind when the car keys are in hand. This is true also of pedestrians and cyclists however who will cross the road without looking where they are going, cars swerving and breaking to avoid them in a bizarre ballet that seems always to be on the edge of disaster and puts me on the verge of a heart-attack several times a day.

An hour later we hit another landslide, this time at the entrance to a tunnel, and again, the same story. This time however the problem of oncoming traffic was faced inside the tunnel which had recently been built and only allowed for a single vehicle to go through some sections, which were still bumpy and wet from recent rains (the tunnel was open on one side). The driver revved the engine to get over a bump and out of the way of an oncoming motor-bike with an enormous loading platform attached to the back. All of a sudden the bus juddered and there was a huge shearing sound followed by a bang. The driver ran to the back of the bus, opened a panel in the floor and got to work on the transmission which had just snapped. Stuck in a tunnel, in the mud, with oncoming traffic facing us, their horns echoing through the small space and a driver running back and forth taking everything from bunches of wire to silk scarves to the back to reattach the transmission, I wondered why I hadn't taken the plane. It truly felt like we were in an impossible situation, but incredibly, after a couple of hours of sweat and concerned looks from the driver, a fragile transmission was reconstructed and, after much toing and frowing, we made our way around the oncoming vehicles.

Not only was the ad-hoc piece of DIY impressive, but the patience of everybody was truly inhuman, or at least un-occidental. There wasn't a single complaint, a raising of voices or eyebrows (except from me as my eyebrows have a life of their own when it comes to expressing opinion), or even a questioning of progress. Everybody sat back and waited, chatting happily in the cold and the semi-darkness. This is in great contrast to taking a plane in China in which the businessmen get very nasty very quickly if the plane is delayed even a few minutes. The difference between those with and without money, and working in the business world in China appears marked in their expectations of others. Many of those on the trip had taken buses or trains to Chengdu, the budget option but often taking a couple of days. These were not rich Chinese off for a jolly between meetings, but nor where they at the economic level of the migrant workers who come into the cities to find work.

Anyway, we made it out, and on our way, changing gear carefully until eventually we stopped off a few hours later outside a small house where the driver found the right contraption to give the transmission a more stable constitution. It took some time, and a few failed attempts and as we sat there and the time ticked by I was getting ready to take my passport from the tour guide, my bag from the bus and hitch hike the next few hundred kilometers to Jiuzhaigou, where I would have been quite happy to find my own accommodation and sort out the next few days independently. However, just before my patience ran out (though I seemed to be the only person getting restless - internally I should note) the bus started up again and we were on our way. The next few hours went by peacefully and without event and at 8 in the evening we arrived into Jiuzhaigou, where I was ready to have a bite to eat, shower off the day's stresses, and collapse into bed.

It became clear pretty quickly that things were not going to be so easy. We checked in and sat down to dinner (the same, simple but perfectly edible food we had had for lunch, and the same that we would have throughout the trip), shivering in the cold as the doors to the freezing mountain air outside stood wide open (the idea of shutting doors when there's no heating inside seems anathema in China - the fresh air seeming to be a positive thing). After five minutes the power suddenly cut out and we were left, not even able to see our breath condense in front of us as we sat in an amused semi-silence.

Candles were distributed and I made my way into my room where I sat on the bed and wondered what the hell I was doing. It was too cold to get undressed, so I got under the covers, coat and all with an extra layer of socks and tried to drift off to sleep, the impotent electric blanket lying uselessly under me. An hour later I got up to check the situation and found that the power was back on and the electric blanket saw that in the end I had a reasonable night's sleep. This was me, in my room, by candlelight wondering what the hell I was doing:

6 am we were up the next day and although the driver had asked us to all be on the bus by 7, all seats were filled 15 minutes early and so we headed off to the gates of the park. This would be unheard of with a Western tour group, and the only such trips I've been on, there would always be the odd few stragglers who would hold up the morning starts. Here however there wasn't a single moment that we had to wait for anyone, and every time we left before our agreed upon time.

We drove the few minutes to the park, the tour guide adding a few additional embellishments to the hours and hours of information he had regaled us with the day before and by 7.15 we were in the park, making our way to the highest reachable point in the West of the valleys.

My biggest fear was that we would have to go around the park in a group, following a flag and all wearing identical red caps, but thankfully once in we were free to do our own thing, so I set off, camera kit in hand and started taking photos of some of the most beautiful scenery on Earth.

Jiuzhaigou is so spectacular that it's almost unreal. The valley is around 20 km long , rising 1500 or so meters to its summit (at around 4000m) and the river that runs through its basin flows into crystal clear lakes where the copper compounds give some of the most vibrant colours I've seen in any natural setting. Between the lakes are stunning waterfalls you find hidden behind moss covered forest floors.

I had planned, like last time I went, to walk the length of the valley, thereby escaping the crowds who take buses between the scenic spots, but sadly, because it was winter, the paths were closed and the buses were the only option, so I took the buses and made my way down the first valley, experimenting with my camera along the way. Though the winter means that the footpaths are closed, it also means that the skies are clear and this was one of the main reasons I'd chosen to come back. I was hoping for snow on the ground and blue skies, and while the former hadn't yet arrived, the latter was spectacular and I got the bright colours which had been lacking last time with the white blanket of fog reflecting off the blue waters.

In terms of photography I had a few new tricks up my sleeve, and a few more years of experience. For landscape shots I had a 10-20mm sigma lens, I had two neutral density filters (ND8) for long exposure shots of the water and I had a 70-300mm lens for zoom. This along with the Canon 7D I'd brought not long before meant that the new bag of tricks should have given me quite an advantage over the last trip.

I'll detail the rest of the trip soon, but in terms of the results I'm still not that happy. I still have a great deal to learn about composition and technique, but every time I go somewhere like this I find there's a huge learning curve. I'd like to spend a week or so in this sort of situation, going through my photos in the evening and reassessing what went right and what didn't. There are some major compositional changes I'd make to my photographs the next time and some technical alterations, especially in that I would use liveview for every shot and mirror lock-up for added stability, even on wide angle landscape shots. Anyway, although I am only happy with a handful of the couple of hundred shots I came away with this has taught me a lot and I look forward to coming back for a third attempt in the future.

So, I made my way down the valley, finding as many photogenic spots as I could, and attempting to battle with the brights of the sky and the snow on the higher peaks together with the shadows of the trees and mountains.

(*NB, though I've altered the dynamic range to be able to catch the lights and darks, I haven't increased the colour intensity on any of the above photos. I have a video I took at one of the lakes to show that this is for real*)

As I stopped off in each place I would frequently be called upon to be in a shot with a Chinese man or woman, who wanted their photo taken with the only foreigner in town, and an incredibly tall one at that. At one point I was stopped by a group of four women from Guangzhou and asked to pose with each of them individually and then in an ensemble of dissonant heights. They didn't know at first that I could understand them (they were speaking Mandarin as one of the women was not Cantonese) but I chipped in after one of them made a particularly amusing comment and we all started chatting. I haven't seen a lot of TV in China, but from what I have seen a large proportion of it is taken up with game shows and chat shows with young women gasping excitedly in what seems to be mock amazement at the answers and actions of guests. I'd always presumed this was somehow put on for TV but for the first time I was the centre of this as my answers brought on ever higher shrieks of excitement: British, from Oxford, scientist, post-doctoral researcher, worked for the Chinese Academy of sciences (this is the most prestigious science institution in the country and has an amazing reputation, apparently known to every Chinese man, woman and child), currently working for a Spanish University, etc. etc. It was fun to be the centre of attention for a little while and as we spent the next couple of hours going through the valleys together I basked in my few minutes of stardom, posing whenever they begged for a photo. At the end of the tour through the valley we parted ways, as their tour guide looked on disdainfully at the pouting women.

One of the deals with the tour was that I would have to pay to see a cultural show, put on in Jiuzhaigou town. In fact there were two of these, but having attended such performances before I agreed only to see one of them - most other people on the bus seemingly going for both. After resting in my room for a bit (still without a shower as the water was off during the early evening and cold the rest of the time) I went along to the theatre and after again having a huge amount of attention from the performers who greeted us at the entrance I sat down for two of the coldest hours of my life. The enormous theatre, again with doors open to the outside world was sub-zero and I sat, wearing five layers on top, shivering uncontrollably for the duration of the show. The show itself was a mix of ethnic songs from the local minority groups, dances, outlandish costumes and the recreation of various ceremonies from the traditional cultures of the area. All of these would be extremely interesting if all Chinese performances weren't infused with an enormous dose of what has been perfectly described as the Spring Festival Craptacular, a garish over-performance of kitsch nauseating flamboyance. Melodramatic pop songs sung with heart-rending passion and stomach-churning over-production together with pseudo-grinning dancers pretending to play traditional drums as the recording blasts at 120 decibels over the top of their prancing around tells me little of local culture and a great deal about the clash of Communism and 20th century Western entertainment. Anyway, after two hours of frozen feet and painful muscles, having spent the whole time in convulsions, I was free to leave the theatre and go home to collapse. I had dreamt throughout the performance of running off to find a foot massage place but in the end I was so tired that all I could do was to crawl on top of the electric heater on my bed and fall immediately asleep.

The third day was another 6 am start and although the plan had been to head to Huanglong, we were told that because of the lack of rain and the very cold temperatures up at 5000m it wasn't going to be worth visiting and so we would head back to Chengdu a day early. Our way back was paved with stops at local jewelry factories, traditional Chinese medicine centres and a yak-meat retailer. These presumably are the real way that the tour is able to function, as although the people in the bus had paid little for the trip, a few of them spent fairly enormous amounts on outlandish pieces of jewelry, gems and bunches of winter worm, summer mushroom. Nobody could resist buying a few bags of yak meat, having about 50 spicing options available and I bought a few bags for thank you and goodbye presents for friends in Beijing.

After another 10.30 lunch we started the final 8 hours back home and along the way the tour-guide started telling us about the various rock-falls on the opposite side of the river to the road that we were taking. He spoke of collapsed tunnels, and death-tolls, of cars trapped under enormous boulders and of falling mountain-sides, as the rocks above us teetered precipitously. There were a few key-words that I couldn't understand from his explanation and I asked a girl behind me, who I had just discovered spoke excellent English, what this one particular word meant. It then clicked, that the whole discussion was about the Earthquake back in 2008 which had completely devastated the precise area we were driving through. The road we were on was new, not because the previous one had been old, but because in most places it simply didn't exist anymore, having been torn to pieces in May two and a half years ago.

The stories were terrifying and I realised that the place we were headed for, as an alternative destination to Huanglong was Wenchuan the epicentre of the Earthquake and the village which had been devastated by the tremors and the landslides, the side of the mountain which overlooks the valley having fallen into the village and killed thousands upon thousands of residents. We arrived in the early evening and looked around what is an incredible testament to the energy and effort of the Chinese in times of trouble. The village has been all but rebuilt with houses vastly superior to anything they would have had before and a spectacular modern school to replace the one that was buried in the landslide. This of course cannot replace what has been lost, but the effort that has been put into this is place which lost everything is truly remarkable. A good friend of mine went to the village a year after the Earthquake and looked after the children, all of whom had lost family members and friends and many of whom were still in intense trauma, neither smiling nor speaking. She described to me her experiences there where she had volunteered for a week, and the stories were a combination of the amazing strengths of humans and the terrible effects of the disaster.

Throughout the village there were people selling locally made handicrafts, not of the finest quality and whereas I would not normally buy much from these stalls I went a bit all out and filled my bag with a fair number of trinkets and fabrics. I found the whole thing a bit strange as the others in the group bargained as furiously as ever with the sellers, I felt completely unjustified in doing so, however much it was expected and however much the prices were inflated to take into account the bargaining process, telling someone that a bag they are selling is far too expensive may be a fun game in Beijing, but not standing next to the ruins of a school!

And on we went, eventually arriving into Chengdu a little after dusk. I had expected to arrive into Chengdu the next evening and then leave early in the morning, but unexpectedly I'd found myself with an extra day. Although I know Chengdu reasonably well, I'd never been to see the star attraction of Sichuan and so early the next morning I made my way north of the city to the panda reserve, which has just celebrated the birth of the 300th panda, a landmark which they had been aiming for for some time. A few photos follow and not much commentary is needed. Pandas, both giant and red: very cute, very playful, very photogenic.

I went in the afternoon to one of the areas I'd explored before in the West of the city which is a group of streets filled with some of the best food in China, tea houses galore and a recreation of what the city would have been like 100 years ago.

Unfortunately in the last three years a lot of the tea houses that I visited before have been taken over by fashionable cafes and a lot of the places are exorbitantly expensive and full of tourists, but I did manage to find myself in one of the nicest remaining tea houses where I sat down with Landau and Lifshitz and sipped chrysanthemum tea for a couple of hours.

I sat in the garden of the tea-house, under the branches of a wonderful yellow-leaved tree as locals chatted around me, played games and ate endless supplies of sunflower seeds. From time to time a photographer would come in to take a photo of the tea-house in the shadow of the tree and I discovered on speaking to them that the tree was almost a thousand years old and a renowned tree throughout the city. They all arrived with giant tripods and wide angle lenses in hand, trying their best to get both the giant spread of the tree, and the layout of the tea-house in shot. This seemed like a pretty difficult task so I turned my camera the other way and took some photos of the small golden balls on top of the posts separating areas of the garden, attempting to get a fish-eye view of the grounds, tree, tables and all.

I got some curious looks from the other photographers but when I showed them the results, everyone turned their cameras round and started following my idea. This is definitely my most successful if not only instance of trend-setting amongst photographers.

In the evening I indulged in some of the great local cuisine before an early night and a trip back the next morning to Beijing. The last 24 hours in Beijing was packed with seeing friends, some last minute shopping and the conundrum of how to pack two months worth of purchases in some relatively small bags. The answer in the end was to send all the books I'd brought in the post to Germany where they should arrive in three month's time.

The trip back to England was a long and tiring one: nine hours Beijing to Doha, four hours wait in Doha then seven hours Doha to Heathrow. The final leg was made a lot more interesting as I was sat next to Graham Brown-Martin, the founder of Learning without Frontiers who spends his time going between the worlds of technology, education and entertainment, trying to bring the education system screaming and kicking out of its industrial revolution era mold and into the era of interactivity rather than passive learning which is being made ever more exciting by the technological advancements going on right now. I spoke to him of Clay Shirky, Sir Ken Robinson and many others that I know from TED and other such sites and it turns out that he spends a good load of his time with these people when he's not discussing in Westminster, trying to persuade the monoliths of government that perhaps a teacher standing at the front of the class and regurgitating lines is not the best way for kids to gain understanding and creativity. Anyway, we spoke a great deal and if time allows I will go to see an event he's organising with Sir Ken Robinson in London in March.

So, 24 hours in London seeing friends and now I find myself waiting in A Coruna for the train back to Santiago where I have ten full days to finish a bunch of reports, hopefully a paper, give a public colloquium on atmospheric optics, and many last minute odds and ends before I leave officially on the 20th for Christmas. 2010 has been an incredible year and I've had so many wonderful opportunities. I'll do my best to wrap up some of these in the next two weeks as well!

For the love of Hangul

2010-11-29T15:08:00.001+01:00

(Much of the information in this post can be found on the Hangul wikipedia article, but I've taken what I consider the most interesting points for this blog and expanded them)

I've mentioned briefly in previous posts here about Hangul, the Korea alphabet, but haven't gone into exactly why it's such an incredibly beautiful system. I thought I'd do that now, before leaving Seoul on Thursday and thus never getting it done.

You can learn to read Hangul in an hour or two, mostly due to its amazingly logical structure, something which I've not seen in any other alphabet. In general alphabets evolve slowly whereas Hangul is relatively new and its original structure was so perfect that it hasn't had to change much.

Prior to the invention of Hangul, some 550 years ago, the writing system in Korea used the Chinese characters (this can still be seen in a huge number of words which are very very similar to Chinese - today's new one for me was on the screen of the printer in my office - 준비- junbi cf. the Chinese 准备 - zhǔnbèi - ready).

The reason for the invention of Hangul was, quite sensibly, because although the Chinese writing system has many artistically sensible reasons for its existence, efficiency in learning it is not one of them. On average it takes a couple of years longer for a student to get up to the same standard of reading using characters as it does when studying a non-character based alphabet. Half a millennium ago when the majority of Korea was illiterate, King Sejong, commissioned the writing system and this was clearly a visionary step. I do wonder how China would have developed differently had it also had such a huge literate population.

Anyway, the history of the writing system is interesting, but it's the structure which is so beautiful. For a start, if you ask a Korean to write down the alphabet, they will not write it down in a single list. They will in general write it down with the consonants and vowels separately, plus the diphthongal vowels, the doubled consonants and the iotized vowels (ya instead of a, etc.)

I'll get onto these in a moment, but first the actual structure of writing the words. Every Korean word is built out of a number of syllables and each syllable has either 2 or 3 letters in it. However, unlike most alphabets you may be used to (save for Hebrew and Arabic), the letters may go above and below each other. A two letter syllable is either places with the two letters next to each other, or one above the other, while a three letter syllable has two, at the top, next to each other followed by one at the bottom, or all three in a column. You read left to right then top to bottom withing a syllable.

For instance, in my opinion the most important word in the Korean language: 김치 kimchi (actually pronounced with more of a 'g' than a 'k'), is made of of the two syllables 김 gim, and 치 chi. The first syllable is read clockwise from the top left and the second is read from left to right.

But this also isn't why it's so beautiful. The reason that Hangul is such a beautiful language is because the consonants are based on the sound of the letter and the shape of your mouth when you say it (known as articulatory phonetics). As a good example. The 'n' sound is written as ㄴ, which is the shape of your tongue when saying the letter 'n'. In my opinion we could have written the Pioneer plaque in Hangul ;-)

How about if we have a sound similar to 'n' but with the tip of the tongue making more contact with the roof of the mouth. This is 'd' written as ㄷ where the new line at the top represents this contact. And if we aspirate this sound with a burst of air to make it 't', this is written as ㅌand has the shape of the tongue (the bottom line with the vertical), the stronger contact (the middle line) plus the aspiration (the top line). The 'r' (or sometimes 'l') is another variation of 'n' but this time it takes the form of a flap consonant. 'r' is represented therefore as ㄹ.

'g' and 'k' are ㄱ andㅋ which are the shape of the back of the tongue on saying these consonants, the second line in 'k' again marks an aspirated sound.

The consonant group 'm', 'b' and 'p' are written as ㅁ, ㅂ and ㅍ and are the basic shape of the mouth on forming these letters where the 'b' is explosive and the 'p' is aspirated.

ㅅ , ㅈ, ㅊ, 's', 'j' and 'ch' is the least obvious set but given the first, the second and third follow as being the same forms with contact with the roof of the mouth and an additional aspirated sound for 'ch'.

The two glottal sounds 'ng' and 'h', ㅇ and ㅎ have the shape of the throat opening in glottal consonants. The 'ng' can also be a silent letter which is used at the beginning of a syllable when it starts with a vowel sound - no syllable in Korean can be written with a vowel to start. As far as I know this is to do with the aesthetics of the written form.

So, those are the basic consonants. I'd wager that if you've read this far you could probably recognise most of the Korean vowels without trying to remember them. Some of these letters can be doubled up to get glottalized sounds and a few combinations make up consonant clusters (ls, lt, bs etc.).
Now onto the vowels. The basic forms of the vowels can be recognised within seconds, so I'll just list them here:

ㅏ,ㅓ, ㅗ, ㅜ, ㅡ andㅣ which are a, eo, o, u, eu and i. Want to add a y to the front? Add another short line: ㅑ,ㅕ, ㅛ and ㅠ - ya, yeo, yo and yu. Note that there's no yi or yu as these are included in the diphthongs

and then there are the diphthongs, which are simply combinations of these vowels:
ㅐ, ㅒ , ㅔ ,ㅖ, ㅘ, ㅙ , ㅚ, ㅝ, ㅞ, ㅟand ㅢ - ae, yae, e, ye, wa, wae, oe, weo, we, wi, yi Note that these can in general be worked out from the simple vowels. ie. ㅒ is ㅑ'ya' withㅣ'i' and thus yae.

So, there you have it, that's hangul, more or less. There are some subtleties related to the sounds depending on where the letters sit in a word, for instance ㄱ can appear to sound like a g or a k depending on whether it's at the beginning or middle of a word. Similarly the difference between 'd' and 't' can be subtle to a non-native speaker.

For English speakers perhaps the hardest thing I've noticed is that the non-dipthongal vowels are very pure in Korean. What we would normally count as a pure vowel in English would often be seen as a combination of two in Korean. I'm staying in an area called Sinchon but there's another area the other side of the city called Sincheon and I still have a really hard time telling the difference between the last vowels.

Anyway, that's a basic flavour of the alphabet. I've slowly been adding to my vocabulary this time, mostly with words related to foods but I'll try and pick up a few more useful phrases for next time I come.

If you're a native speaker and have any comments on this, please do tell me. For now 안녕히 계세요!

(With many thanks to Yumi for the consultation and for answering my constant stream of questions)

A taste of Korea

2010-11-29T11:50:00.001+01:00

So much to blog about from the last couple of weeks, but right now I'm recovering from a bought of something that hit me hard yesterday. I'm still not sure if it was food poisoning (the most likely option given some of the strange things I've been eating recently - including yukhoe (육회) and the biggest sea urchins I've ever seen) or a 24 hour virus, but yesterday morning it knocked me for six. Anyway, I made it into the CQUEST office this morning in Sogang university and had a reasonably productive day working on a couple of projects.

I only have a few days before leaving Korea and heading back to China for a week, and there are still a fair few friends I've got to catch up with before I head off but today I still need to rest up and make the most of the next couple of days in the office.

For now I leave you with a tour of some of the food in the market in Pohang and a few plates that have made the last two weeks so...well...tasty.

These and more can be found on my Flickr stream.

Squid boats and Autumnal colours in Pohang

2010-11-21T15:35:00.000+01:00

The brilliant lights on the horizon in the previous post's photo were from the squid-fishing ships which head out around dusk with rows of lamps hanging from ropes from bow to stern. As you watch you can see the ships go over the horizon where the light is still visible but dims significantly as they disappear from view. To keep them so bright they are cleaned meticulously before each trip and as we walked along the harbour yesterday we saw them cleaning them before heading out:

Today was another packed day as we took an hour's bus ride to Naeyeon San (mountain) and visited the buddhist monastery, Bogyeongsa, at the foothills of the peak. I still have to process a few of the photos from the temple but for now I'll post an autumnal photo from the trip up the valley which currently has only a small stream and some rather lovely waterfalls along the way. This place must be spectacular in the rainy season when the torrents crash down the very steep slopes.

Tomorrow I'm back in the office and giving my first talk of this trip to Korea.

Pohang arrival

2010-11-20T17:02:00.000+01:00

I got into Pohang yesterday after a sleepless night in Beijing (recent late nights at work have shifted my body clock again and a four am start was not much fun). After racing from Incheon to Gimpo airport across Seoul to catch my connecting flight I arrived into Pohang and made my way to the APCTP where I'm spending the next week.

I spent a short time in the department before it was time to head out to eat, as my eyes could no longer focus on the computer. My friend had little hesitation in taking me to a place which served, in no uncertain terms, one of Korea's most unusual dishes, which is really saying something! I took a video but won't post it here because the likelihood of my family letting me stay for Christmas would fall sharply on seeing this plate of food. Anyway, more or less, it's hag-fish (a pretty unpleasant looking eel-like animal) which has been killed and chopped up, but when it's cooked in front of you it's still very much thrashing around! It makes san-nak ji look pretty tame, although in contrast to that dish, the eel is very much stationary when you eat it. After cooking you eat it in the Korean barbeque style, wrapped in lettuce leaves with various sauces to give it some kick. Very tasty, but not for the faint-hearted. (It's called 꼼장어 in Korean but be warned...)

Anyway, I got into my superheated apartment after dinner (the Koreans, as far as I've been able to tell, like to have their houses roasting in the winter and there's not much I can do with the underfloor heating system) and caught up a little on my missing night. Today was a packed one which included a trip to a Korean wedding, replete with traditional Hanboks, a series of terrifying bus-rides by the local bus drivers who seem to think that speed (and all its higher derivatives) always wins over comfort and a trip out to the famous sculpture on the most easterly point of the Korean peninsular. We got there at sunset and by the time I'd stopped faffing around taking pictures of the moon, the light had gone and we were left with the view of the hand, rising out of the sea, with Jupiter and the moon rising above. A 20 second exposure gave a nice effect but it was definitely a moment that a tripod would have been valuable, guessing the angle of a 10mm lens when placed on a makeshift platform on the ground is not easy.

Anyway, tomorrow is a little more sightseeing and I'll have to get my talk ready for Monday when work starts again in earnest.

My apologies for not keeping up to date with Beijing adventures, we'll see if there are moments spare to add snippets over the coming days

Everest in the early morning light

2010-11-11T04:55:00.000+01:00

The absence of leg-space on my flight from Doha to Beijing made for a pretty tiring flight, standing up for most of the journey, but it did have one benefit. As the sun rose and the Earth-shadow slowly faded, the sight revealed below was the foothills of the Himalayas, a sight I'd never seen before. I watched the peaks rising from the gently rolling hills, and in the distance a familiar sight appeared. The light was still relatively low, and perching by the emergency exit, peering through the small window made for awkward photography, but this was one of the first shots I took of it. I'll try and process some more of the photos from this series in the next week or so.

If I'm mistaken and somebody knows better then please tell me, but I've compared this image to others in google and the surrounding peaks look right.

Dancers in Tian Tan

2010-11-01T15:55:00.002+01:00

I bought the camera without any plans to use the video feature, but I played around with it a little in Tian Tan park last weekend and found the quality is absolutely breathtaking. The following, rather shakily taken footage (this is my first attempt at film making) was reduced by a huge factor to put on youtube, and the colours in the original are stunning. I may put up a higher definition version at some point.

I thought the whole thing was a rather lovely moment with some great expressions, both facial and through body language of people out for the day, to enjoy the weekend together in one of Beijing's most pleasant temples. Give it a moment for the second couple to come to the front

Three weeks in and extremely loud on the Eastern front

2010-10-30T13:02:00.000+02:00

Blogging has been on the tips of my fingers for the last three weeks but time simply hasn't allowed. There's a critical point where the number of blogworthy events becomes so high that there's no time to blog about them as you're too busy doing them, and helping to run this conference while attending lectures, writing papers, organising lecture visits and showing people the wonders of Beijing has kicked us way into the criticical region. We've had some fantastic lectures and some wonderful evenings and now, three weeks into this eight week program, I'm feeling very happy with how it's going, even if I'm pretty exhausted. The highlight, in addition to meeting up with some old time collaborators and starting a load of new projects has been having the chance to show good friends around a city which I feel very comfortable in, and to see their impressions of China change from a scary, exotic unknown, to an exciting, inspiring place with so much to offer (we've seen everything from hardcore Beijing punk, to tango in the park, to Sichuan face changing, to kungfu in the early mornings to traditional singing in Tian Tan, and so much more).

So, given so little time (about to head out for another meal) I thought I'd update with a few photos from the 7D, which I'm extremely pleased with so far.

From the Forbidden city:

and Tiananmen. I love the little doll she's holding limply as the guards march by:

From Tian Tan, on a very smoggy day:

and a close up in Tian Tan:

and the soju bottles at the end of an evening in a Korean bar in Wudaokou:

There are a few more here, and plenty more to come.

Back in town

2010-10-08T05:44:00.000+02:00

After a long trip (no extra leg-room on the flight from Doha to Beijing and so I had to stand up for most of the seven and a half hour trip) I arrived, heavy eyed, but excited to be back in Beijing. I was greeted with the heavy smog of a city of 14 million, and the smell and noise to match. Taking the bus from the airport to Zhongguang Cun and walking into the Chinese Academy of Sciences campus felt wonderfully familiar, even though it was the end of the national holiday when I arrived and so the place was deserted.

I took my key from the porter and made my way back to the same building that I lived for two years here, arriving fresh faced from my PhD five years ago. Nothing has changed, the jaozi stands are still there. The copy shops and the hordes of people playing games remain, the grandmothers taking babies for walks in split bottomed trousers (the babies, not grandmothers) are still as numerous as ever, the men, old and young hacking up big spots of phlegm on the sidewalk remain to keep the pavement from drying up, the smart shoed fruit salesmen still talk noisily on their cell phones and in the tennis courts next to my place there is still a group of people practicing tai qi though I have to see if the sword wielding grandmothers still come out in the early morning.

I'd been rather worried that I'd come back to find a post Olympic sanitised version of the city, but thankfully it's the old Beijing that I know and love - the buildings change, but the underlying feeling is exactly the same.

I'll be here for the next two months and I have to say, though I know from past experience that the stresses and chaos all get too much after a while, I'm enormously happy to be back!

Jupiter, Io, Ganymede, Callisto, Europa and Uranus from Santiago de Compostela

2010-09-28T00:42:00.000+02:00

This may not look like much, but it took a fair few shots to capture it. Jupiter at the moment is one of the brightest objects in the sky, rising around sunset and shining through the night, it's currently the closest it's been to us for almost 50 years. I've caught Jupiter with the four major moons before, but this shot was a bit special. When I enhanced the image, a bright green spot jumped out. I knew what it was having seen on Stellarium a few days earlier what else was in the sky, but I double checked to make sure that I'd really captured the very faint image of Uranus around 2 billion kilometers away from us, just to the top left of the Jovian system. Here's the result (my photo on the right) as compared with Stellarium (on the left):

Here's another image from the same set of shots, but at a different setting on the camera, such that I could get the moons in better resolution. Here's Callisto, Europa, Io, Jupiter and Ganymede

Sundogs burning over Santiago

2010-09-27T18:47:00.000+02:00

Back in Santiago and with an intimidating amount to get done in a week before I hit the road again, but I wanted to post some photos I took yesterday.

I was heading into town to see a friend I haven't seen for a couple of months and on the way I noticed the hint of a sundog as the cirrus cloud tickled the 22 degree peripheries of the suns reaches. We went for a walk in the Alameda park in the centre of the city and by the time we got to the point overlooking the hills in the distance, the lone sundog had turned into two brilliant points of light in the sky, dazzlingly colourful and being bisected by a sun column and the faintest hint of an upper tangent arc. It was the strongest display of a double sundog I've ever seen and so I got my normal volley of shots off before the sun disappeared into the clouds:

Keep an eye out over the next few days. It tends to be as the seasons change that we see more of these glorious scenes.

Lunar halo over Oxford

2010-09-23T01:48:00.002+02:00

I just came back from a long, tiring but very enjoyable day visiting the University of Southampton where I did my PhD. I went down there to give a talk and spent a long time chatting with the students and postdoc, and my former boss about a miscellany of ideas and possible resolutions to current problems. It was a positive visit and people seemed enthused by the talk.

It was also a good chance to catch up with an old friend that I see far too infrequently these days, so we went for a curry and chatted in one of our old haunts, while freshers drank themselves into a stupor around us.

I got back home to Oxford after taking four trains around midnight and saw, as I got into the drive, a halo around the moon. I got the tripod out and went into the back garden and took a few shots. The halo itself was delicate but lovely, made all the better by Jupiter, just to the bottom left of the moon. Uranus, just above Jupiter couldn't be seen with the flare from the moon.

While we're on the subject of atmospheric optics and ice halos I'll post up a photo I took from the airport in Vienna on Monday evening as the sun was setting and the plate crystals in the split cirrus clouds reflected and refracted the light toward me:

Tomorrow I head back to London to check on my visa situation, and then on to the wedding either tomorrow night or Friday early morning. In the mean time there are calculations building up which will be tackled in transit.

fifty bits to make you wonder - by helen sotiriadis

2010-09-21T23:34:00.000+02:00

I will update the last couple of days of hectic travels, but first I really wanted to put up an advert for a new book, out today, which any fan of photography should get their hands on. I've advertised the work of Toomanytribbles (aka Helen Sotiriadis) on numerous occasions, not just because she's a friend but because I think that her work is really spectacular. We met in China after she found my blog and quizzed me about life in Beijing and it was a pleasure to see her photography go from good to outstanding in a short space of time, helped on by the inspirational architecture and sights around the city.

She's just created a book of some 50 of her best works which can be previewed here.

:: fifty bits to make you wonder :: by helen sotiriadis | Make Your Own Book

anyway, if you want your own copy of this lovely work, go here and order one...or several. Mine is in the post.

------------------

So, onto more mundane matters...

I caught up with a couple of hours of sleep today after a tiring night. I flew from Vienna to Gatwick and got into London some time after midnight, making way towards Oxford Street where I'd booked myself into a hostel in order to get up as early as possible to the Chinese visa agency (a great company if you haven't got time to go to the embassy yourself) I've been using for the last few years. Normally I stay with friends in London but the timing just wasn't going to work on this occasion. I realised yesterday that I wasn't going to have time to get the passport to the agency and back before I leave for Spain again and so I had to hand it in in person this morning. The snorer in the room in the hostel however scuppered any chances of a good night's sleep and though I drifted off some time around 5 am, getting up before 7 wasn't easy.

Anyway, though tired, it worked out ok so far. I made it to the agency, handed everything over, confirmed all forms and photos and made my way back to Oxford where I've spent today drifting between sleep and work.

Tomorrow morning I'm out of the house before 7am on the way down to Southampton where I'll be speaking with the students of my PhD supervisor about my recent work and theirs and meeting up with old friends in the evening, before racing back to Oxford once more late at night. Then Thursday to London to pick up the visa and Friday to the wedding of one of my best friends. In between all this I'm trying to keep the momentum going on a new calculation which we want to add to a new paper, to come out in the not too distant future.

So, in summary, the normal chaos, and in a few days my penultimate stay in Santiago will begin which I'm looking forward to very much.

Spain-England-Austria-Slovakia-Hungary and back

2010-09-20T00:02:00.000+02:00

It's been almost three weeks since my last post, and the time has been crammed absolutely full since leaving Santiago. The last two weeks have mostly been spent in Vienna which has been both enjoyable and very productive. Two weeks sitting down in the same office has allowed for progress on three projects, though there is still some way to go on all of them, and the rest of the time in the institute has been spent talking with collaborators (and drinking large quantities of coffee). The fact that there are blackboards in the toilets shows just how serious these people are about doing good science!

I took last weekend off to go to Bratislava and Budapest, neither of which I'd been to before and given that Bratislava and Vienna are the two closest capital cities in the world, I thought it silly not to take the opportunity. I took off on Friday evening on the train and booked into a botel on the Danube itself. Nothing special, but I figured that given that it would be churlish not to spend a night on river. I went out in the evening, had some very good local fish (Slovakian food, from the variety I saw, looked very good indeed) and then walked around the town before chatting with a load of locals and foreigners in a bar in the centre and then moving on to a club as the evening drew into night.

The next day I headed off early on the train to Budapest, two and a half hours away, and checked into a hostel before taking the train up north to the Turkish baths and spending a very enjoyable few hours soaking, swimming and being steamed at a range of temperatures. That night I went out for a fine Hungarian goulash before going bar hopping with some people I'd met in the hostel. It's been nice to go to a fair number of clubs in central Europe and to see that they're full of people who actually enjoy dancing, something that I see less of in Spain (plenty of jumping, not so much dancing!).

The Sunday I did the tourist trail in Budapest, walking up the hill to the castle and going around the park full of the preserved communist monuments, which have been kept as a reminder of the past, something unusual in an ex-communist country, most of which destroyed such structures when communism fell.

Sunday evening I got back on the train and made my way back to Vienna, spending most of the way talking physics to an Indonesian art student and her mother who bombarded me with questions about the nature of the universe.

This week has been another busy one in the office, working on my projects and giving a talk on Wednesday. Thursday morning I took off though as it was my birthday and I fancied heading out to the summer palace in Schonbrunn, where I'd been before, but it's one of the most spectacular palaces in Europe and the tour around the house is pretty well done.

and then the weekend, which was taken up with tourist things in the day, sitting in cafes and getting on with some paper editing, and a little partying at night. I have one more day now in the department and will be heading back to England tomorrow night, where five full days of work, admin nonsense and weddings await me.

On the road again

2010-09-02T12:36:00.000+02:00

I've just moved out of my flat in Santiago, a place which has been my home, when not on the road, for the last three years, and has been a truly wonderful place to live, with a kitchen which could accommodate even my most ridiculous dinners, with rooms to house many friends and couchsurfers, with a view of an amazing palette of greens and wide skies, looking out towards the setting sun.

I've had a friend living with me for the last few weeks while she finds a place of her own, but last night I asked to be alone. I arrived in the flat three years ago, alone, without a bed to sleep on, without memories or knowledge of what life had in store for the next era of my life, and I rather wanted my last night to be alone there as well, sitting, thinking about the last thousand days, about the dinners and friends who've come to eat and stay, about the 120 or so couchsurfers from almost 30 countries who have come into my life for just a few days, to share their stories and to hear tales of the universe, of life in China, of crazy meals and lost days, of a life in research, of what we know and what we don't know. The number of art's students who now have a basic knowledge of the holographic principle is non-negligible, thanks largely to these walls in el Calle Romero Donallo. I wanted to think about the work I've done in this flat, of where I've come since leaving China, of the papers I've written and the papers I almost wrote, of the new collaborations, of the arguments, heated and impassioned which I've had, and which have increased my understanding, or decreased my misunderstanding of the field, of the time spent silent and motionless on the sofa, trying to play mathematical tricks to solve a problem, of the nights where I couldn't sleep, because every time I started drifting off, mathematica code would stream across my visual field and I would jump out of bed, only to realise that my idea was ludicrous, or not. I wanted to remember the kimchi making parties with crowds of Korean friends coming round to get their taste of home, of the dumpling evenings where a bunch of friends would be put to use in a production line around the dining table, filling jaozi after jaozi with scallions and pork, of the sushi, paella and pulpo lunches where we would take advantage of the wealth of seafood off the Galician coast...and so much more.

This isn't my farewell to Santiago, but I will be here for only another two weeks before Christmas and on the road the rest of the time, at conferences and programs, and so it didn't seem worthwhile to keep the flat. My belongings, boxed and labeled, are taking up most of the spare room of a friend's flat, for the time being, until I send them off to Munich some time before December. My life is temporarily reduced to a rucksack of clothes and a bag with my notebook, my laptop and my camera. The rest of my belongings will sit in silence, enshrouded in cardboard and tape for the next few weeks. This minimisation is something I rather like, though I feel there is more I could do without.

For now I'm waiting to take a train, to catch a bus, to take a plane to England where I'm off to a wedding this weekend, before flying straight on to Vienna where I'll spend two weeks at a school on applications of AdS/CFT to the quark gluon plasma, a subject that I haven't worked actively on this year but which I hope to get back into over the coming weeks. There are still some ideas from last Christmas that one of my collaborators has reignited and I hope to give a push to as soon as possible.

So, for now I say goodbye to my home in Romero Donallo, to the library which has been my home from home over the last two weeks where I've been calculating furiously, to the cafe which has been keeping me well caffeinated and whose waiters would greet me with a sly grin every time I popped in for another giant mug of cortado upon cortado, to the swimming pool which has cleansed my mind every few days and has almost certainly saved me from complete melt-down, while working late into the night, and of course to friends, who I'll be seeing again in a few weeks time when back for the penultimate time, just before heading off to China.

The low down

2010-08-30T22:49:00.001+02:00

The calculation I've been working on all day every day for the last couple of weeks pretty much wound up today and, along with finishing packing up my flat, all boxed up and labeled ready for shipping at the end of September, I feel almost ready to head off again on Thursday for another few weeks of adventures. Upcoming: Wedding in England, two weeks at a program on AdS/CFT and the quark gluon plasma in Vienna, a talk in Southampton, another wedding in England, and then back to Santiago for a week before taking off once more. I'm thoroughly looking forward to spending a couple of weeks grounded in Vienna, the birthplace of my Grandfather, and by the sounds of things, a rather lovely physics institute.

For now a quick picture, again with thanks to Gerardo for the use of his camera, on the evening kayak trip through the lakes of Bariloche in Patagonia. We arrived back after dark, with the stars out and the light from the snow on the mountains marking out way.

The Muse on the hill

2010-08-29T16:09:00.001+02:00

The sunshine has returned to Santiago but for now I have to make up for lost time and plug on with calculations. I've spent almost all day every day plus a fair few nights in the library this week and the same is true this weekend. Progress is not bad but there are still a few puzzles in the current work which I would like to get sorted today.

Friday night was an exception and I was able to make it to the Muse concert up on Monte do Gozo overlooking the city with Venus setting over the stage and Jupiter rising behind us. I'd been wanting to see Muse for a few years and was one of the lucky few (tens of thousands) to get a ticket. The crowd was huge as this was the main event of the biggest time in the most important year in Santiago's calendar and so the youth of the city had turned out in force. The concert itself was the first big concert I've been to since seeing Sonic Youth in Beijing three years ago and it was worth the wait. If you haven't seen them, Muse is one of the most impressive groups to see live these days and the production was really incredible, just about undifferentiable from the albums.

Anyway, fullsimplify has stopped so I'll just post up another photo from Bariloche I took on the cycle ride around the lake as a passed some workmen burning some recently felled trees, the crepuscular rays streaming off the still-standing trunks and branches:

El Ateneo in Buenos Aires

2010-08-26T16:38:00.000+02:00

The chances of me getting more than a couple of minutes at a time to sit down and write a final post for the recent South American adventures is pretty low, so I'll drip feed it here to the blog as and when I have a moment. I'm currently spending my days in the library in Santiago working on a couple of different calculations which never made it quite from mind to hand to paper on the trip and finally it's time to sit down and get them rather more organised.

Anyway, I was lucky enough, after the conference in Buenos Aires, to have a weekend to explore the city and so I headed for the famous Ateneo bookshop, renowned as one of the most beautiful in the world. It is indeed stunning, set in an old theatre, but I have to admit that had it been a second hand bookshop it would have been infinitely more pleasant with the combined aroma of old books and the exuberant architecture. As it was, the old surroundings rather clashed for me with the bright lights and buzz of the commercial enterprise. Still, I browsed for a while before sitting down with some Marquez and a coffee. I rather wish I'd gone for Borges now as I still struggle quite a bit with Marquez's Colombian Spanish and complex phraseology.

Anyway, worth checking out if you're in the area though I discovered some rather less commercial bookshops with very nice cafes in the Palermo area of the city which I think are even nicer places to spend an afternoon.

Dawson Bros new clip

2010-08-25T18:12:00.000+02:00

For those of you who haven't come across the Inman/Dawson Bros, it's about time you did. This is doubly so for those who saw Avatar and wondered what all the fuss was about...now we know

Tim, Steve and Andy have been working with the likes of Peter Serafinowicz, Derren Brown and Mitchell and Webb over the last few years and got their own half hour comedy show Happy Finish recently. Well worth looking out for and a few of the clips can be found online (including the first in the Internet Hate series (Definitely not safe for work)).

Evening Kayaking in Bariloche

2010-08-15T07:00:00.000+02:00

With thanks to Gerardo for the photograph

Full circle to Buenos Aires

2010-08-14T01:40:00.000+02:00

My South America trip has come full circle and I'm back in Buenos Aires, having flown from Santiago de Chile this morning. The last few days have been exciting and surreal and for some reason, still unknown to me, I had my 15 minutes of Chilean fame (ok, mild fame, but I'll take that too). The last two days have seen interviews with three different papers, including one which promises to go into Chile's biggest magazine, El Mercurio, a videoed interview and a couple of rather odd photoshoots. This was all in relation to my talk on Atmospheric Optics which was the first in hopefully a series of talks for the general public in Andres Bello University, one of the top private universities in Chile. The talk itself went pretty well, with plenty of questions once the students got their confidence up and my first experience of being simultaneously translated. I ran through the basics of the talk with the translators beforehand to make sure there wasn't too much jargon, and the only thing they wanted in the end to look at in detail was the quote from Descartes which I include on the section about rainbows:

"A single ray of light has a pathetic repertoire, limited to bending and bouncing (into water, glass or air, and from mirrors). But when rays are put together into a family - sunlight, for example - the possibilities get dramatically richer. This is because a family of rays has the holistic property, not inherent in any individual ray, that it can be focused so as to concentrate on caustic lines and surfaces. Caustics are the brightest places in an optical field. They are the singularities of geometrical optics. The most familiar caustic is the rainbow, a grossly distorted image of the Sun in the form of a giant arc in the skyspace of directions, formed by the angular focusing of sunlight that has been twice refracted and once reflected in raindrops."

Still the most poetic explanation of a rainbow I've come across.

Anyway, there are still adventures galore to catch up on, but these, as normal will have to wait. For now I thought I'd share some of the photos I've just put up on Flickr from the trip across the Andes by bus from Bariloche to Valdivia, where I gave an enjoyable two hour talk. The seminars in Valdivia are legendary for their questions and the idea, which I highly approve of, is that there should be no time limit, but that the talk goes on until the speaker wants to stop, or the audience truly understands what is being said. The atmosphere is really wonderful and although there are a huge number of questions, none of them is aggressive, and I get the impression that the members of CECS in Valdivia really have a deeper understanding of a larger range of subjects than the average group of theoretical physicists, largely due to this atmosphere of probing questions.

Anyway, the trip to Valdivia was stunning (I was lucky enough to see the Andes from above today as we flew straight over the top with perfect clear skies. I sat in my seat itching to get the camera out but there's no moving around until you're clear of the peaks) and although from the bus I didn't manage to get any good shots of the higher mountains themselves, the snowy scenes were pretty spectacular. This was the lake skirting Bariloche town centre as we pulled out early in the morning, with the morning fog resting on the water

And the tree lined roads leading up into the Andes:

Getting to Valdivia I met my Couchsurfing host and we went for a quick stroll down the river where the sealions were basking in the rather unusual sun (Valdivia is reknowned for its constant rain):

So, I leave South America on Sunday, though I'm sure I'll be back. It's been a good trip for giving talks, a fascinating trip for talking with lots of great physicist, an excellent month for thinking of new ideas, but in terms of sitting down and calculating, it's been pretty tough. Moving from place to place isn't conducive, at least for me, to deep concentration and now I'm really looking forward to getting back and having two weeks in Santiago to try and finish some long overdue calculations before heading off again for weddings and a two week stay at a long term program in Vienna...it doesn't stop.

Arcos, Halos y rayos: Un tour por la óptica atmosférica

2010-08-10T22:26:00.002+02:00

Things are getting serious! I've just come out of an interview with the university journalists about my talk here for the public on Thursday. Here's the advert which is about to be linked to on Twitter.

Time	Thursday · 7:00pm - 9:00pm

Location	Av República 399, sala 002

Created By	Andres Gomberoff

More Info	Arcos, Halos y rayos: Un tour por la óptica atmosférica. Dr. Jonathan Shock Universidad de Santiago de Compostela El estudio de la óptica atmosférica ha despertado el interés del hombre desde que miramos el cielo para observar nubes, rayos de sol y la interacción de la luz y el agua en todas sus formas. Nos preguntamos cómo estos ingredientes colaboran para desplegar la belleza de los fenómenos que iluminan el cielo. En esta charla... se analizarán varios de estos efectos. Desde los más comunes, como el arcoiris, hasta los más extraños e increíbles halos de hielo y el famoso rayo verde. Acompañaremos la charla con fotografías de expertos y amateurs, para dar así una mirada científica que nos ayude a apreciar mejor estos hermosos fenómenos que nos acompañan a diario, pero que la mayoría de las veces pasan desapercibidos de nuestra mirada. (en inglés con traducción simultánea) Cupos limitados (llegue temprano)

Buenos Aires-Bariloche-Valdivia

2010-08-08T22:01:00.000+02:00

I'm now in Valdivia, Chile, having skipped out, blog-wise on the last couple of legs of the journey and only given cursory details of any of the last two weeks. I've just arrived at a hotel after staying with a great couchsurfer in a very very cold house last night. I'm slowly defrosting, but was glad to have the chance to spend some time with local residents for an evening at any rate.

Before this I spent three days in Bariloche, though it felt like a good week given the amount that was packed into the short time. Bariloche is where Juan Maldacena spent a few years studying before moving onto Princeton. I was the guest of hist former supervisor Gerdardo Aldazabal who was an excellent host, both in terms of organising my physics activities but also as a keen outdoors activities man who made my stay really special. Given that I was giving talks on the last two days of my stay, having arrived at 2am on Wednesday morning I wanted to take full advantage of the Wednesday to see some of the Patagonian countryside. Staying on the campus of the centro atomico it was a short roll out of bed and into the office to chat with Gerardo about a possible route for the day, and I soon found myself alone with a rented bike, a thin pair of gloves, several layers of clothes plus a good calorie intake from a Welsh breakfast (there are large Welsh communities in Patagonia and a few valleys where Welsh is the predominant language, Welsh teahouses are a common sight) ready to head around the lakes.

The Ciruito Chico takes you around the gently rolling countryside through the occasional steep section or dirt road, around a series of stunning, crystal clear lakes, flanked by snowy mountains and dense forests. I spent the first two hours or so going around taking pictures and stopping occasionally to warm up my icy fingers, before turning back three quarters of the way around the lake when the traffic started increasing and made my way to a restaurant in La Colonia Suissa, a Swiss community with wooden houses, and plenty of traditional Alpine regalia to dine on the famed Patagonian trout in Las Siete Cabritas, an outlandish restaurant with some of the best prepared food I've eaten in Argentina. A coffee and a lemon meringue pie later and I was ready to get back on the bike and take the dirt road section back to the start. 45 km and two very tired legs after having started (I haven't cycled seriously since the Land's End to John O'Groats trip a decade ago - though I plan on starting again in Munich) I gave the bike back to the rental company and chatted for a while with the owner over a cup of tea. Given that it was still early and it was the only day to be able to sight see I walked up the road to the start of the hill trail to the Campanaria watch tower and started pushing my legs up the extremely steep path.
A few pictures from the trip:

Passing a controlled bonfire in the forest:

Some icy proof:

This slightly strange looking photo was taken by resting the camera on a icy pond in front of the lake. The ice you can see stretches for about a meter in front of the camera but looks to go much further because of the unusual perspective:

After the cycle ride my legs were none too fresh and the half hour scramble up was quite a struggle, but the view from the top made it well worth it, as I emerged from the undergrowth to be greeted by the crowds who had come up by cable car. The panorama of the lakes and mountains is really one of the most stunning scenes I've seen and I would highly recommend this area to anyone coming to Argentina. The light wasn't that easy for photography, but I got a couple of pictures to try and give the general impression. Here's one for now

Back down the hill and into the centro atomico for a quick shower, before heading into the town centre to take a look around. It's a ski-tourist haven and a chocolate-lovers dream, somehow giving the impression of a Patagonian Swiss Alps and the usual crowds of skiers fills the streets lined with restaurants serving trout, lamb, deer and a few other local delicacies. Sadly by the time I got back to the lodgings it was too late to go out again so I popped to the local supermarket to munch on some empanadas before bed.

Thursday was a full-on work day and I was in the office and getting on with some calculations in the morning before my talk in the afternoon. The group is quite diverse and so I had to change my talk a little from the one I've been giving recently, adding a few slides of introductory material and bulking out a few explanations. Of the 20 or so in the audience, I'm not sure I saw a single sleeper which I count as a good performance in a technical seminar. With the snow gently drifting outside and a positive audience with good questions, I left relieved that at least some people had understood, and happy to have been able to give a talk in such stunning surroundings. Tomorrow incidentally I'll be giving my talk in Valdivia, famed for talks which can last for many, many hours so I'm not going to get complacent yet about my seminar-giving abilities. Anyway, Thursday night I managed to find a table at an asado restaurant and sampled the Patagonian lamb which was very very good.

Friday was time for the colloquium on atmospheric optics, and not only the whole of the centro atomico but also the whole of the town had been told about it. Half an hour before I was due to start I was introduced to a journalist with whom I gave a quick interview. It was a good chance to try and explain a little about atmospheric optics in Spanish, and also a chance to realise that my decision to not give a Spanish version of the talk in Santiago de Chile in a few days was probably the right one. Although I could explain about the different effects to the journalist, it was with a lot less of the technical precision and detail than I like to be able to give in English. For the talk, I guess there must have been a few over 50 in the room which was a nice sized group and they seemed to enjoy the images and explanations. It's a pleasure to be able to tell people about things which are always around them and therefore get to change the way they see the world a little on a day to day basis!

The talk over and a little more work later and it was time to get in the car with Gerardo and head out to the lakes for the Friday evening kayak session. In sub-zero temperatures we were well-prepared with several layers of neoprene, hats and gloves although I wouldn't have wanted to get any more than my feet in the icy waters. I shared a double canoe with Gerardo and we headed out into the lake, with the mountains looming around us and the sun gently setting as we paddled our way from the shore. Although I used to canoe a lot when I was around 10, I've done it only a handful of times in the last 20 years and although it was really wonderful to be doing so in such surroundings, my shoulders burned constantly for the two plus hours that we were out on the lake. It felt like a really serious workout but thankfully I haven't been aching since, the only complaint being the lack of skin on the inside of each thumb. Gerardo had brought along a water resistant camera and so I'll try and put up some photos when they're available.

After a lovely dinner with friends at Gerardo's house I got home and prepared for an early start the next day, to take a morning bus over the Ande's and into Chile where I am now, but I think that that will have to wait. I have to prepare a few more things for tomorrow but will see how things go later today.

Argentina take II

2010-07-30T19:11:00.000+02:00

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.

Argentina take 1

2010-07-21T01:56:00.000+02:00

A really quick post from a cafe in La Plata, Argentina, a little South of Buenos Aires, and although I have enough material to be typing here for several hours, I do have a lot of work to get on with so I'm going to try and spend a few hours tonight calculating. Four projects on the go are currently interfering, perhaps destructively, though I hope to get a couple of them ahead of the rest for some interesting results in the not too distant future. Preoccupations with the biggest talk of my career next week are also playing on my mind though I'm looking forward to it as well.

Anyway, I landed in Buenos Aires after a fine flight through a stinkingly hot Madrid, from London and was greeted by the coldest temperatures in BA for several years - minus 2 on the runway on touchdown. We (Sam and Debs, a couple of friends from back home) made our way to Palermo ready to crash at our hotel, but after a shower and being greeted by an amazingly friendly hotel manager who did everything to make us feel at home we were refreshed enough to head out into the city and go exploring. We walked up North, passing a wonderful cafe on the way were we breakfasted and warmed up a little before going round the botanic gardens, passed the zoo and through the Japanese garden

to an art museum where we saw a great photography exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe's works. On the way back we passed the famous Floris Generica

In the evening we headed to a parilla to try my first Argentinian steak and I was not disappointed. A very fine fillet for a small sum was succulent and juicy to perfection and the buzz in the restaurant showed that we had chosen a pretty good spot to try the first local delicacy. Other steaks have followed and, baring one, have been fantastic.

Anyway, time is getting on....we had planned to fly up to Iguazu, but our flight was cancelled and so we decided to drive the 1300 km up North. (Sunrise over the rio de plata after finding out our flights were canceled:

After running around the city failing to find a car, we tracked one down, and two days and 16 hours of driving later found ourselves on the Frontier with Brazil and Paraguay. We headed straight for the falls just in time as we had only three hours before the park closed. I really can't put into words how spectacular they are. Pictures do not do them justice, they are just overwhelmingly powerful! For now, pictures will have to do and these are the first few that I've processed so far.

Anyway, I hope to talk more about the journey up soon but now I have to work. One thing I need to state however is that, time after time, we have been bowled over by not just people's friendliness, which I've met in many countries, but their incredible kindness and willingness to go out of their way to help you. Over and over again we have been greeted with the most incredible hospitality I've ever come across. In England if you turned up in a restaurant at 10 at night in an overbooked tourist town in the middle of nowhere and asked if they knew of any hotels, they might point you in the direction of a hotel to try, or simply shake their heads. When this happened on the drive up to Iguazu, the restaurant owner phoned around a dozen hotels pleading for a place for us until he found one, booked us a room and then told us to sit down and have a meal before we went on to the hotel where they were waiting for us. This has continued to happen every day without prompting or pleading. This country has impressed me a lot on many fronts so far and I'm really looking forward to the next few weeks of travel and work here....and now back to it....

Some runner beans and a fine dose of phytohaemagglutinin - a warning!

2010-07-04T14:13:00.005+02:00

I tend to eat healthily at home, cooking a good meal every night and including a lot of fresh vegetables and plenty of wholefoods.

I recently got to know the people who work in the greengrocers around the corner from my flat which turns out to be a family business, selling vegetables from their own garden. I've been buying my food from there for a while but after reading The Omnivore's Dilemma recently I wanted to know more, and so spent an enjoyable evening finding out about where all the produce came from, about the seasonality, and the disbelief of most locals that you can't get potatoes in the summer and the fact that perhaps it's better to have a few bugs in your lettuce than a layer of pesticides - this was a surprise given that Galicia is a province whose people are historically tied closely to the land. It turns out that I was the first person who had ever asked about where anything comes from in their store - a rather depressing state of affairs.

So, I left with a great big bag of locally grown produce to create dinner with and set about making a lush salad with a sesame and honey dressing (the honey also being produced locally).

I knew that eating raw kidney beans was bad for you, but having no kidney beans I thought nothing of the runner beans, that had come directly from the garden to the shop that morning. So I chopped up the bright, crunchy beans and threw them in the salad for a bit of texture and the flavours that you only get from produce this fresh.

A Chinese friend was passing by and on seeing the preparation warned me that eating raw beans was bad for you - I took it as a bit of Chinese folk-lore, having eaten plenty of raw legumes before and dismissed the warning.

Well, lesson now learned - after turning distinctly pale, shaky and nauseous for the last two days and having a few other symptoms, which I shan't go into here, non-stop yesterday, A) I shan't be making this mistake again and B) I wanted to post a little warning to everyone else!

The omnivore's dilemma is ever present, and the dangers and pleasures marking the fine line which is dictated by science, culture and folk-lore make for exciting possibilities - in all directions! Be warned!

Fading memories from Croatia

2010-07-03T14:21:00.000+02:00

Where to start? It's only been two weeks but the littlest things that caught my attention and I wanted to write about have slowly faded and I'm left without the words that came to me at the time to explain as vividly as I'd like quite what went on.

Talking of vivid however, I was hoping, as I walked into work a couple of days back that the cirrus clouds and the quickly rising sun would do their dance and end up giving us something special towards midday. As we went to lunch at around 1.30, the white crests below the sun which had risen above 58 degrees started glowing with vibrant reds, yellows and blues as I got my first ever display of a circumhorizon arc. These, most colourful of halos, are only visible in the summer when the sun rises high enough in the sky, and therefore there is a latitude above and below which they can never be seen. The Northern Europeans may get the best winter halos but we get the best summer ones! No pictures of the CHA itself, but I got a few shots later in the day as the clouds maneuvered themselves into and out of the local optical geodesics. I have to do a little more reading up at the moment on this subject as I'll be giving three or four lectures on atmospheric optics in Argentina and Chile over the coming month.

Anyway, step back a couple of weeks and the last post saw a rather sleepy me sitting in a North London front room waiting for my taxi to Stansted. I've since discovered that the taxi costs almost as much as getting a discount room in the Hilton right next to the airport, which is what I did on the way back. The slightly later time to get up, along with the gym, sauna and swimming pool made this a much more pleasant way to not get much sleep!

So, I flew from London to Dubrovnik where the sun was fierce and the drive along the coast from the airport gave a hint of the stunning blue, green waters which would be the site of a few wonderful afternoon swims over the coming days.

I checked into my hostel which had been pre-heated to boiling point and wandered into town where I got my first taste of tourist prices thanks to a few slices of smoked salmon and some notably tasty horseradish hollandaise. Over the next couple of days I met a bunch of interesting people in the hostel from around the world and spent time reading papers and books in the old town. Two good friends from Santiago also turned up and we spent a couple of perfect afternoons reverting to teenage years by jumping off cliffs and reveling in the ease of swimming in salty water.

(The walk from the hostel to the old town:)

and the view from the cafe Alex and I were working in in the centre of the old town:)

Time to relax ran out fast as we headed up the coast to Trpanj (emphasis on the Tr with a slightly rolled r and the nj sounds a little like a Spanish ñ) where the school on black holes was being held (we had somehow held court the previous day when we met an American woman who discovered she'd lucked out with a bunch of scientists and we gave an impromptu lesson on the practice and philosophy of modern theoretical physics - this happened on a number of occasions when I mentioned what we were doing in Croatia). Trpanj is a town on a T-junction which would be a lot worse were the vertical not to lie in the valley of two mountains and the cross-bar not to meet the Adriatic sea. The main road plays host to a bunch of almost identical restaurants which serve a fairly small range of pretty tasty meals.

The same view at night with a 30 second exposure - the colours are not altered in this shot:

In terms of food we realised pretty quickly that although similar to the Croatian fare, the most famous Bosnian restaurant in Dubrovnik, the curiously named Taj Mahal, seemed to offer a much better selection of dishes than any local restaurant we could find - the cheeses and steaks were really superb.

Anyway, the school itself was fantastic, with the most relaxed atmosphere of any school I've been to. Although there was a rough time-table drawn up, the lectures started and finished when the dynamic in the room dictated and so all of the talks (which were given on the black board) had a good pace where the lecturers could really expound to their heart's content. For me the highlight of the school was a series of talks by Gaston Giribet on 3-dimensional gravity. I'm hoping to be able to learn some more on this subject in South America over the next few weeks where much of the early work on this subject was pioneered.

The final talk of the school was a discussion session led by Holger Nielson (Of backwards causality from Higgs production at the LHC fame). While I may not subscribe to all his thoughts on black holes, he's an extremely knowledgeable guy and the session turned out to be thoroughly thought provoking, leading to a good deal of chat about black hole information as we walked away from the blackboard towards another meat-heavy meal.

After the school I headed back to Dubrovnik, hitchhiking from Trpanj with Alex and on arrival we were propositioned by an elderly lady asking if we'd like to stay at her house. Strange as this may sound it actually turns out to be by far the best way to stay in Dubrovnik, and from what I understand, this holds true for much of Eastern Europe. We had a whole apartment to ourselves and paid less than we paid for a bunk in a smelly, hot room in a hostel.

We spent the last couple of days seeing a few more sights and kayaking around one of the local islands, before saying our goodbyes and heading in separate directions. Having spent a good deal of the last half a year with Alex and his family, discussing physics till early in the morning, cooking outrageously tasty meals and getting into plenty of adventures it was a rather sad goodbye, having already had to say my farewells to Eliina and Sahtah (wife and daughter) a short while earlier.

So, I find myself now back in Santiago with a couple of new projects on the go (we're up to four at the moment) and several talks to write for South America. Come Thursday I'll be heading back to England for the stag do of one of my good friends before leaving on the 15th for Buenos Aires where a great mix of adventures and physics awaits me during a month of intensive travels - Tickets are booked for the various legs of the journey and I can't wait to get there and indulge my physics/travel passions in one fell swoop.

Off to Dubrovnik

2010-06-17T06:16:00.002+02:00

Just waiting for the taxi at 5.30 in the morning after little sleep to head from Hartford to Stanford airport on my way to Croatia and minute now. Bags packed full of papers and books, and possibly a little suncream, and thoroughly looking forward to getting to know a new city before diving into the Black Holes school. During this time I have plenty to do to prepare for a trip to South America next month where I have a half dozen talks already lined up around Argentina and Chile plus a couple more colloquia on Atmospheric Optics to present. This all happens with only a week in between in Santiago (de Compostela) and an immense amount to organise in between, plus the KITPC program I'm arranging looming up quickly. It's these early mornings which give me a few moments to reflect and breath, but for now the taxi is pulling in and I gotta dash...

the briefest of updates

2010-06-13T19:09:00.000+02:00

It has been pointed out by a number of friends that things have come to a grinding halt here for the last couple of weeks. I haven't had a moment to update from the last few days of South Africa, or from Paris or the return to Santiago where I've been getting on with the project started in Cape Town since getting back home. All well and I've been spending days and dreams surrounded by kappa symmetry equations - all good!

This weekend I had a couple of old friends from back home to stay which has been lovely, as always, and somehow we've fitted in a huge amount to the weekend. We took a trip down South to Redondela last night to a music festival where some friends of my good friend, collaborator and current housemate, Alex, were playing. Caspian Hat Dance came on at about 2 in the morning and I've seen such electric reactions from a crowd on only a handfull of occasions - these guys are incredibly talented musicians and play with such a flair and style their klesma/gypsy/folk/rock combo that the whole of the front turned into a giant mosh pit where people were going crazy for the whole performance. Apart from being bounced around like a pin-ball and waltzed through the crowd by a bearded, long haired stranger (one of life's more surreal moments) I jumped and sweated to the music and had a fantastic time getting lost in the atmosphere. The group is coming to Santiago this evening and will play in Casa Das Crechas before descending on my flat where we will have a full house of seven tonight.

The next couple of days I have to finish off a few calculations before handing over to my collaborators as I fly to England Wednesday and then Croatia Thursday on my way to a summer school in Trpanj on Black hole physics. I'll have a couple of days in Dubrovnik first and am thoroughly looking forward to exploring this old city and getting in some good photography while I'm at it.

So, for now I leave you with these scant relics of the last couple of weeks but will see if there's any time for something more substantial before getting lost in the Balkans.

Down South

2010-05-31T00:00:00.000+02:00

It's likely that the full details of the last few days, including a trip up Table Mountain, a pot-luck couchsurfing dinner, Eurovision madness and some pretty hairy cab rides will have to wait for a while. In the mean time I'll leave you with a picture from a trip today to the Cape of Good Hope with three couchsurfers who are living here. I'll have to lighten the water a little but given that it took me such a long time to get the panorama set up, I'm not going to do that just now, so here's an outrageously big panorama (this thumbnail is roughly 1/30th the size of the full size version):

A little light and magic

2010-05-26T22:24:00.000+02:00

(written mostly on Sunday)

It's been a funny old weekend, and I'm pleased to say that after the last post I've spent a lot of time walking around the city with less worry, but almost as much caution, as I had before.

Saturday was another spectacularly sunny day and I made my way towards town in one of the local mini-buses, packed in with 25 others, as the driver tore through the streets and his friend called out and whistled to passersby seeing if we couldn't shove another half a dozen people in the back. We passed an area that I'd heard of before, so I called and jumped off the bus, and started wondering Woodstock, a pretty rundown neighbourhood, but one which I'd heard had hidden treasures. It didn't take long to find the old biscuit mill, which now, every Saturday, plays host to a fantastic food market, with delicacies made freshly but originating from around the world. I tucked into a great smoked salmon in rice paper wrap and wonderful seared swordfish with passion fruit and avocado. I also got the first decent cup of coffee I've drunk whilst in Cape Town before tearing my way away from the food tents and walking around the extremely artsy-looking home-stores, clothes shops and photography galleries.

I took another treacherous journey in a local minibus (here called taxis) into the centre of the city and wandered around the rather unappealing looking streets until I found a nice square to bask in the sun, read a book and work out my next move.

Though they may seem overly touristy, I've started using the open-topped bus tours as a way to get to know a city if given only a short time in it. The two hour tour took me through most of the important districts in the city, including the infamous District 6, up to the cable station of Table Mountain and on around the beaches to the West where the rich and famous sun themselves. I took this from round the corner of one of the most exclusive areas to live in Cape Town:

Getting back to the small but rather historic guest house, I met the owner and her daughter, whose boyfriend was there with an old school friend of his and his girlfriend. Soon another guest arrived, and on inspection I found myself to be in the company of an international rugby star, a world famous paleontologist and a TV star/top model/DJ. We chatted for a while and watched the rugby which was being played down the road, before I headed off to get something to eat in one of the local restaurants. I didn't manage to explain my thoughts on the holographic principle to the model, though I have no doubt that she would have been fascinated!

Sunday I headed off for a walk in the forest at the foot of Table Mountain which boasts one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world. It's a really stunning area with such a variety of ancient flora (mostly being made of of a plethora of ferns) that you seem to be moving from one continent to another as you walk through the undergrowth.

Getting out of the forest we headed to Montebello's, one of the areas famed lunch venues and sated our appetites on a strange sushi rice based concoction, wasabi'd to perfection, before heading back to the guest house. I spent the afternoon getting on with work and chilling into the evening.

The rest of the week so far has been a push on the project which has taken a few u-turns but we have some concrete calculations to look at for now. Today was a bit of a break as I gave my talk on atmospheric optics as a departmental colloquium. I had a good reception and the number of questions after and display of photos with a variety of cloud formations and optical effects which people quizzed me with was a great sign. I'll be happy to give this in other departments in the future and it looks like I have one lined up for Chile in August.

In fact the weather played its part today as we had a rather lovely solar halo over the campus through the morning (and now a fine lunar halo). I played my usual part and pointed it out to random passersby who gave me a much warmer reaction than that which I've received in any other country. It's not the greatest solar halo ever, but it is the best timed!

This on the other hand is a mystery to me. As I headed out of the department on Monday I was greeted with a strange light around the top of Table Mountain which stayed pretty stationary, though faded as the clouds moved swiftly across the peaks. Within five minutes it was gone, but I have a feeling it was as much to do with the position of the sun as the cloud formation. My only guess is that there may have been two layers of lenticular clouds which let through a perfect sliver of light. Any other suggestions would be gratefully received.

This, by the way, is the magnificent campus view of Table Mountain (actually Devil's peak) directly behind the main UCT hall.

A strange mix

2010-05-19T20:03:00.000+02:00

Life in Cape Town can so far be described as paradoxical. It is a beautiful city, with stunning scenery surrounding it, great food, great wine and some of the friendliest people I've met anywhere, but juxtaposed with this is the constant fear of violent crime. You just don't go out on the streets at night. Some people would even consider going round the corner a risk, though the woman running the guest house told me not to worry as I cautiously crept around to the main street this evening to get a take-away - a meal I would normally have eaten in the restaurant, but by the time I would have finished it would have been completely dark and the park along which I had to walk seems rather notorious. I hurried home, steak and pate in hand.

The dichotomy is further confused when I try to compare the lifestyle here with that of Santiago, one of the safest places I've ever been, where women don't think twice about walking home alone at any time of the night, even in the most remote parts of the city. However, as I tried to find some jeans which go all the way to my ankles (no easy task) in a nearby shop earlier today I was amazed when the woman behind the counter told me that she was getting off work soon and if I could wait she would drive me somewhere that they might have my size (no such luck in the end). Still, the idea of someone opening up so quickly to a stranger in Galicia is not something I've ever come across before.

Later this afternoon (the work hours are shifted here, partly to take into account that you don't want to be getting home after dark and so people often work from 7am -5pm or so) a taxi driver told me of the horror stories in his part of the city (I shan't repeat them here) that have taken place over the last couple of days.

The cafeteria in the university adds more to the confusion, as signs flicker up on the walls asking you if you've secured your valuables, know where your bag is, have seen any suspicious behaviour, etc. etc. in blinking red dots. This added to the panic buttons placed around campus make this feels like some futuristic horror. These signs, I have little doubt, add more to the sense of paranoia than to people's caution levels - a subtle differentiation which I think is very important.

This all being said, one of the researchers here regularly heads into the townships to the bars where he has a great time and hasn't ever encountered any problems. It seems that the streets around the university which are empty at night are the perfect place to prey on the one or two students who happen to be coming home alone (several students murdered in this area recently - out too late after a party, or starling a burglar).

But people seem willing to adapt their way of living to deal with such things if they get to live in such a wonderful city and indeed the attitude of the people is easy going and extremely friendly, and right now they are all really looking forward to the month long hiatus which is going to mark the world cup coming to town.

Anyway, so I sit here in my guest house again this evening finishing off some notes on the current work, unable to venture outside. I'm hoping to meet up with some Couchsurfers in the next couple of days (I've already bumped into a Norwegian Couchsurfer I met in Seoul two years ago, while 'enjoying' a coffee on campus - enjoying is a bit of an overstatement, given the insipid brown fluid which you get when you order a coffee), and given a firm destination I should be able to take a taxi to meet people outside the confines of the street I'm staying on very soon.

I'll do my best to update shortly.

Anticrepuscular rays over the Western Cape

2010-05-17T23:18:00.004+02:00

Rays coming out from the point of the setting sun are a common sight, as the light is blocked by clouds, but as these rays diverge over the zenith they can sometimes be seen to reconvene at the antisolar point. These less common rays are described as anticrepuscular and as we went for a walk on the beach this evening after work we got a wonderful display of them:

The shadow of myself and Jeff and Amanda to my left can be seen heading off in the same direction.
These same rays can be seen above the kelp which had washed up on the beach and was being bounced around on the tide-line:

and in this photo (click for a huge version) the Eastern edge of Table Mountain can be seen to the right with the clouds literally spilling over into the bay:

and a little colour to end, from the beach huts looking out to the shark-filled waters:

I'll be giving my first talk here tomorrow morning. It's the same talk I gave in Santiago a week or so ago which seemed to go down pretty well. The crowd here is a combination of string theorists (who know a huge amount about what I'm talking about - they have written some wonderful papers on this work) and cosmologists who have a pretty good idea about AdS/CFT and are likely to ask lots of great questions. It should be fun, but I'm not expecting an easy ride!

Arrival in Cape Town

2010-05-16T14:58:00.001+02:00

We come to the end of the craziest week in some considerable time, as I sit in the 'tree' (only by name) apartment in a self-catering guest house a short walk from the University of Cape Town and in the shadow of Table Mountain.

The week started off with my first Tango lesson, which passed without too much bloodshed or too many twisted ankles. Sadly as I'll be traveling pretty constantly for the rest of the year, this is only going to be a very occasional occurrence but I'll see if I can get in a couple more lessons before going to Buenos Aires in July.

Tuesday saw my first ever performance on the Geiger Counter at the quantum music festival in front of a crowd of several hundred

videos to follow. While Wednesday and Thursday evenings saw music courtesy of Emir Kusturica and some fine blues players in Dado Dada.

Friday the fun began for real.

Friday afternoon I headed over to Paris to meet up with a good friend from Beijing, who, five years ago got me involved with the Couchsurfing scene. I've since hosted well over 100 people in my place in Santiago, thanks to this connection and it has been a fantastic aspect of life since then, getting to know people from all over the world and, something which has been an added bonus, to be able to explain many aspects of my work and science in general to a huge audience of people who are interested but generally come from non-scientific backgrounds. Being able to share the passion of what I do is a real pleasure and in return I find out about cultures from every corner of the world, usually accompanied by some fine local cooking.

Anyway, so I spent the night in Paris, going out to a few bars and meeting a very international crowd in the Richard Lenoir and Oberkampf districts, before getting up slightly woozy headed on Saturday, making my way to CDG airport and flying to Istanbul. I was advised by the air stewardesses that I wouldn't have time to go into the city but I got the name of a good restaurant from them and, with newly acquired visa in hand, I took a taxi to the banks of the Bosphorus to the site where the first light house sits, on the inlet from the sea of Marmaris as the river makes its way into the city.

I sat watching the sunset and had an excellent meal (though outrageously overpriced - had I had more time I would definitely have gone somewhere a lot, lot cheaper) before heading back to the airport and waiting for another four hours as the flight was delayed (in the mean time I bought the most expensive cup of coffee I'd ever bought - at over 5 euros I thought I must have been mistaken but sadly it was already in my hands when I discovered that this was truly the price!

From Istanbul I flew with Turkish airlines (who served some of the best in-flight meals I've ever had) to Johannesburg where we waited for an hour to refuel before coming to Cape Town where I sit now in a beautiful apartment and wait for sleep to roll over my tired eyes.

It's going to be a very busy couple of weeks here but I'll do my best to update when possible.

Africa beginnings and endings

2010-05-13T20:57:00.000+02:00

Tomorrow I head to Paris for the night, followed by a mammoth trip via Istanbul and Johannesburg to Cape Town where I'll be spending a couple of weeks working with researchers and friends in the UCT who specialise on topics in applied AdS/CFT and especially the area of emergent geometry. This is something that I've recently started working in and is a fascinating topic.

I thought that, even if only briefly, I should try and finish off the stories from the Africa trip last month before starting a new adventure.

Last I wrote we were on tofu playa, near Inhambane, a few hours north of Maputo in Mozambique where we had arrived after a 19 hour non-stop road trip. We'd swam with dolphins and attempted to do the same with whale sharks, some with more success than others, and we'd been generally chilling in the wonderful beach hut, sampling the local fish (from the outrageously overfished waters) and getting ridiculous tan-lines as we did it (despite the constant applications of factor 50).

30 seconds in the life of six travelers and expats in Mozambique:

On the third day we headed into one of the main populated areas to grab a bite to eat in a black metal shack in the middle of the day where we quickly became far hotter than the food (which was pretty hard to compete with, having been doused in firey piri-piri sauce!). The fan which was brought to the table when it became clear that we were probably going to pass out from the heat failed to turn, but we were told for 10 minutes to have patience (and possibly faith) and that in its own good time it would start working. Indeed such patience was met with the help of a guy sitting at a table next to ours, who, on seeing our plight, came over, removed the safety cage from the fan and cranked it up by hand - a beer was duly sent his way to the applause of all at his table.

A game of petanque outside a French bar saw in the dusk as we spoke Spanish with others talking in Portuguese, with reasonable success.

It has been a while since I was in Portugal but I find the Mozambiquan Portuguese much easier to understand than that of our Iberian neighbours. The slow lilt of it is rather similar to Gallego and once you understand the basic mappings, it's pretty simple to understand for a Spanish speaker from Galicia.

Anyway, having spent a few days chilling on the coast we made our way back down to Maputo, to stay with our friends (from South Africa and Galicia) who have been living in the city now for a few months and who were the primary cause of this trip.
Some sights on the way back:

The seven hour trip down passed with far less terror than the trip up that we had made through the night and we arrived tired by happy in a buzzing Maputo. The promise of a great apartment, and, especially noteworthy, a fully functioning elevator, was only half fulfilled as we trudged up 11 flights of stairs with our fully laden backpacks, only to collapse at the top and quickly make our way down again to get some food in one of the most famous restaurants in the area (Piri-Piri's). The piri-piri chicken was spectacularly hot (perfect for me), though I was rather ashamed when the dessert arrived and I simply wasn't able to manage the whole slice of chocolate cake, which must have weighed in at well over half a kilo: my first culinary defeat since at the age of 12 or so, a giant sea snail had shocked me into submission.

The next day we did the tour of the city, the atmosphere of which is still very much influenced by the colonial buildings from the Portuguese era. We visited the train station, designed by Eiffel, and also his ingeniously useless metal building, which may be perfect for a more temperate clime, but in the heart of Africa is truly a folly of unrivaled proportions.

In Mozambique it's quite common to ask someone waiting by the side of the road to look after your car as you go into a restaurant or a shop, and to give them a few Meticals afterward. Normally you get a few offers of such a service wherever you stop.

As we stopped in front of the old parliament building, nobody was around to provide such a service at the time, so we dropped the car off and headed to look at the old fort and a few other local points of interest.

On arrival back at the car however, a man almost too drunk to stand up came up to us and demanded that we pay him for his vigilance as we had made our tour. It became pretty clear pretty quickly that he didn't have a leg to stand on in terms of his claims as our car was no longer in possession of its wing-mirrors. They were presumably already sitting in a market stand somewhere nearby, or allowing some guy to have his morning shave.

Given that we didn't have more than 24 hours in Maputo, going to the police was not going to be an option (the bureaucracy in Mozambique is some of the fiercest in the world, and the queues are those that any Englishman would be proud of). We drove around extremely carefully, aware that the police are legend at catching you for the slightest infringement, but made it back to the flat without encountering any cops on patrol.

In the evening we headed to a local bar and a Thai restaurant, to have our last meal out in Mozambique.

The next morning we got up at the crack of dawn, breakfasted on local fruit and bread and took off back towards the border that had given us so many problems on our way into Mozambique.

The other way round (Mozambique to SA) turns out to be much much easier and we were in and out within half an hour, heading back on the much more comfortable roads of South Africa on our way to Johannesburg.

We arrived safely in Johannesburg and attempted to go to the Apartheid museum, curiously placed on the grounds, so it appears, of a theme park. Unfortunately the museum had just closed so we went straight to the parents of Ben, with whom we had been traveling and staying in Mozambique, for a spectacular dinner and several hours of fascinating conversation, before hitting a couple of bars nearby, returning before it got too late, and rising early again the next day for our flights, leaving time to explain to the car hire company what had happened to the wing mirrors!

It seems that had we not pointed it out, the car hire company probably would not have noticed the lack of mirrors, but having confessed and explained our lack of police statement there wasn't much they could do. As they looked up how much it would cost us, we were somewhat taken aback when they quoted us a little over 500 euros for the pair! Pleading with them (though knowing that the insurance for the car didn't cover glass, wheels, undercarriage, or any incident in which another car was not the primary cause), they suggested that we explain to the police in the department at the airport. We went along and stated our case only to be laughed at, quoting, unsurprisingly, that whatever crimes take place in Mozambique have nothing to do with them.

Cutting a long story short, the car hire company very helpfully got the police to write an affidavit which was apparently enough documentation to drop the cost to us to less than 200 euros and we department a little poorer but happy given what the possibilities could have been!

The flights from Johannesburg back through Dubai were uneventful but painful given the lack of emergency exit seats and I passed most of the night stood up at the back of the plane.

On landing in London we headed to Bethnel Green where we spent an enjoyable few hours wondering this area, which I'd never explored before, met up with a few friends for lunch and dinner and crashed out before a 4.30am start to catch the bus back to Stansted on our way to Spain.

I've never had a holiday on which I've risen before 7am for so many days (I think that we only slept in past 7 on two occasions on the whole trip) and on returning to Santiago I was refreshed in mind, but not in body! Since then I've kept up with the swim routine I'd promised myself in Mozambique and have been swimming 3 km every week since then. I'll see if I can continue while in Cape Town.

I'm not sure there will be much of a chance to blog for a while, but this depends largely on the internet situation in the guest house I'll be staying in for the next two weeks.

I'll let you know....

Sun pillars and storm clouds

2010-04-25T23:33:00.001+02:00

I looked out of the window of my apartment to watch the sunset this evening as I normally do when I have the chance and was greeted with a sight I'd not seen before - a sun pillar was clearly visible, rising vertically from the setting sun. The ice crystals which had been present in cirrus clouds throughout the day were reflecting the light from the sun off their lower and upper surfaces and sending it straight to me (and everyone else) giving a faint upper tangent arc and a distinct pillar, rising perhaps 30 degrees into the sky - a really lovely sight and of course the camera was on hand.

I thought I'd put up another photo from a wonderful cloudscape a couple of days back when the cumulonimbus rolled into town and gave us a pretty impressive thunder storm:

This photo hasn't been played with at all, but I used a circular polarising filter to take it:

Mozambique continued

2010-04-24T14:13:00.000+02:00

At the last count we had driven 19 hours from Kruger National park to Inhambane and beyond, a couple of hundred miles north of Maputo, tackling potholes, dirt tracks, border police, drunken revelers, a confused GPS, local buses and a rat (the rat didn't come off very well) before collapsing in a beach hut with a few friends.

The next morning we woke early, despite the exhaustion from the day before and gorged ourselves on local avocados, similar in size and shape to an American football, bananas, croissant and coffee and took stock of the situation.

We quickly discerned that the situation we found ourselves in was not far from paradise, with a 30 second walk into the warmest sea I've ever swum in, baking sands and stunning seafood aplenty.

I shan't go through a blow by blow account of our 4 days on the beach but will mention a couple of highlights.

One of the most fantastic moments came on the second night, when we headed to the beach, the almost full moon lighting the scene, guitar and gin to accompany us and the gentle crashing of waves sending us into a relaxed delirium. As if this were not enough, we were treated for the next couple of hours to a wonderful lunar halo display, the likes of which I'd not seen before. These photos were taken at around midnight:

Other highlights from the stay were a trip out to sea as we attempted to go swimming with the largest fish in the world, the whale shark. We spent a couple of hours in rather choppy seas searching for the telltale shadow of this beast, jumping into the water occasionally to cool off. After an hour or so we had pretty much given up hope when we found a pod of dolphins and dove in with them. They were playing hard to get, so Ben headed off on his own, splashing around in the water to get the attention of any animal which may have been around. Sure enough after a couple of minutes he called over to his spot in the water where a whale shark had passed right underneath him. Sadly none of the rest of us saw it, as the animal quickly dived down out of reach of us and our snorkel gear.

Ben, Ryan and I decided to swim back to shore (a little less than a kilometer), and as the others disappeared in front of me I suddenly felt extremely vulnerable, not because of anything that may have been lurking in the water, but through my own lack of swimming experience. I was a couple of hundred meters off the shore line, and beginning to flounder when the boat with the others pulled along beside me and I dragged myself into the boat, feeling rather ashamed at having bitten off more than I could chew. It was only later that I discovered that Ben had played for some time on the South African national waterpolo team and so my attempts to keep up with him had been so futile.

Since this incident I've made it a new resolution to improve my swimming fitness, and after a disastrous couple of attempts at swimming a kilometer in the pool here in Santiago, managing 50 meters at a time with coughing and spluttering, one week in I can quite happily go for the kilometer with just a single break in the middle. Some time ago I mentioned about the total immersion swimming technique which I read about in this book a couple of years back. The technique seems very intelligent to someone who is a physicist but not a natural swimmer, the idea being that to propel yourself through the water your arms are actually a pretty rubbish form of propulsion, but the twisting of your body, to push water down its length is a lot more efficient. This video gives an example of this technique and is frankly about the most beautiful swim stroke I've ever seen:

The four days on the beach passed all too quickly but it was the first time that I had truly relaxed for a long long time and there were moments where I didn't think about work at all - an enjoyable and unusual luxury.

Anyway, given that I'm back in Santiago now I have a great deal of work to be doing, getting ready for a talk here, and a trip to Cape Town next month where I hope to start a new collaboration...better get back to it for now.

The crossing of Crocodile Bridge

2010-04-20T20:50:00.000+02:00

As promised, despite the volcanic activity which temporarily held up the release of this video, I can now post the video of the tentative steps we took in crossing crocodile and hippo infested waters on a flooded bridge, the true damage of which was unknown to us. It doesn't look like much, but the sound of the rushing water and the knowledge of its contents made for a slightly nerve-wracking few seconds:

Ugli fish

2010-04-18T23:06:00.000+02:00

Tis the season to eat lamprey...

I headed down to the Southern edge of Galicia, where it borders Portugal (a noted absence of guards with AK-47s at the frontier was welcomed!) with some friends this morning to sample the legendary lamprey, an animal which I first came face to face with a couple of years back when I took this photo of the creature in a fish tank outside a restaurant in Santiago.

It's not the most beautiful of fish in the world but I had been promised that, like monkfish and a few other beasts, it tasted a whole lot better than it looked.

Santiago is not the place to sample the best lampreys, but the South of the province is legendary for their fresh fish and fantastic preparation (warning, the squeamish amongst us should perhaps skip this) - the animal is cooked in its own blood, making a rich, luxurious sauce.

We made our way through the Al Barino and Ribeiro wine regions, stopping off in Ribadavia to see the Jewish quarter of this ancient town and wander the streets for a bit, before heading to a pulperia nearby for a little tapas to get the stomach juices going. Traditionally the best pulpo is found inland, where it is taken after freezing at the coast - the non-frozen pulpo is generally quite a bit tougher.

We arrived at the restaurant a little after 3 and started with a cold dish of smoked, stuffed lamprey (lamprea rechea). I have to admit to being a little disappointed with this dish, as the fish is both tough and the flavor of the smoke overpowers the subtle strengths of the meat itself. The stuffing was also nothing to write home about.

When the main plate came along however it was an entirely different story. The simple dish of lampreys stewed in their own juices and served with crutons and rice is not an elegant looking piece of cuisine, but the flavour and texture of the lamprey are truly wonderful. I was taken aback by the amazingly smooth flavour of the meat, somewhere between a white meat and rich fish taste, it's really a powerful meal and I would recommend it to any foody in the area.

Finishing the meal with postres and coffee we made our way to the border with Portugal to burn off a few calories with a walk around the riverside and watched the clouds roll over the hills for a while:

On getting home, just in time for the sunset, I set up the camera from the window of my flat and watched not only a green flash, but a blue flash, as the sun disappeared behind the hills. Sadly I only managed to catch the green flash on camera, but I'll keep a look out over the next few days for similar conditions.

Anyway, no time today to go through any more Mozambique photos but hopefully a couple of evenings this week should see that finished off.