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.
The neighbourhood was dominated by tall, grey concrete rows of cold war-era administration buildings and office complexe, almost clinical in their austerity; in amongst these were some, more recent, glass and steel structures which were far less imposing and far less interesting. 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 based my decision on the fact that they had the sort of purposeful stride of two who women 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 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 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, the sort that used to constitute 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 merely to walk Brno’s concrete pavements wearing flip flops it was nothing compared with running up them in flip flops. Fortunately, thanks to our earlier, rather more relaxed, perambulations during which we’d thoroughly familiarised ourselves with the neighbourhood, 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 some results he’d recently proved about Higher Dimensional Automata, which he claimed could potentially be 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 with 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 during which I had learned something of 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.
