Euroland excursions 2
Euroland excursions 2
I had a whole bunch of stuff planned for today's entry, but I left it at home. So instead it's back to the travelogue for a bit.
When we arrive at the hotel one room isn't ready (we're early) but the other is so we dump our stuff and make for the bus to the conference. I hate using public transport in strange towns, but Nice is pretty simple - you're either going parallel to the shore or inland.
We make it to the conference in time for a talk on oceanographic applications of Smale horseshoes, and then Poincar� has to go to a meeting. I'm very tired, and I haven't figured out how the programme works so I don't realise there are more talks I should be attending. Instead I run off to buy Point de Vue (with a fifty �uro note), a three cheese panini in the old town (which at this point I'm still thinking of as gamla stan) and some postcards. I'm thwarted in all attempts to buy stamps - people keep directing me to the tabac, and all the tabacs I can find have signs propped up on the counter saying �Pas des timbres�, which is French for �No stamps for you, silly Engleesh�.
Then I go back to the conference centre and look round some of the poster displays and fall asleep in the sun on the roof terrace. It isn't easy being an academic, you know.
And then there's a session in the late afternoon to attend and then we go off for dinner. We end up at a restaurant on the waterfront swapping stories of bureaucratic absurdity with French colleagues (a comfortable win for the home side) over moules frites and white wine. I've never eaten shell-fish (ugh!) and I never drink white wine, so that's two precedents set in one meal. As it turns out mussels taste mostly of sea water and the wine is fine. It then takes four mathematicians ten minutes to divide the bill evenly four ways. Le sigh.
By then the busses have stopped running and we're faced with a considerable hike home through the infinite run-down beach-side suburbs of Nice. It would have been a lot longer if I hadn't overruled Poincar�'s about which direction was parallel to the shore. He's probably the most accomplished geometrical thinker I've ever met, so it figures that he would have no sense of direction.
When we get back to the hotel the big wrought-iron gate is shut. We ring the buzzer and it swings back glacially slowly. It seems more like the gate of a guilty millionaire in an episode of Columbo than a prop from a horror movie, though.
Reception is now being guarded by some youth who doesn't speak much English and doesn't understand why we want two rooms but only know the number of one and how could Poincar� have checked in if he doesn't have a room? Eventually after considerable inarticulate seething from our side he makes the necessary phone-calls and figures it all out. I ask (in French; my O-level is paying its way at last) for a wake up call at 06:30 (which is 05:30 in English money; the time-zone goblin has snaffled an hour of my sleep) and at last it's bed-time.
To be continued. Eventually...