Tuesday

We awoke at 8am. All that greasy, stodgy, starchy Czech food was playing havoc with my digestion (temperamental at the best of times) affecting my bowel movements in the morning, and leaving me feeling bloated and constipated the whole rest of the day.

Something funny happened that morning as we were leaving our room to go to the canteen for breakfast. It was just I was standing in the corridor outside waiting for B to get her things from the room. I had vaguely registered that the door of the next room was open and that there was cleaning paraphernalia littered on the floor outside, when, suddenly, there emerged from out of the room the startling figure of the cleaning lady: a slim and attractive young blonde wearing a tight white cotton t-shirt and the skimpiest pair of white shorts; indeed she wouldn’t have looked out of place at a lap dancing bar. She looked absolutely nothing like any other cleaning lady I’d ever seen.

B locked the door and we headed across the corridor to the stairwell; she’d also noticed the girl but was quite nonchanlant about it. Then, as we were walking down the stairs, and once we were well out of earshot of the maid, B turned to me and said with one of her most suggestive grins, “You’d like to be cleaned by her, wouldn’t you?”

For breakfast another drab bowl of rice pudding. The morning session of the conference started with an hour long invited talk by an insufferably smug, young Russian researcher who wore thick rimmed glasses with close cropped hair. Next up, I attended a presentation by a Neapolitan professor about graded CTL — a topic that was potentially relevant to my own research, though as per usual I struggled to keep up beyond the first few slides of the talk. Then Thomas Schwentick, another brilliant logician with a healthy sized paunch, gave a talk on the two variable fragment of FO on data words.

Lunch.

The canteen dining area was partitioned into two rooms. Today, for a change, we decided to eat on the other side of the partition, the side that looked more like a cheap gaudy restaurant. We sat at a table with just two seats. It took a little longer for our tureen of soup to arrive; I don’t know if that was because of our changed location or they were just busier that day. For a main, I had rice and something which I can best describe as a soft boiled egg rolled up in some beef – and it looked and tasted just as appetising as that bland description makes it sound. Well I found it disgusting anyway, but then I have a real aversion to boiled egg.

I decided to give up on lectures for the rest of the day, so after lunch – and after leaving all my books and notes back in our dormitory room – we took a trip into town, walking into the city centre via Kounicova boulevard.

Once there we took up our official city guide, a little red book which we were, each of us, eager to take charge of and wrest from the clutches of the other; we didn’t have any other sort of map with us, so the book conferred a commanding advantage on its posessor.

We chose the shorter of the two tours suggested inside, and went off to find its starting point, the old town hall, its ornate portal famously crowned by a bent spire. From there we wandered around taking in some of Brno’s other famous sights, buying some little purple plums from a fruit and vegetable market on the way, and taking photos of each other in front of the Parnas fountain.

Feeling the need for some repose, we went off route of our tour and found a wonderful tea house, or čajovna as it is in the local tongue. The čajovna is an important Czech institution. Indeed, one of our favourite haunts in Glasgow, `Tchai Ovna‘, a tea house in the West End of the city directly overlooking the Kelvin River, takes its guiding inspiration, and of course its name, from this venerable Czech tradition. However, quaint and cosy as the Glaswegian take on the čajovna admittedly is, it stands as but a pale and rather amateurish imitation of the real thing.

This, our first Czech čajovna, was spread over a series of themed rooms in a basement. One of the rooms had been dressed up in a Japanese theme and had black lacquered wood furnishings; another was set up to look like an eastern opium den and had its own set of water pipes. Those were both occupied so we chose another room, one that had something of a vague garden party/childhood nostalgia theme to it. One half of it was taken up by a raised platform on which were placed a low table and some scatter cushions; the other half had a couple of black cast iron garden chairs (on which I managed to stub my toe, removal of outer footwear being of course obligatory on entrance to the rooms) and a bookcase filled with Czech books and boardgames.

I ordered a milky Data Masala chai from the helpful, white, dreadlocked tea attendant – it was a little oversweet. B ordered a compacted white tea dragon ball and we sat and watched as it gracefully unfurled itself within a glass teapot filled with hot water; it all felt a bit unreal, like a dream.

The next stop on our shortly resumed tour was the grand cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul. We had a vague little amble around the grounds. Afterwards we wanted to go and see the crypt of the Capuchin monastery just off the Kapucínské námĕstí (as far as I can tell námĕstí means square or piazza) so that we could visit its mummified inhabitants. But they weren’t admitting visitors just then; mummies need their bit of privacy too sometimes.

We wandered along to the Římské námĕstí and into the more commercial part of town. I had the idea of sloping off into one or two of the bookshops that appeared en route; there was a good few of them: the locals, it seems, are a literate bunch. However B is always dubious about my compulsion to visit bookshops wherever I go. This is because I always have the awful tendency whenever I’m in one not to restrict myself to only browsing the shelves – which is what you’re supposed to do, most of the time anyway – but actually end up buying books, which with I’ve now managed to fill up every bit of spare space in my room.

Actually, I did manage to visit a few bookstores that afternoon. I didn’t buy anything, but I was surprised at the range of books that had been translated into Czech: I don’t know why, but I just assumed that they’d keep technical manuals or programming language guides in English. If you were working as a programmer or an engineer wouldn’t you need to know English anyway?

Later we ended up at Námĕstí Svobody, Brno’s main town square, before venturing off to take in another couple of cathedrals, one of which, St. James, was a 15th century, gothic church with a tall green spire and a little stone gargoyle perched atop one of the tower windows eagerly thrusting his culo at the passersby below; in the other cathedral, St Thomas‘, they were performing afternoon mass.

We found another splendid čajovna just off Římské námĕstí, on the top floor of a two storey building complex otherwise given over to offices of one sort or another. This one had a small entry passage and the rest of it was partitioned into two large rooms with heavy drapes at the entrance to each. The walls in both rooms were covered in dustworn rugs and tapestries, with threadbare oriental carpets adorning the wooden floor – they had put nothing like the effort and the thought into decorating and furnishing the rooms as the first čajovna had. There were bookshelves and racks with magazines in Czech about Indian mysticism.

The second room was almost full up so we looked for somewhere to sit in the first. Most of the first room was taken up by large raised platform upon which there was lounging a party of about five or six young Czechs. A very striking looking group of people the Czechs. One of youths in the party was a beautiful raven haired girl wearing a short black dress with gorgeous brown limbs and the wilful, headstrong look of a radical about her. She lay sloped languidly against her rather plainer looking curly haired friend and everything was in a late afternoon haze. The scene was evocative of the sort of bohemian Europe I’d always dreamed of and often glimpsed in films.

There wasn’t any space left on the platform for the pair of us, so we had to make do with a little low bench by the window, on the other side of the room and a table that was essentially a brown glass topped packing crate.

So then we had to order some tea. B and I were, to start with, slightly at a loss for what to choose from a menu that was packed with all sorts of wild and exotic varieties of tea, but in the end we ordered a pot of yellow tea – having already tried black tea, white tea, red tea and green tea, it seemed unfair to leave out the yellow sort. The waiter soon arrived with our yellow tea in a teapot along with a flask of hot water, and showed us to brew it — turns out there’s something of an art to making yellow tea.

I’ve noticed this in general about the čajovnas we visited during that week in the Czech Republic — and we must have visited about 4 or 5 — namely, that they always put so much effort into doing things properly. Not only was this manifested in the impressive range and quality of the teas on offer, but also by the choice of the decor and the furnishings, and especially in the level of expertise and know how among the staff, which certainly surpassed that expected of most decent coffee house barristas. The careful attention to detail that was taken during preparation – from making sure the tea was in the right receptacle, and that the temperature of the water was correct, that the right cups were used – spoke of a real love and respect for tea that I think is often missing in similar establishments over here: those trendy tea houses that are popular everywhere now, and are frequented by the hip and the twee with their macbooks and weekly knitting circles.

B and I sat and chatted about politics over our cups of yellow tea. After a while, just as I was becoming more and more absorbed in the conversation, B’s attention began to wither, and the conversation itself became increasingly a monologue. At a certain point, just I was on the verge of launching into a self important rant about something or other to do with America she interrupted my train of thought by distractedly wondering aloud whether the two girls sitting nearby, who’d arrived together a few minutes earlier and who were speaking in English, might not be American. She clearly hadn’t been paying any attention to what I’d been saying and that upset me more than a little. In fact her indifference coupled with the brusie to my ego, killed off my enthusiasm for any further conversation, as well as for our location. So since our tea was finished, I suggested we pay and leave.

The tension between us wasn’t to last long however. In fact we made up straight away again once we were back down on the street outside and kissed and held each other. She excused her earlier blank inattention by telling me about how deeply troubled she was feeling about her future right then. She talked all about her fears and dreads and of how little hope she held out for herself.

We decided to revisit St Peter’s cathedral, finding our way up to a fine vantage point at the back of its great grey mossy stone flanks. She leaned on the parapet, her chin sunk onto her soft forearms, and gazed desolately off into the distance. That was the end of our tour.

Then it was dusk and time to eat, so we found a restaurant where the menu boards were written in Italian as well as Czech and German. We weren’t that hungry and my stomach still felt uneasy from the last few days of Moravian stodge, so we only ordered two soups. But my heart sank when I saw how big the bowls actually were, and even more so when I saw the film of grease floating on top of each bowl. After our hearty soups we decided it was better to walk back to the hotel rather than catch the tram.

Monday

I didn’t get very much sleep on Sunday night. There was a fluorescent light fixture on the wall beside my bed, just a foot or so above it. After B had gone to sleep I wanted to continue reading so I turned off the main light and turned the fluorescent lamp on. Unfortunately the light switch became loose and came off, so that in order to turn it off again I had to jam a ball point pen into the switch socket and wiggle it around. But for some reason this only turned it off temporarily, and so 10 or 15 minutes later the fluorescent lamp fizzed back mischievously into life and I had to get up again and reapply the pen.

This repeated itself over a number of times during the course of that night. Just as I was about to drift off to sleep, the lamp would spark back to life – it was too bright and too close by to be able to ignore – and I’d have to scramble around again, searching for my pen, feeling utterly exasperated, and hoping maybe this time I could get it to stay off. At a certain point, maybe around the fourth or fifth iteration, I heard someone rapping on the other side of the wall just as I was busily jamming the pen in. Great: now I’d woken up the poor bastard next door. Eventually, and I don’t remember how, but I managed to turn it off permanently.

We got up at half 7, but I didn’t have time for breakfast. B started complaining about the fact that we had to share a bathroom with the guy in the adjacent room. I went straight off to the conference to see an invited talk being given by Erich Grädel, another logician whose work I admire greatly, but who didn’t cut such an impressive figure in person, with his large pot belly jutting out in his black shirt. The talk was interesting enough and I followed it till about half way through when my grasp of the main ideas became too precarious and it all fell about like a house of cards in my head. Coffee break. I went to the foyer and had some fresh fruit and a cup of coffee, assiduously avoiding the trays of cakes and pastries that had almost immediately caught my eye because I was still trying to keep to my diet.
I went back in for the second morning session and worked from my category theory textbook, paying little mind to the speakers up front. After that B and I went off to the canteen for lunch together. We sat at a table with two Chinese students; the one sitting next to me was busily slurping up his soup and loudly sucking up his noodles. I’ve noticed that in general the Chinese love to accompany the act of eating with a whole litany of appreciative sucking sounds — even if they’re quiet and reserved in so many other ways. For a main I had chicken and liver with rice; it was a bit bland.
Then having filled our bellies we took a short stroll along the Štefánikova, the street upon which we’d first set foot in Brno; we took in some shops and a few graffittied buildings. Soon it was time to go back to the conference.
Most of the talks that I attended during the afternoon session were related to automata theory, covering among other topics, data automata, reset automata, lossy machines, and randomness. B was working hard in the foyer on a presentation of her own.

Sunday

We awoke at 7:30. On getting up we noticed that there were small crowds of tiny ants crawling all over the laminate flooring. If anything the broad light of day made everything look cheaper and more dismal than it had on our arrival last night. The contrast with our room at the Lisbon Radisson of the past week became all too painful for B.

We had been given breakfast tokens on checking in the night before, and were both ravenous for not having had any decent food for over a day. But first we had to work out the location of the canteen: they weren’t going to make things easy for you here at the Hotel Družba. So we got dressed and went out to look for our breakfast; it looked warm outside so I put on my black wifebeater top and some shorts and sandals.

It became fairly obvious early on that we weren’t going to have any luck finding the canteen for ourselves; so I suggested that we start following two young women who we’d just seen leaving the hotel after us, one of them pushing a buggy, in the hope that they would lead us to the canteen. I think I based my decision on the fact that they seemed to have the sort of purposeful stride of two who were heading off to claim their complementary breakfasts. After last night we had grown weary of asking directions only to come up against the language barrier and blank stares and shaking heads. There was hardly anyone else around to ask anyway, so stalking seemed our best option.

The neighbourhood was dominated by tall, grey concrete rows composed of cold war-era administration buildings and office complexes, almost clinical in their austerity, and in amongst these were some more recent glass and steel structures which were far less imposing and also far less interesting. The two women did in the end lead us to the canteen building, the exterior of which was very much in line with the spare, utilitarian, and utterly serious (brooking no mischief) ethos of the surrounding architecture.

Inside, the tables were all neatly laid out with folded napkins and clean table cloths, and the air was thick with a mingled aroma of soap, grease and starch: the kind of pungent, warmly nauseating odour that lingers on in your memory long afterwards, and that you can never entirely efface. The dinner ladies were butch, heavy duty, Les Dawson types, of the sort that had constituted one of the two stereotyped categories into which all Eastern European or Russian women were supposed to fall; the other sort being young, impossibly pretty, and extremely easy.

Our breakfast consisted of a bowl of rice pudding with a few slices of bread, and coffee. Then we went off in search of the Informatics faculty where I was meant to go and register for the conference — and where I was due to give a talk sometime later in the afternoon: I didn’t know exactly when, but remembered that it was after 12.

We asked at the hotel reception desk for directions and were told that we would find the faculty two streets down. But we had no map and nor were there any recognisable landmarks by which to orientate ourselves and so it didn’t take long for us to get lost again, and neither did it take long for me to tire of having to tramp over concrete flag stones with my flip flops on. However we did eventually find our way to the faculty building after about half an hour of wandering, and without too much discomfort of foot on my part.

Upon our entering the foyer I saw a notice board stand on which was mounted a yellow sheet of paper with the list of speakers for the Young Researchers Forum, so I went over to check. Running my eyes down the list of names I noticed, with a rapidly burgeoning sense of disbelief and of alarm that was verging on panic, that I was listed as the first speaker of the second morning session which was due to commence at 10:50am – only half an hour away!

Of course the real horror of it was that we could have so easily gotten here maybe 15 or 20 minutes later, if not more — there had been such a lack of urgency on our part about finding this place — and then I would have completely missed my slot (I had left my USB stick with the slides on it back at the hotel), and after all this presentation was the ostensible reason for the whole trip. I cursed myself for my utter fecklessness and immediately conveyed my rather pressing discovery to B, who kept a clear head and insisted I run back to the hotel as fast as possible and retrieve my USB stick.

Now if just a few minutes earlier I’d found it arduous just walking Brno’s concrete pavements wearing flip flops it was as nothing compared with running up them in flip flops. Fortunately, thanks to our earlier, rather more relaxed, perambulations I didn’t have any trouble locating the hotel. I ran upstairs, found my USB stick and ran straight back down again. When I got halfway to the university I realised I was still dressed in my shorts, flip flops and wife beater, ensemble; but it was far too late to run back and change into something more appropriate – or rather something much less inappropriate.

I got back to the Informatics building with only a little time still left to spare, found the lecture theatre I was due to speak in – it was downstairs and across an inner courtyard – and loaded my talk onto the lectern computer. Shortly afterwards the chair introduced me as the first speaker.

Now to my own great surprise I started my talk off feeling relaxed and quite laidback. I wasn’t even fazed by the sudden influx of people into the lecture theatre five minutes after I’d started. Maybe I’d just exhausted my reserves of nervous energy with all that sprinting back and forth or perhaps it was that I just hadn’t had the luxury of time to spend worrying. The fact was that this version of the talk went far better than the one I delivered in Lisbon. Of course having given the same presentation once before and to a similar audience I was bound to be a little more polished this time around; but I’d also become far more resigned during the course of the intervening week, to just how mediocre and uninteresting my work really was. I was fully expecting to be outshone by every other student speaker, and that was pretty much how it played out in the end. I’d lowered my expectations and afterwards felt much better about myself.

I had two questions at the end of the talk. One was from the session chair and the other was from a fellow speaker, a conspicuous looking young Greek student with a thick bushy black beard, glasses and a pale green sunhat; he was up next. The Greek’s presentation was an overview of results he’d recently proved about Higher Dimensional Automata, which he claimed could be potentially very useful in the analysis and modelling of concurrent processes. I returned his earlier favour and asked him a question at the end of his talk, on whether he’d been able to prove the decidability of the formalism he was working with, something he’d mentioned in a former slide but hadn’t elaborated on since – it turned out he had. I kept quiet for the rest of the session. There were three other speakers, one of them was English with a pale, ruddy face and a hair cut that made him look like a medieval pageboy.

Then it was time for lunch. But first I had to go out into the foyer and register so I could claim my little calico bag full of conference goodies – which this time around included a mysterious orange plastic ball that after a few attempts at prying it open turned out to contain a cheap rain poncho. Afterwards we followed the rest of the crowd back out to the canteen; and knowing absolutely no-one there, and both of us being far too shy to risk any kind of social interaction with strangers – brilliant and intimidating strangers at that – we sat at a table by ourselves.

As at Lisbon B was extremely reluctant to take any of the conference food, so I got up and asked a passing dinner lady about the possibility of B’s paying for her own lunch. The dinner lady took us to one of the girls we’d seen earlier at the reception desk and she told us that it was OK and that there was no need for us to pay any extra – and having been given this concrete assurance B had no further qualms about partaking of food at the conference.

Lunch at the canteen was a three course affair. For the starter, a dinner lady usually brought a large tureen of sour cabbage soup to our table — which was nice, and good solid fare and all, but bland enough to get very tiresome very quickly when served over the course of a week. Each day you had a choice of main course: on this occasion B had fried turkey breast filets and I had a hearty goulash. After that we went back to the hotel together and made love.

I returned for the afternoon session of the Young Researchers’ Forum but I didn’t really pay any attention to the presentations. Instead, I sat near the back of the theatre and used the time to work through my Category Theory textbook: something which I got into the habit doing throughout the majority of the talks I attended that week – I had quickly realised most of them were just beyond me. However, even after all those hours of study I couldn’t say I was too much the wiser as to the basics of Category Theory. But it’s just that kind of a subject. You need to get quite far into it before the basic definitions and theorems start to take on any really interesting significance.

I stayed for about an hour of the afternoon session of the Young Researchers’ Forum and then B and I went to see the final part of Yurifest, a symposium that was being held at the same time as the YRF in honour of the eminent Russian-American logician Yuri Gurevich on the occasion of his 70th Birthday. Yurifest (yes, it was a very silly name) had been up till then largely devoted to technical presentations focusing on Gurevich’s core interests in Logic and Computer Science, but it was due to culminate in the presentation of a Festschrift to which the public were invited and which I was eager to attend.

I had been aware of Gurevich from my days as a Masters Degree student in Manchester when I had read about his pivotal contributions towards solving the classical decision problem. I relied heavily on the textbook Gurevich had co-authored on the subject during the writing of my Masters thesis. So I sort of felt I was familiar with the man through his work. Plus it was just interesting for me to be in the presence of someone of Gurevich’s intellectual stature.

We made our way to Yurifest, along a series of corridors and up several flights of stairs. It was being held in a conference room on the top floor. When we arrived there were a number of people waiting outside for the previous talk to conclude. The door opened and a curly haired man emerged grinning inanely and holding up a cake decoration with YURI written in bold white icing. This turned out to be the Israeli logician Nachum Dershowitz, the organiser of Yurifest: he had appeared at the door to invite us all in for the presentation of the Liber Amicorum. Dershowitz also happens to be a cousin of the famous American lawyer and pro-Israel propagandist Alan Dershowitz, and the facial resemblance between the two is quite striking.

Before the main event itself, we were given a slide presentation by Dershowitz tracking the long journey Gurevich had made, halfway across the globe, during the course of his long and distinguished career: from his early days behind the iron curtain as a student at the Urals State University and in Tbilsi, Georgia – which was in those days, as Dershowitz mentioned in an aside, the best place to be a Zionist in the USSR – to his escape to Israel and finally his arrival in America where he still works as a researcher for Microsoft in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

After the slides Gurevich was presented with the Liber Amicorum and was invited to say a few words. He was a frail looking old gent with a quiet, rather feeble voice. He launched into a series of rambling anecdotes. I didn’t catch a lot of what he said due to his accent and the faintness of his voice, but I did pick up something about his love of taking long walks. Afterwards as we were all leaving I was asked to sign the Liber Amicorum by Dershowitz. I lied and told him I was no one of any importance, but he insisted, so I added my signature to the flyleaf.

B and I left and went back to the hotel stopping at a beer garden on the way. We walked to the town centre to get something to eat, a 20 minute walk, and walked back.

Saturday

B had set the alarm for 7 am. I wanted some extra sleep so I persuaded her not to get up just yet. Instead she came over to my bed and we cuddled. Eventually, half an hour later, we both got up out of bed. B packed while I showered. For breakfast we ate the fruit I had bought last night, after which we went downstairs to check out and say farewell to our wonderful hotel with its pleasant, subdued interiors and an ice vending machine on each floor (– the machine on our floor was broken so I usually took the staff lift one floor up to get my cupful of ice cubes). At the reception desk, we were offered a free ride to the airport in the hotel mini-van with Mario, one of the Hotel staff, which we gratefully accepted.

It was a short drive to the airport. We checked in and went to stand in a long line for the security control, after which we got to sit in the departures lounge. It was the usual mind numbing wait for our gate to be called. I used the time to write my journal and look at pretty girls walking by. I tried to read The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis but I just wasn’t getting into it; it was much harder to summon up enthusiasm for the book now that we were leaving Lisbon.

Our flight was delayed by half an hour and it was a real relief to finally get to board. The seats on the plane were plush grey leather, and during the flight little LCD displays flipped down from the overhead compartments to track the progress of our flight across a map of Europe, as well to show Safety First, the old silent Harold Lloyd short that ends with the iconic scene of him hanging off a clock tower. All of which certainly made a pleasant change from the last couple of years of flying Ryanair. On the other hand, the food they served us was dire. B had a couple of spoonfuls of her dessert, which was a chalky approximation of chocolate mouse, and fed me her cheese and crackers.

We arrived at Prague desperate to make our connecting coach at 5:35, which thanks to our plane’s late arrival we were on the verge of missing. So we rushed through the airport – and since we’d travelled within the Schengen area there was no passport control, a novelty for me – and eventually came to a standstill at the baggage reclaim. I sat and stared glumly at the baggage carousel, feeling resentment at its having halted our momentum, and waited for our luggage to make an appearance. B went away to fetch a trolley and to ask for directions.

Once we’d loaded up our baggage on the trolley the race was back on again – and we literally ran through the adjoining terminal buildings trying to get to the pick up point for the coach – for which we had only a few minutes left to spare. I find it more than a little surprising that in our panicked gallop – with me pushing the trolley ahead of me and B chasing up behind, following in my wake – in all our hurry and our rush, that we didn’t come to mischief on the polished floor. We got outside, to the parking lot, but the coach was nowhere to be seen — so thinking we’d missed it, B and I boarded another bus that would take us near to the Prague Florence bus terminal, from where we hoped we could take our connecting coach to Brno.

But just as this bus was pulling out, we spotted a large mustard yellow Student Agency coach pulling into the airport parking lot – this was our coach, the same one that had merited all that pointless haste and breathlessness just a few moments earlier, arriving 10 minutes later than it meant to (– and neither was this to be the last of our difficulties with the Czech Student Agency bus company and their annoying habit of not arriving or departing to schedule). The driver of the bus we’d boarded graciously stopped the bus and allowed us to get off to catch our coach.

As we drove through the Czech countryside I commented on how beautiful a day it was, and how much hotter than I’d been expecting for this part of the world. According to B this was no fluke: she explained that summers in central Europe were often this hot and sunny. Well, I had to bow to her superior knowledge since I’d never visited the region before. Of course the very next day, the skies began to cloud over and the rain to fall and the climate became rather more temperate and more familiar to me. We were not to have another such glorious cloud-free day during the rest of our trip, and we spent most of this one being driven around in a coach.

After a short ride that took us into Prague, the coach dropped us off at the Prague Florence bus terminal, a shabby, grey, concrete edifice, from which we awaited our connecting coach to Brno. The coach ride into the centre of Prague itself had had quite an impact on me; I was dazzled by the grandeur of the city: the monumental scale of its buildings, and the opulence of its streets and its piazzas. You were under no doubt but that you’d arrived somewhere once auspicious, a former seat of great wealth and power — and which had managed to hold onto something of the majesty of its glory days. I was to somewhat attenuate my high opinion of Prague on my following visit, but that was still about a week away.

While we waited, I bought a baguette from a sandwich bar in the bus station — that was to be my main source of nourishment for the day. We boarded our Student Agency coach at 7pm, and took two seats right at the front. As we got going a tall blonde stewardess passed through the bus offering us magazines in Czech, and headphones to listen to the film they were showing on the in-coach TV monitor, some dreary 90s flick starring Ethan Hawke and Angelina Jolie. The bus juddered rhythmically over the bumpy, pockmarked, highway, as we drove through an enchanted fairytale landscape of tall, gloomy Bohemian forest silhouetted against a luminous grey dusk.

After the movie they showed an episode of Friends subtitled in Czech; it was as comforting as a warm bowl of ever so slightly lumpy porridge. We arrived at Brno at around about 10pm. Earlier on, back when we had a wifi connection, B had been on Google maps and noted down some directions on a piece of paper. This was all we had to go on to find our hotel. I was delegated the arduous task of wheeling around both pieces of heavy luggage – my trolley suitcase with her holdall perched on top of it – as B ran on ahead, first in one direction, then the other, trying to figure out the location of the Hotel Kounicova. It didn’t take too long for me to reach frustration point with my unwieldy burden and to start complaining after her, at which point she also got upset. It had been a long day, one in which we’d covered most of the breadth of mainland Europe. We were both exhausted after our journey and just wanted to turn in for the night: so it was understandable if tempers were beginning to fray ever so slightly.

We got on a tram at B’s suggestion; the interior was bright and well lit after the darkness of the streets. Unfortunately neither the tram driver, nor most of the passengers seemed to know enough English to give us directions – though eventually, working our way down the tram, we found one who did: a bespectacled young man who was able to tell us we’d overshot our destination by two stops. So we got off at the next stop and started walking back in the direction we’d come. B asked directions from a few middle aged ladies who happened to be wandering around at night, but none of them spoke English (it seemed as if they only let the older ladies wander around at night, the streets were mostly full of men and pretty Czech girls during the day).

I found it strange to be in a place where so few people seemed to have even a rudimentary grasp of English. I wasn’t used to it, although to be honest my experience of mainland Europe up till then had been limited to more Anglophone-friendly countries like Germany, Italy and Portugal. In a way I guess it was reassuring: it meant that, even here in the heart of central Europe, there were cultural strongholds where the locals had managed to hold out against this worldwide imperative for everyone to learn English and partake of a common globalised monoculture to which so many other parts of the world have succumbed – as I later found out had Prague itself. Regardless, we were still utterly lost, with little chance of guidance from the locals and with rapidly dwindling patience.

B’s formidable linguistic skills also failed her here: Italian is her native tongue, but she’s fluent in English, German, and French, able to get by in Spanish and indeed practically any other Romance language, as well as most Germanic languages – and to top it all off she has a doctorate in Linguistics. But on the other hand, she had never studied a Slavic language before and as it turned out was as lost as I was – which worried me a little because I’d gotten used to her being my authority in all things linguistic. The words on the street signs and the billboards, the store fronts and the bars, all seemed so exotic and unfamiliar, with their multiple diacritics and extended sequences of consonants: there was very little chance of puzzling them out using clues from English or the little French I’d learned at school, the way I’d been able to do the first time I’d visited Germany or Italy.

Eventually we found a portly lady with an excitable little dog who had enough English (the lady not the dog that is) to direct us towards our destination. We ended up traversing a long dark street called Kounicova, and hoping and praying that the hotel of the same name was somewhere nearby. It felt like we had been walking for hours, but in reality it was probably just over 45 minutes; my shirt was completely soaked in sweat, and my back, always the first thing to give out during any kind of prolonged physical exertion, had been troubling me for a while. B insisted, nay demanded, to relieve me of luggage hauling duties for what we both hoped was the final stretch of our journey – and although it wasn’t the most gallant of behaviour on my part, I let her do it.

So, this time I went on ahead while B struggled to bring up the rear. The street was deserted, but I found a bar that was open, and went in and asked the pretty bargirl for directions to the Hotel Kounicova; it turned out that it was right next door. To be fair to us, the hotel was very easy to miss, given that from the outside at least there was nothing to distinguish it from any of the other apartment blocks in the vicinity.

We went into the reception. The receptionist was a rather dour and careworn middle aged blonde who’d probably been once very pretty, about 30 or so years ago, but time had not been too kind in the interim. She was a woman of few words and most of them in Czech and I could only speak to her in English, but in the end I think we understood each other. I filled out a few forms and she told me I had to pay for the room up front. I went back out and found a nearby ATM and withdrew 4000 Czech crowns. When I came back the logician Alexander Rabinovich was standing at the reception desk checking himself in.

We took possession of our room which was on the third floor. It was a spartan two bed student dorm type affair with a a window that looked down onto the courtyard behind the hotel; what little furniture was in the room, two tables and chairs and some shelves, looked worn and shabby. We shared a bathroom with the room next door which was a cause of some consternation for B. But she was tired enough to save her complaints for some other time.

I hadn’t had anything to eat since that baguette in Prague so I went down to the bar and had a Starobrno and a big bag of potato crisps or `chips‘, as the name on the front of the pack said, there was no other food to be had.

The Royal Wedding

I found the recent outbreak of irrationality and hysteria around the royal wedding to be extremely disturbing and not a little offensive. Here we are being asked to venerate and to pledge our undying loyalty towards two young people as they perform their matrimonial rites, on the sole basis that the groom was born into a certain family and has managed to keep himself alive and not disgrace himself in too outrageous a fashion over the course of his young life.

I see no other reason to revere this William character, he is in no wise an exceptional human being: at 29 he has achieved nothing outstanding, or even truly worthy of note — at least nothing under his own steam, and that wasn’t the direct result of royal privileges inherited at birth. Prince William is no great warrior, scholar, or statesman; and nor does he seem to possess any special religious or spiritual insights. He has so far failed to display any particularly remarkable personal virtues, nothing that, aside from his royal heritage, would serve to really set him above the common herd. It seems to be enough that he is quietly personable and can competently comport himself in a “regal” manner — that he takes his princely role seriously — for us to regard him as praiseworthy.

The point is that we expect very little from our royalty and demand even less. You see we’re not really supposed to exalt William on the basis of any personal qualities he may posses, but on the quasi-mystical basis of what he represents. His princely authority derives from the fact that he symbolises an institution which stands for Britishness, in the same way the union jack and the mythical figure of Britannia stand for Britain and Britishness — but not in the more straightforward way that, say, a map or a national census survey stands for Britain/Britishness. This institution, the Royal Family, wields no genuine power over the inhabitants of this island – or so we’re told, even if we are all, nominally speaking, its subjects and find ourselves under its dominion: the authority and the role of the royal family is merely symbolic.

All those magical incantations, honorifics, sigils and rituals, all that grand pomp and pageantry we’re meant to fall into some kind of blind ecstasy over — willingly handing over millions of pounds each year to maintain its upkeep and to keep the royals living lives of unimaginable luxury — is there to ensue some kind of psychic continuity with the past; to keep us in touch with our nation’s ancient cultural heritage — which we’re told, ultimately serves to bind us all together as a nation in some ineffable sense (the other royalist retort is of course that they bring in millions of pounds in tourism but that argument is easily defeated). It’s all rather vague of course, and works along the lines of a religion. I’d have thought by now we’d kind of grown out of that.

Our reverence and adoration helps to transmute base, muddy, inbred Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Windsor DNA into irresistible regal glory and splendour — and increasingly it’s the only thing. Surely, the more banal these people get with each passing generation and the farther they are from anything remotely approaching charisma and personal magnetism, the harder to is to summon up any vestige of desire to genuflect before them.

Indeed what offended me more than anything: over and above the millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money lavished on this absurd spectacle at a time of enforced austerity for the rest of the country; more than the heavy handed and indiscriminate crackdown, immediately before the wedding, on any kind of organised dissent or protest; and indeed more than the fundamental disconnect between our intuitive notion of the concepts of freedom and democracy, and the fact of living under a monarchical system of government, essentially a throwback from the days of feudalism: yeah all that stuff bothered me a lot, but what offended me most during the actual ceremony itself was what a pair of utter mediocrities the pair of them actually were!

It just felt like the final insult to me. OK, Kate carried herself well enough on the day, and had sufficient charm and pose to be able to engage her audience of hundreds of millions, but come on, she was clearly upstaged, quite early on in the proceedings, by her sister’s ass. I was expecting more from our future queen: I wanted her to project such an aura of stately radiance as to genuinely silence all the doubts and scepticism in my head, for however long the ceremony lasted, I wanted for her to be the very essence of regal feminine grace.

And I expected even more of William: I thought that for once he might truly live up to the title of Prince, and tower over the rest of us in his imperial confidence and the degree of his self assertion. That’s what I expected as the price for my devotion and for accepting, even if it was just for the length of the ceremony, that these two were somehow superior beings. You see I’m an old romantic: I kind of wanted to believe in it all. But, no, it was all just so pedestrian. And it convinced me that the magic had all but gone in this particular relationship.

Friday

I had another attack of the night terrors on Thursday. I awoke in a panic, and my agitation woke B up in turn. I started screaming out questions: for a brief few moments I was unable to distinguish my nightmare from reality.

It was the final day of the conference and our last full day in Lisbon. We got up at a quarter to 8. I had just a banana to eat for breakfast. Then we went over to the university, taking some seats near the front of the auditorium for the final keynote talk — and the one I had been most looking forward to. It was to be given by Christos Papadimitriou.

Papadimitriou is probably best known, at least among Computer Science students and researchers the world over, for his magisterial textbook on computational complexity, a real classic of its genre; but he’s an important figure in the field of complexity on the basis of his original contributions alone; and on top of that he was recently the co-author of a highly acclaimed graphic novel about the life (and madness) of Bertrand Russell.

His talk was going to cover various complexity theoretic issues related to the computation of Nash Equilibria in Game Theory. There were sound problems at the beginning however: the mic wasn’t working properly, plus, Professor Papadimitriou has a bit of a tendency to mumble, which on top of his thick Greek accent, meant that even those of us sitting near the front caught only a little of what he was saying. The situation was rectified in part when he was passed a hand held microphone by one of the conference helpers.
Then 15 minutes before the end, to thank us all for sticking around for the last day of the conference – something he admitted he personally would never have done in his younger days – he began a brief presentation on recent work detailing the evolutionary benefits of sexual intercourse as opposed to the forms of asexual reproduction practised among lower forms of organism – at which point, of course, every one in the auditorium perked up and started paying more attention.

Inevitably, all the questions at the end, and there were quite a number of them, were about sex; for some reason no one wanted to ask anything about Nash Equilibria.

After Papadimitriou’s talk, B and I took a train to Rossio and had a brief wander around the town centre; this time we headed for the Barrio Alto. The sun shone brightly. During our stroll, we walked past a sex shop that had a sex toys section entitled “contra natura”, and stopped off in a small piazza with a bronze statue of a ticket collector, with whom we posed for photos. We walked down a stone staircase which smelled heavily of piss; there was a poor hunched-over old gypsy woman at the bottom wearing a black shawl. I gave her a few coins.

The streets of the Barrio Alto were shabby and the buildings graffiti ridden, though not to the extent of the blocks I’d visited on my first day here. The whole neighbourhood was pretty deserted and supposedly only came alive at night: the locals were wont to party all night long and sleep through most of the hours of broad daylight — a lot of the windows had their shutters closed to keep the light out. Aside from the sex shop, and the streets littered with fag ends and covered in last night’s beer stains, I really didn’t get to see much of the hedonistic side of Lisbon; in fact I feel like I never really got too much of a sense of the living, breathing essence of the place, just a bunch of old buildings and some admittedly stunning scenery. But that’s fair enough: after all, I was here at the university’s expense to attend a conference on artificial intelligence, not to investigate the culture of the town where it was being held.

We walked back to Rossio and went to sit at an outdoor café facing the Praça da Figueira; I wasn’t impressed: €2.30 for a can of Lipton’s Ice Tea. We took the train back to the universidad after deciding to have lunch (for free) there. But we arrived a little too late and there wasn’t much food left on the buffet tables, and what was left had gone cold. B and I had a few slices of quiche. After eating I went back to the hotel to get B her laptop. It was sweltering outside, but I was dressed for it in my Hawaiian shirt and black knee length shorts.

I returned and gave B her laptop before heading to the final technical session which had at least one talk that seemed as if it might be relevant to what I was working on – and it was, kind of. After sitting through all three talks of the session, I went back to B in the canteen. She was in one of her fits (or rather furies) of organisation, and was absolutely adamant that we had to arrange every detail of tomorrow’s trip right there and then, even down to calling the hotel in Brno to double check our bookings; I was, on the other hand, a little too laid back. We tried to call the hotel on Skype but the internet connection wasn’t too great and our attempts were finally cut short by the need to get to the closing session, which was to be a goodbye from the organisers.

During the session, one of the organisers, a small, stout man, got up and began to talk about the challenges of setting up the conference, the preparation for which had began years ago. At one point he explained how the stress of organising everything had been compounded by the fact that he’d been dealing with a major personal crisis at the same time – after mentioning which he started to choke up. It was more than a little uncomfortable – I guess Computer Scientists aren’t used to such naked displays of emotional vulnerability. But I guess the Portuguese don’t tend to button up and repress their emotions like us Northern Europeans do; and I put it all down to the Portuguese predilection to over sentimentality at the time. We gave him a loud round of applause as a token of our gratitude and to drown out our embarrassment at the scene.

B and I went to the final reception. The attendance was rather sparse: most of the (now former) conference attendees were either out enjoying the sunshine, or were in the process of returning back home. I had a few pastries and drank some cold draught Super Bock; the stuff had been available on tap throughout the conference, during the morning and afternoon breaks and lunchtime, and I had developed a real taste for it.
I didn’t want to be saddled with my shoulder bag the rest of the afternoon; so I trudged back once again to the hotel to leave it in our room; before going back out to meet B at the Campo Grande station — she had gone up ahead of me. We rode the train to Baixa Chiado, and decided from there on to go to Estrela: I was interested in seeing Fernando Pessoa’s old house, which had been turned into a museum dedicated to his life and work.

So we took the 28 tram up the Rua São Jorge and climbed the rest of the street to the Jardim da Estrela where we rested briefly in the shade. I carelessly dropped my tourist map at the bench where we’d been sitting and when I went back to retrieve it a few minutes later, saw a couple of children playing with it. I decided just to leave it – we had the little map in the guide book to refer to after all and how churlish would it have been for me to have asked for it back?

We had something of a problem trying to find the Casa Fernando Pessoa. On the first go, we left the park by the wrong exit, though this had the advantage of leading us straight to the Basilica da Estrela – which we were too tired to give more than a quick glance to. And so back through the park we went: at which point B decided she’d prefer to rest on a bench by an old antique iron pavilion and listen to her iPod — letting me traipse off by myself to look for the Casa FP – and of course I was to call her when I found it.

So off I went by myself, took a few more wrong turns and inevitably got lost: I’m usually not too bad at orienting myself to unfamiliar surroundings, but Lisbon is a fucker for losing your way in. Eventually, by retracing my steps back to the roundabout after the park, I managed to get my bearings. My confused little wander that afternoon took in an Anglican church, an English cemetery and the headquarters of a troupe of amateur English theatrical players: all remnants of the centuries’ old Anglo-Lusitanian alliance.

Finally, I managed to find old Fernando’s house – five minutes or so before it was due to close of course. I
phoned B to tell her this; she seemed not to mind and told me I should go and take a look for myself. So I did.

The museum had a gallery of Pessoa inspired paintings, a library containing his complete works as well as a wealth of secondary texts, and they’d also set up his former bedroom to look like it had when he’d lived there – which since I wasn’t really that familiar with his works, only with his general reputation as a modernist genius, didn’t hold much intrinsic fascination for me. After a brief look around – and it had to be brief given the time – I went back to B at the Jardim.

It was decided that for our last evening in Lisbon, that we would revisit the Alfama – and so once again, and indeed for the final time, we went to board the number 28 tram. Once we arrived we settled on a Goan restaurant that lay on the cobbled pathway that led up to the Castello. We were the first two there that evening and the waiter – who, alas, wasn’t very Goan looking – was very attentive and pleasant to us. The food was ok: my shrimp curry was nice; B’s fish curry was a bit bland however. We washed it all down with — what else? — two glasses of chilled Super Bock.

We walked back to the Praça do Comércio and took photos of each other in front of the monument or with the triumphal arch and the rushing traffic as background just as the gloomy dusk was beginning to settle. I wasn’t able to rub out the smudges on my camera lens and that turned up on the periphery of all of the photos we took.

And so, our final evening in Lisbon over and done with, we took the train back to the Campo Grande. B went straight to the hotel, but I stopped off in Lidl first to buy some fruit. It’d been less than a week but I’d very quickly grown attached to the Campo Grande and the stadium Lidl which I must have visited every day I was in Lisbon: so that that last visit was more for sentimental reasons than any real desire to buy fruit. Finally I got back to the hotel. B lay in bed while I packed my luggage.

Thursday

Awoke at 8, made myself a banana sandwich for breakfast, dressed quickly, and rushed off to the first talk. It was given by an Australian professor in a loud Hawaiian shirt; he talked about applying ideas from the mathematical study of symmetry to the design of combinatorial search algorithms.

Like most of the talks of the last few days, I found it to be quite dull and uninteresting; even though, in fact, the subject itself is inherently interesting, bringing up as it does deep connections between the order which we observe in nature on the one hand, and that which is embodied in what are, after all, merely theoretical, computational constructs on the other. I don’t know: maybe the presentation was dull – and it kind of was – or else I was too preoccupied with other things to be able to focus on the talk; whatever the reasons, my attention was wandering all over the place.

That particular hour over and done with, it was time for a coffee break, after which I sat through the Logical Foundations of Multi Agent Systems session; as usual most of it just passed me by, it seemed as if I was there just to occupy space.

I ate my lunch alone. During the lunch break, though, I did manage to chat to Michael, a Chinese-Australian PhD student who I’d met a few weeks ago at Edinburgh; he recommended B and I visit Belem, which had been one of the suggestions B had made as to where we should go this afternoon – which settled it for me, in my mind at least. I returned to the hotel. B was sitting waiting for me on a couch in the lobby, wearing black eyeliner. We went up to our room and made love.

She agreed with me on Belem. But I wanted to do just one more thing before we set off. I borrowed her laptop and took it to the university to use the free wifi and check when I was due to talk at the Young Researcher’s Forum in Brno on Sunday (obviously a waste of time as I completely misread the schedule when I actually got to Brno, but more of that in a later journal entry).

I went back to the hotel, changed into my black shirt, shorts and sandals – and then we were ready for the day’s excursion. We caught the train to a station by the coast and from there we took the tram to Belem. B was acting very affectionately towards me. She’d visited Belem before, the last time she had been in Lisbon, and knew where to lead me. We crossed the bridge over the motorway to the shores of the Tagus, hand in hand. The river was a wonderful azure blue.

Belem – the name is a corrupted form of Bethlehem –was the main launching point from which Portugal came to assume its dominant role during the age of discovery; it was from here that one of the greatest explorers of them all, Vasco di Gama, set out on his epic journey around the Cape of Good Hope to India. So that Belem’s profound historical significance extends far beyond Portugal and her former Imperial colonies; for where the Portuguese led the way, the rest of Europe followed – and we all know how that played out.

For Portugal itself, I guess Belem serves to bolster up the flagging pride of that nation in the face of its modern day inconsequentiality – well given their current role in destabilizing the Euro currency, it would seem they’re not so inconsequential after all – and to remind the Portuguese of their glorious heritage: of the time when they were the world’s greatest voyagers and explorers, and the whole planet seemed to lay itself open to their rapacious, grasping clutches. Hence the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, a 52 foot concrete monolith that stands by the beach at Belem, on which are carved, all in all, around thirty of the greatest figures from the Lusitanian Empire’s glory days – including both Magellan and di Gama himself.

The Padrão shares its corner of the beach with the Torre di Belem, which of all Lisbon’s historical monuments is the one that is most immediately identifiable with Portugal’s maritime heritage – it was certainly very familiar to me, seeing that it had been chosen as the logo for the conference, and was imprinted on all the conference literature, the conference pens, the conference note pad, as well the conference shoulder bag. Unfortunately we arrived too late to gain entry into the Torre. So we took photos of each other on the beach instead. It was a late, lazy week day afternoon in midsummer, and there weren’t too many other people around; even we were only half heartedly playing the role of tourists.

We went back into the town of Belem itself, and were drawn in stark eyed amazement towards the extravagantly ornamented Jerónimos Monastery, built in honour of Vasco di Gama, and the perfect epitome of Imperial Manueline excess. Later we took a stroll in the Jardim Botânico Tropical. I was a bit miffed at the 2 euro entry charge to the gardens: they weren’t exactly teeming with lush, exotic vegetation and nor did they offer up the most shining example of the landscapist’s art.
That disappointment was more than made up for by what was for me, undoubtedly, the highlight of the afternoon, and maybe even the highlight of the whole trip – and yet again it was down to another one of B’s felicitous suggestions. She had mentioned a few times that there was a particular kind of custard tart that you could only buy from a certain bakery in Belem, the famed Antiga Conferitaria de Belem, and which was reputed to be so delicious that people would queue outside the bakery for hours just to try it. And turning the corner before the bakery, located on Belem’s high street, we saw that there was indeed a lengthy queue in front; there was nothing else to do but to stand at the back and wait.

As is usual in these types of situation I started to voice my scepticism: I mean, just how good could one custard tart be? I’d been gobbling them down, along with various other kinds of pastry, the whole week past; and the Lisbonese pastries I’d tried up to that point were nice, but nothing too remarkable. B bade me wait and see. All in all, we had a fifteen minute wait before getting to the counter; which actually felt like nothing in light of how our patience was eventually rewarded.

I doubt that, even as the details of every other wondrous new sense impression from that week in Lisbon begin to fade and obscure with the passage of time, that I’ll ever lose the vividness of the memory of biting down into the crust of my pastel de Belém, and the ensuing hot gooey rush which started to flood into my mouth, of the most divine, rich custard I’d ever tasted.

We went back to the beach and the Torre for one last look. After which we took the tram back to Lisbon
town centre and looked for somewhere to buy bread and cheese for dinner. Said items having been purchased, we took the train back to the Campo Grande. Sporting Lisbon were playing a game at the CG stadium, so we had to walk through crowds of football fans wearing what looked to me like Glasgow Celtic colours to get back to the hotel Radisson. There were street vendors under the concrete motorway overpass catering to all the fans, and selling hot dogs, burgers and Super Bock. Taking advantage of the occasion B and I opted for a refreshing half pint of cold Super Bock each. For dinner back at the hotel, we had tinned sardines, tinned tuna, and bread and cheese.

Wednesday

Awoke, both of us, at 8am. We had what was left of the bread, tuna and cheese for breakfast. Then we went off to see the invited talk. A Brazilian lady professor from Carnegie Mellon. She had slightly greying hair and wore glasses and had on a knee length dress. I kept looking at her legs behind the podium as she would periodically rub her ankles one against the other – a little nervous tic, or maybe it was just itchy ankles. The talk was about robots and planning, which didn’t really interest me. Who cares about robots these days anyway?

Coffee break. B was still reluctant to take anything. Afterwards, I went off to see a talk about Description Logics with fixpoints; the speaker looked a little like David Cameron and a crazy German bellowed out questions at the end.

The next talk I planned to see had caught my eye while looking over the conference program earlier: it was about the classification of dreams. I went to the lecture theatre where it was going to be held and stood outside with a few others, waiting for the last talk to end. It took a while – the previous talker was still taking questions. When I finally got to go in, the presentation turned out to be a disappointment.
It was given by untidy looking Iranian student, and completely failed to hold my attention – and ironically I ended up taking a nap during the talk.

Then it was lunch time, and I met back up with B. She was less circumspect about eating from the buffet this time round, and asked me to bring her back some vegetables.

After lunch, we took a train to Rossio and wandered around for a bit looking for the start of one of the tour itineraries in her travel guide. We ended up climbing a series of steep, narrow streets – B gave me the silent treatment the whole way up – to a high-up terrace with a glorious, sunny prospect over the whole of Lisbon; this was the start of the tour. It was also to be the first of a number of such superlative vistas we would see together that afternoon. Having oriented ourselves, we made our descent, and followed the path of the itinerary – and also wandered off it at numerous points – as it led us onto the Alfama, the town’s most celebrated district. And indeed, it was a magnificent way to spend an afternoon: exploring Lisbon’s tight tangled maze of streets and lanes in the warm Mediterranean sunshine, stopping off at other terraces and vantage points to gaze in fresh wonder at the extravagant views; stopping off in shops and cafes when necessary – which it often was – and, inevitably, getting lost.

Eventually we made our way into the Alfama itself. It’s the oldest part of town and consequently its cobbled streets, winding down the steep side of an incline, are narrower than in the rest of the city and with a greater tendency to meander. In fact, it was the only quarter of Lisbon to survive the great earthquake of 1775 intact, and is therefore a unique window onto the city’s dim Moorish tinted past. There didn’t seem to be too many folk around, just a few pale old ladies shuffling around, keeping to the shadows cast by houses and a few young bronzed boys like small, skinny Ronaldos, cavorting in the streets and alleys. The fronts of many of the houses clad in those famous glazed blue tiles.

Soon it came time for a longer pause, and following a recommendation from the guidebook, we stopped off in an Austrian run café on the Rua São João da Praça. The cafe turned out to be a major book crossing site: most of the walls were lined with bookshelves. And so as B went up to order – in German I assume as she’s fluent – I got up to browse, eventually picking out Jose Saramago’s `The Year of the Death of Riccardo Reis’ – a book which had been recommended in another travel guide as one of *the* quintessential Lisbon novels, and whose subject matter also tied in with my burgeoning interest in Fernando Pessoa. Well this was clearly the book for me, so I decided I would take it with me.

Our order arrived: fresh orange juice and a slice of orange cheesecake. We were both of us on diets and had ordered the one share to slice between us. I was grateful for the rest: my toes were hurting from rubbing against the sides of my trainers all day. Afterwards we went to visit Lisbon Cathedral, otherwise known as Sé, which, as our guidebook helpfully informed us, had been built on the ruins of a mosque. More importantly it was cool inside.

The next, and final, stop on our Alfama itinerary – and how could it have been otherwise? – was the Castelo de São Jorge, whose commanding position, seated on top of one of Lisbon’s highest hills, offered up the most dazzling prospects over the whole of Lisbon, capping off a day marked by a number of such grand belvistas.

By the time we got into the grounds, after a lengthy afternoon of walking and a brief wait queuing outside the castle for our entrance tickets, it was almost dusk. We went and sat on the ramparts, taking in the epic sweeping panorama before us and happily chatting away together about trivial things as the daylight began to seep away, leaving behind it a deep orange wash. Afterwards we had a little wander around the grounds and visited the rather underwhelming castle museum: the exhibits consisting of little more than a few maps and some bits of dusty pottery.

Having had our fill of the castelo, we went off to look for a place to eat. We’d spotted a number of potential candidates during our afternoon stroll through the Alfama, and went back and retraced our footsteps. In the end we chose a modest looking restaurant with an outside grill and outside tables. B ordered a plate of sardines for me and Calamari for herself. While we waited, I read to her from a book about Fernando Pessoa’s poetry which I’d carried with me all the way from Glasgow.

Our order arrived. The sardines, and there were three of them on the plate, were much larger and much fleshier than I expected; I’d been thinking of the narrow, shrunken, tinned and briny variety. It got to be a bit of an irritation, having to pick out all the tiny wee bones from their bed of sardine flesh, and B advised me just to crunch up and eat the smaller ones. She also recommended cutting off the head from each fish before I started, which I didn’t do. And so to my disgust I ended up eating a mouthful of guts, along with the horrible brown mushy contents therein: a deeply unpleasant experience, which put me off the rest of the meal, and was indeed enough to put anyone off food for a while.

We walked back to Baixa Chiado buying water from a desi-run shop on the way.

Tuesday

At least now the pressure was off me. OK, I had to give a talk when I got to Brno, but that was a whole week away. On the other hand I was still eager to attend as many relevant talks and presentations as I could during the rest of the week: as opposed to just skipping what was left of the conference and treating my time in Lisbon as a holiday — tempting as that was. In fact it was really quite tempting. My academic confidence had suffered a real blow the previous day, and I just wanted to take my mind off my PhD for a while. But I decided, no, I would try and make a go of it; and I don’t think B would have approved of my choosing any other course of action.

We got up at 8am on Tuesday. We both showered, and had two of the pastries we’d bought last night for breakfast, before rushing off for the 9am tutorial. The tutorial was about computational social choice and electronic voting systems and the like. It was given by a professor from the prestigious Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam, a name that will carry enormous weight with anyone who has even the slightest interest in modern logic. The professor – actually an associate professor – had a crew cut and wore a t-shirt and jeans. He was dressed like any other averagely hip thirty-something northern European; and in fact looked disconcertingly normal for someone of his vocation. But maybe that’s just me; even after being a student for the best part of a decade, I still see academics as dusty, absentminded types. Alas, the professor’s sartorial averageness wasn’t enough to hold my attention: I’d lost interest in the tutorial not that far into it, and had to make a real effort to keep up with its main threads. After the coffee break, B and I went back in for the second part, and I decided to completely give up on it, and instead devoted all my attention to writing my journal; B sat beside me and checked her emails, one of her favourite things to do.

Then it was time for lunch. B still refused to partake of the buffet that had been laid on for the conference attendees. I had beef and gravy with rice, as well as soup and salad, along with some slices of quiche – the food was just too good and too plentiful for me to restrain myself, and in the end B also helped herself to a few bites from my heavily laden plates. During the lunch break, we also managed to meet up and chat with Indrajit and the Egyptian sentimentalist.

B and I skipped the rest of the afternoon’s talks having decided to go sight-seeing instead. Our point of departure was once again Baixa Chiado station. Not far from the station was a tram stop from which we boarded the number 28 tram. The 28 rattles its way, up and down, along most of the undulating breadth of Lisbon, and is said to be the best way to take in the most picturesque parts of the city in a single journey; unfortunately we had boarded only a few stops from its terminus point and had missed out on most of the itinerary. All the seats on the tram were taken up — mostly by tourists, their cameras in hand and that expectant look about them — and the challenge was to find somewhere to stand from which it was still possible to see something of the city rolling past. After pulling itself up to the top of a rather precipitous slope, the rickety tram came to a halt at its final stop, the obese tram driver shouted “Finish” and we all filed out.

We’d stopped beside the gates to the Jardim da Estrela, and B and I took the opportunity to wander around in the shade of the exotic Banyans, Tipuanas and Jacarandas, before finding a bench to sit on. After a brief rest, we left the park and walked down a steep narrow street to the Assembleia da Republica, and then climbed up the slope of the Rua de Poço Negros — whose name I couldn’t get enough of, having mistakenly understood it to be the road of little blacks –stopping off at a little supermarket along the way to buy some refreshments: two little plastic bottles of drinking yoghurt and some water.

Just off the R. de Poços Negros, we discovered a vantage point with an amazing prospect of Lisbon down to the coast: the hectic jumble of pastel houses that occupied every part of the swelling landscape. Our afternoon walking tour also took in the Avenida da Liberdade, a magnificent ten lane boulevard, flanked by luxury hotels, offices, and shops that catered to some extremely opulent tastes; it was a show of wealth and affluence that was completely at odds with what I’d seen of the rest of the city, and felt more like we were in Paris or Milan than Lisbon. We stopped just short of the Parque Eduardo VII and caught the metro at Marques de Pombal station back to the Campo Grande. When we got back to the hotel we showered, and then headed back out for the opening session of the conference proper.

On the way into the lecture theatre B ran into her lanky Brazilian admirer who it turned out was also attending the conference – she’d met him the year before at ESSLLI in Bordeaux at the end of which he had slid a letter under her door expressing in chaste terms his fondness for her. He shook my hand awkwardly as we walked down the corridor on our way to the opening session. The talk was given by Ian Horrocks and was about formal ontologies and was interesting enough. Judea Pearl had been due to talk, but had instead flown back to the US because of a family emergency; no small thing given that a previous Pearl family emergency involved Judea’s son, Daniel Pearl, being beheaded in Pakistan.

The reception afterwards was held in the charmingly laid out garden of the Museu da Cidade, with its large papier mache sculptures of flies, caterpillars, and wasps. B didn’t want to attend; she was worried she’d be turned away for not having an invite. We were served canapés. Me and some of the others were a bit miffed there wasn’t anything more substantial on offer, since we hadn’t had time to have dinner. A jazz band played as the dusk began to settle, and we all chatted to each other, drinks in hand.

Monday

My phone alarm woke me at 8am. I went to take a shower and managed to get water all over the bathroom floor. For breakfast I finished off the bread, tuna, and cheese slices from yesterday; I’d kept the cheese and the tuna in the minibar fridge overnight. Then I got dressed and rushed off to the conference for the 9am tutorial; crossing the Campo Grande over to the University. I found the room fairly quickly thanks to yesterday’s little preliminary expedition.

The tutorial was about automated negotiation and was given by an orthodox Jewish woman from Israel who wore a long black skirt with hideous white chunky trainers on underneath, her head was covered with a scarf; she looked very homely, a little like a charwoman. She lectured in a very conversational way, peppering her talk with a number of anecdotes and asides. The first part of the morning session was a very brief introduction to Game Theory. She showed clips of Russell Crowe playing Nash in a Beautiful Mind, and, oddly enough, Jasper Carrot’s Golden balls during the lecture, to illustrate her slides about Nash Equilibria. I lost the thread of the talk in the second half of the morning session, and sat in the lecture theatre working on my embedding proof instead.

During coffee break in the canteen, I struck up a conversation with an Indian from Madras as we both made the rounds of the buffet tables – which were always so sumptuously laden during the whole conference – and we ended up going to sit at a table made up largely of his compatriots. One of them, an excitable wide faced young man named Indrajit, was doing his PhD in Poland – his Polish supervisor was sitting beside him at our table and seemed a good natured chap; there was also an Egyptian linguist who was researching sentiment analysis.

Later, during the lunch break, I noticed that one of the guys from my office was standing in the queue for food; I had no idea he was attending the conference as well. We sat and ate together and chatted for about 20 minutes which was about 19 minutes more than we’d talked in the whole year since his arrival in the office. I went to sit out in the courtyard and drink my coffee in the sun.

I attended the third session of student talks, having skipped the first two in order to find out more about game theory – I felt a bit bad about that, but less so by the end of the afternoon after having noticed that the speakers and session chairs only stayed for their own sessions, and that there were very few in the audience besides. The talks in the third session were loosely based around agent programming.

A pale Australian girl meekly started off the proceedings with her paper about agent planning and coal mines; then next up was a cocky Glaswegian from Strathclyde University whose presentation was also about agent planning; and after that a pretty, mahogany tanned, French girl faltered through her presentation in a weak and squeaky voice, it seemed to involve something about helicopters: I wasn’t paying much attention to any of it really.

It was at this point that B discreetly popped her head around the door, and flashed that beautiful smile of hers up at me. I went out in the corridor to greet her and we embraced. I took her heavy black holdall from her – this was her entire luggage for our two week trip — and we sat together on a bench and started chatting with each other in hushed tones, discussing her journey over from Italy. I waited for the talk that was then still in progress to end before I took up her holdall and went back up to my seat at the back of the theatre. She went to the canteen to get something to eat.

The third session over I went to the canteen to join her. B absolutely refused to take anything from the buffet tables and was even reluctant to eat from the heaped up plates of food which I brought for her. She said she felt bad because she hadn’t paid anything for the conference. I tried to convince her that since there was so much food laid out – more than enough for all the delegates present – they’d probably have to throw out a lot anyway: it certainly wouldn’t keep for long in this heat. She didn’t buy that. It wasn’t so much that she was refraining from the food because of some deep moral qualm or that she thought it was freeloading – but that she was much too self-conscious and afraid of what other people might think if they knew or even suspected.

We both went back in for the fourth and final session of the day; this was the one in which I was due to give my presentation. I was fourth on the bill and as I ran my eyes down the list of titles of the other talks, I started to feel intimidated and not a little embarrassed – and rightly so: my talk, which was based on a paper I had written a few months back and in which I had almost no confidence left, had the least substance of any of the talks. I had assumed that, given that it was a student session – and I am after all a student, this session was intended for the likes of me – that the standards wouldn’t be as high, and I wouldn’t feel out of my depth like I had at other conferences or workshops. I was wrong.

I had failed in getting my paper accepted for any of the other `grown up’ conferences which my supervisor, Dr A., had suggested – and the feedback from the referees made it abundantly clear that my paper just wasn’t good enough – so it clear that we just had to aim lower; indeed I hadn’t wanted to submit it for anything, but Dr A. insisted. It turned out that one of Dr. A’s colleagues was helping to put together this student session as an adjunct to the main conference, and had told her that they hadn’t received enough submissions, which meant that it was very likely that I would be accepted. So, on her advice, I submitted and was duly accepted.

But now as I sat there listening, with a dropped face and an ever mounting sense of inadequacy, to the other speakers – and bear in mind that unlike the talks in the previous session I was on much more familiar territory with these ones and consequently they were much harder to block out – it just reinforced, as if any fucking reinforcement were needed, all my many fears over how trivial my work was and how little I deserved to be there. That sudden drop in confidence, coupled with my lack of preparation helped to ensure the total mediocrity of my presentation (of material that wasn’t too edifying to start off with). There were lots of garbled half sentences, and lots of hand wavy gestures to compensate for the lack of much coherence or clarity of exposition. I was so eager to have it all over and done with, I ended up under-running by about 10 minutes. It wasn’t my finest hour, or to be more accurate, it wasn’t my finest 15 minutes.

After the talk B and I went back to the hotel. We lay together in bed, she in her underwear and I fully dressed, and we cuddled and kissed. She told me she wanted to have a nap after her long and tiring journey, well then, I thought, at least I’d have the chance to try and finish the Heart of the Midlothian, but thanks to the effects of the bica she’d taken earlier in the canteen she was unable to stop nattering and so I gave up on the book. Around about 8 we went to the Campo Grande and took the metro to Cais do Sodre.

We wandered along the coast for a bit before crossing the Praça do Comércio, Lisbon’s grandest square, where I was repeatedly offered hash the night before by over insistent pusher; I’d be approached on the street with offers of hash many more times before my stay was over, you really had to swat them away like flies. We walked through the lofty triumphal arch facing the north side of the square, the gateway to Rua Augusta, with its bakeries and street cafes full of tourists, eventually reaching Rossio train station and pausing to admire its startling `Neo-Manueline’ façade with its elaborate, curving, organic forms.

We were both extremely hungry by this point. And so B, who knew a little about the city having been here once before, led me up the long series of stone steps behind the Rossio station which were overlooked on one side by a succession of bars and restaurants: the wide landings doubling as restaurant terraces and the steps as stone benches for tourists and for the young, bronzed Lisboese. We went all the way to the top of the steps and then like the Grand old Duke of York we turned to walk back down again; I just couldn’t decide where to eat. And so we finally settled on a place one flight down, and were shown to our seats at one of the three long tables set out on the landing; altogether there must have been about 40 diners seated there.

The service was atrocious; the waiting staff were brusque and offhand in a manner which brought to mind the worst stereotypes of the surly continental waiter – but in their defence it did seem to be quite a busy night and they had to deal with God knows how different nationalities and languages and accents. We ended up waiting about 40 minutes for our main course to arrive and were on the verge of leaving when it finally made its appearance. I had ordered what had been listed on the menu – or at least on the part of the menu that was in English – rather vaguely, as “rice and fish” – which could have meant anything. It came in a little saucepan, and turned out to be actually quite delicious. The rice – it was some form of paella rice I’m guessing – was immersed in a rather delicately seasoned, though slightly viscous, broth complete with little chunks of fish flesh. B had the cod steak which she approved of, and we had a small bottle of wine between us. We were both ravenous and made short work of our food.

Afterwards when I went to ask for the bill at the restaurant counter, one of the waiters, a young Portuguese macho, played around with me and pretended to arm wrestle me, which bemused me a little. He wouldn’t take my five Euro note that was torn in two, so he charged me fifty cents less for the price of the meal. Then B and I went back down the stone stair case, back down to Rua Augusta, where we stopped at a pastry shop, at two in fact, to buy something for breakfast tomorrow. B didn’t even want to try speaking in Portuguese, so she ordered our pastries in English.