Berlin and Budapest

I recently returned from two back-to-back conferences in mainland Europe.

The meeting in Berlin was very theoretically intense. The most telling example is probably the first plenary, held in a rather large lecture hall with about 1000 people in attendance. The speaker started his work with some 10 slides of just formulas, expecting everybody to motivate himself for this introduction. The funny part was that most attendees probably did ...

Anyway. After 10 days at home, it was time to move on to Budapest. Here we had the final meeting of a long EU project that the Liverpool group had been part of. It was again a nice meeting, although I was distinctly conferenced out by the end. This second meeting was organized by the Budapest node of our network, which did a great job showcasing the city and sending us across town to different restaurants for every night. Here are some images of Budapest in the evening:

First, the metro is deep, deep underground - unlike Berlin, where most U-Bahns are only a few feet below street level if not above:

 Then there is the parliament building which had very conveniently arranged the moon straight behind it. To take this picture, all one had to do is to find the gaggle of photographers and place the camera on a solid semi-straight piece of ground nearby ...

The water is the Danube, which is quite wide in Budapest already. The next picture is taken from an Island on the river, and it has a boat travelling through the middle of it (can you spot it?).

And, finally, this appears to be the Hungarian interpretation of a victory column: