more from prague...

so i mentioned the wall-less elevators earlier... here's something else that's entertaining here... ground floors are labelled as floor 0, and basement is labelled as -1... it IS more logical, right?

the conference was cool this morning... we heard 4 speakers talk about their current work... including Robin Thomas and Martin Klazar (two really famous combinatorialists)... there will be more famous people throughout the week.

this week our schedule is: wake up, grab free breakfast at the dorm we're staying in, come and hear math talks from 9am to 1pm, free lunch with the math conference, do whatever we want for the afternoon. next week, the conferenec will be over, and "conference and lunch" will be replaced by "ONE lecture by a famous Czech faculty person and buy your own lunch".

the building we are in is really cool. it used to be a huge famous Czech church... the front half still is; however, they ran a wall halfway through it and the back half is math/computer science/physics offices and labs... no interior access between the academic rooms and the part that still is the church, but the classrooms and offices defintely, from their windows and vaulted ceilings, are tell-tale of what the building used to be... the main lecture hall that the conference is in used to be a religious chapel in the back of the big cathedral building... and is now set up as a tiered math lecture room... go figure.

kinda overcast and yucky today, but i think with the rest of the afternoon we're walking up to the castle. some of my students have been looking up concerts, etc. to check out while we're here (in addition to the $300+ each they gave us for food, if we do anything social and bring back a receipt, DIMATIA will reimburse us for it... how cool is that?)

looks like when i heard "prague portion of the REU goes through august 10" i took it as "stuff going on through the 10th; free to go on the 11th", when it really means "stuff going on through the 9th; free to go on the 10th"... which means i've arranged to go to budapest on the 10th now and have an extra day there.

prague is beautiful and i'm incredibly excited to be here... people have joked in the past (i've read and heard it many times) that prague and budapest are sisters... it just depends on if you like your ancient buildings in good and well-preserved condition, or with bullet and cannon holes from the past... prague is the former, budapest the latter.... while that's true to an extent, there's an intangible personality difference between the two also, that i can't quite explain, but i fell in love with budapest first :P, and CAN'T WAIT to go back :)... either way eastern/central europe is definitely superior to western european culture in my mind :P

by the way, if i haven't mentioned it, while in budapest i get to rent an ENTIRE apartment for $23/night from the friend of a friend... that'll be nice too :)... otherwise i'd be paying $15/night for sharing a dorm-style room with lots of strangers in a hostel, which, while fine for a weekend trip, for a week and a half i prefer paying the $8 extra per night to have my own kitchen and shower too. :P no complaints here for having good connections :)

i should stop writing a novel and get on with enjoying europe... the afternoon's already half gone, and it would be good to do some non-math today too. :)

happy monday to all y'all!
:-)