Sunday, February 15, 2009

Middle of Lent Term, and more Paris photos

I haven't managed to post in a really long time since I've been so busy with term. I'm attending two classes and working on my essay, which is about coherence theorems in category theory. The essay should be around 20-30 pages when finished and I have to read three mathematics papers and summarize them to write it. That may sound fairly straightforward, but it is a lot of work to understand the material in the papers enough to write about them, and I am expected to fill in details on proofs from the papers. I'm still rowing, but other than that I'm trying not to do anything other than mathematics.
In other news, the days are getting lighter, which is nice. However, we've had snow a few times, which usually melts right away, but English people seem to be completely thrown off by snow. One of my friends was irritated to find out a post office in town was closed down because of the snow, and the snow had already melted and the streets were clear. Also, people tend to walk with umbrellas in the snow, which I think is kind of funny. Since there's so much rain here, I suppose this is just how they respond to precipitation in general?
So, eventually I will finally get the photos from my trip to France back in mid-December up....
After Sandra and I had our day in Strasbourg, we went back to Paris first thing the next morning. We started out at the Arc de Triomphe and walked all the way down the Champs-Elysees to la Place de la Concorde. It was pretty early then, and very gray out (photo faces toward the Tuileries):


Then we were very disappointed to discover that a few museums were closed that day - some places don't have hours on Tuesdays- including the Musee de l'Orangerie des Tuileries, which holds Monet's waterlilies. So instead, we went to the Musee Rodin, which was wonderful. There is both an interior as well as a sculpture garden outside. Here is the Burghers of Calais:



and the Gates of Hell, which is inspired by Dante's Inferno:
Then we went to the Notre Dame and had a long walk around that area:


Then we made it, very exhausted, to the Latin Quarter, where our hostel was. On the way we made several stops, including the Luxembourg Gardens, which were very barren.


Our hostel in the Latin Quarter was very nice. We were right on the same street as an open air market so once or twice we just went and got stuff from the market for a simple dinner.
So I hope that I can keep posting in the next little while. I don't have a photo of myself yet, but a couple of days ago I went into town with one of my friends and we found a hairdresser and I got my hair cut to shoulder length, so I suddenly have a lot less hair than ever before. Other than that, things have been pretty uneventful lately.