Mon 25 May 2009

Seeing Strasbourg (Day Three)

Last night I got to spend a little of time walking around when I went to dinner. The first interesting thing I saw was a pair of bunny ears sitting on a railing. I have no idea what they were doing there, but I like to think they fell off a cat who was sneaking around, pretending to be a rabbit.

The Ill river runs through much of Strasbourg, along with several tributaries, and the town is built around them. This means that you will cross many bridges when walking around. It was still daytime when I met my friends for dinner, and when I paused on one bridge, I looked north to see a large church standing above the water. It was the Church of Saint Paul, and it really has a great location.

We had Chinese food for dinner, and I liked the sweet and sour pork, but the curry had more vegetables, so I had more of that. Afterward, I was very tired, but I really wanted to take a shower before I went to bed. I managed it, even though my bathtub doesn't have a shower curtain. It was more like sitting in a bathtub holding a shower sprayer above my head. Oh, well. If I had taken a bath, I'm sure I would have fallen asleep.

Like all buildings, the hotel has its own noises at night. The loudest came from people flushing the toilet in the rooms above mine. Fortunately, closing the bathroom door fixed that. Breakfast was simple, but came with a unending supply of tolerable coffee, which is more than I hoped for. After that, I enjoyed the very short walk to my meeting.

The morning sessions were all held at the European Doctoral College, in the very nice Théâtre building. These were all plenary sessions, with everyone in attendance. In the afternoon, I ran one of the first parallel session, where we discussed two separate, but very similar proposals for accessing simulation data. The session took place in the Strasbourg Astronomical Observatory. I don't know if it is still used for observations, but it looks amazing standing against the sky.

I'm really looking forward to Wednesday afternoon, when I'll have a free afternoon to walk around and see more.

PS: Forgotten item #3 is the iSight.

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