nawl

I am flying over the Atlantic. Everyone is asleep. I am again somewhat bewildered by the speed of my departure. Things move so quickly now.

I spent the last four days of my week in North America in Toronto.

It snowed the day I arrived. I don't consider that acceptable behavior for spring. While lovely, this looks to me like winter.

(On the subject of my whining about the cold, some random visitor left a random comment flaming me for being ignorant about Canadian culture. The access logs don't show a referrer, so I have no guess as to this person's motivation. On a similar note (as far as amusing and clueless web users are concerned), the comments on another one of my entries seem to have taken on an entirely new life of their own.)

Kevin brought me to a French-language book store where I bought a copy of Robert des noms propres and was rung up in French. We made corn soup with actual corn, went to the CN tower and looked out over the sprawl of Toronto, had mediocre Mexican food, watched Bride and Prejudice in an actual movie theater, and had a semi-failed swing outing. I don't think Lindy is my thing.

The CN tower is very tall.

You can look at skyscrapers and the lake.

And now I am leaving the land of drinking fountains, unlimited tap water at restaurants, clothes dryers, Cadbury creme eggs, active dry yeast, baby carrots, and people who smile at strangers.

It's strange what you miss.

When I was in Princeton, I bought a copy of Prague, a Gen-X expat novel set in 1990 Budapest. All of the characters are irritating. There are various things going on in the story, but the one that struck my own experience the hardest was the isolated expat universe the characters live in. The story is set in a city filled with Chain Bridges, Gerbaud cafes, and pizzas topped with corn, but the Hungarians populating the book either serve as sex objects, business transactions, or historical curiosities. Nobody learns any Hungarian. They're there to witness the fall of communism as outsiders.

It's an interesting contrast to the small collection of anglophone expat memoirs that I read while in France. In each case the authors attempted to learn French, interacted with normal people, and commented on their efforts and usual failures to fit into a different culture.

I'm not even sure there are any other "Hungary by expats" books to compare with. There must be. Then again, there is only one Hungarian textbook for English speakers, and it's mediocre.

--

Geneva is beautiful and green and surrounded by misty mountains accented with snow. People speak French. The airport terminals are round buildings with 360 degrees of windows. When I arrived at my gate I watched a young man in some sort of floor-length priest's robes negotiate something with the woman at the counter.

When the plane took off we had a nice view of the lake and the gigantic fountain.

Same fleeting thoughts, the curse of visiting Western Europe: Why am I in Budapest, again?

--

Arrival in Budapest. All of the snow is gone, replaced outside of the city by tufts of new green grass. It was at least 15 degrees. Balmy. Wonderful. Spring came and kissed the city while I was gone.

In the metro the innocent-looking young man sitting across from me was staring, so I started a conversation. Just enough English to have a stilted conversation. He carried my bag up to my apartment for me, to the massive confusion of Diane. Right. A much better start for things. Very three years ago. Now if only I could hold a baby conversation in Hungarian. We'll see about this isolation thing.

Posted by nadia at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My visit to Princeton left me in much the same confused state as before I visited anything.

It was a rather blah day, gray and hazy without any of the niceness of fog, when I arrived on Sunday.

On Monday, I visited the IAS for their morning seminar, which was on game theory on networks, and aimed at an elementary enough level that I actually stayed awake and understood almost everything. The audience asked a lot of questions. I was impressed. The conversation over lunch in the IAS cafeteria centered around a compare and contrast session of admissions and recruitment policies in CS theory before directing itself to removal policies for bad students and the horror stories of the advisor who didn't recognize his student and the student who was disgruntled with his advisor and so killed a random professor with an axe. Awesome recruitment strategy.

So the downside to coming on a random day is apparently that, well, nobody is around. I only got to talk to three professors, because everyone else anybody could think of was out of town or not responding to email. At least I got to have really long conversations, and I learned about some new things like zero knowledge proofs, derandomization techniques, and approximation algorithm techniques. After a certain point it seemed that every time I went in search of direction for a new professor to talk to I was shuttled off to talk to some more grad students.

So while everyone was nice enough and the grad students professed to be happy enough, I was sort of feeling my decision being made for me. Until coffee (rather, chai) the next day with a Slovakian grad student who had randomly been in the restaurant the kids from the department who had been assigned to babysit me took me to the night before. (In a small world note, it turns out he is from the same small town as Brano, the one Slovakian we met in Bratislava a few weeks ago.) Later in the evening we met at the d-bar in the basement of the grad college for a rather amusing, smoky, and French-accented conversation.

So, um, compare and contrast:

Research: Both places are fine. I don't know exactly who I'd end up working with, but it seems like there are a few possibilities at each place. The professors who actually talked to me at Princeton are much younger than the average professor at CMU, so it felt like their interests were much more specific. Princeton seems to have a lot of the approximation algorithms thing going on, which I'm not sure is really my thing. If Steven Rudich at CMU is really so deep into the consciousness thing, there's not much choice for complexity. Since I don't yet know exactly what I want to do, it's probably mostly a matter of me being shifted one way or another by the focus of the department.

Graduation requirements: Almost identical. 6 required classes, 2 semesters TA. Princeton has a qualifying thingy which almost everyone passes. CMU's classes are pass/no pass. Average time to graduation is 5.5 or 6 years. CMU has a lot of department structure to keep track of students. Princeton is small enough that they claim everyone knows about your progress. Funding isn't supposed to be an issue in either place.

Grad students: I was more impressed overall with the CMU kids, and the department appeared to have more social cohesion, even correcting for the visit day coming together thing. But Princeton has a lot of awesome departments, and the most interesting Princeton kids took their friends from all over. Thing #1 that impressed me was that this actually happened. Relief. Dreams of baby bab5. If I went to CMU, I'd probably spend all my time with CS people.

Stuff to do: Pittsburgh is a small but livable city. Princeton is, well, kinda boring and expensive, but as they say, New York is only an hour away. Thing #2 that impressed me was that there were people who did actually go there every weekend. I guess it comes out about equal. Both campuses have ballroom clubs but it's not clear exactly how active each is.

Size: There are ~400 students in SCS at CMU, ~200 in CS, and 25 in theory. There are ~2000 grad students at Princeton, ~100 in CS, and ~20 in theory. Last year there was one new theory student at Princeton. There is one girl and one american among the theory students at Princeton. There are more than that at CMU.

Housing: Everyone lives in their own houses or apartments off campus at CMU. At Princeton, nearly everyone lives in on-campus housing. I was advised to live in the grad college to meet people. The old buildings look like a castle. The dining hall looks like Hogwarts. They have some sort of complicated housing lottery system. The grad college is separated from the rest of the Princeton campus, apparently the result of some university official who thought that grad students should be living a monastic scholarly life.

Prestige: Non-CS people say "Are you kidding? How could you turn down Princeton?" CS people say "Are you kidding? How could you turn down CMU?" Theory people say, um, conflicting things.

So at this point, I guess the responsible thing to do is think long and hard about exactly what I want to do and exactly who I would have as an advisor. But that's less fun than making an informal poll.

So... where should I go?

Posted by nadia at 04:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm in the atrium of the Newell-Simon building at CMU, having finally found an unsecured wireless network. This building seems to house the "exotic programs" in CS here: robotics, HCI, language technologies, other stuff. I can see in the windows of one of the robotics labs bordering the atrium. I'm impressed that the buildings here are unlocked at 7 am on a Sunday morning.

The CMU visiting days were pretty fabulous. Huge. I think there were 50 people here, of 70-ish admitted. On the first night it became clear that this is relatively late in the visiting season for CS schools, so there were crews of kids who already knew each other from visits on the MITBerkeleyStanfordUCSDWashington circuit. The word on the street was that this was the best organized and smoothest of the visit days. There were six of us total from Berkeley, including four girls all of whom had lived in the co-ops.

We all got huge gift bags when we checked into the hotel, with bags of caramel corn, snack mix, a canvas Carnegie Mellon lunch bag, little bottles of ketchup and mustard, a Heinz pickle pin (?), and folders of tourist information. Higly amusing. They fed us all dinner in the hotel on the first night. The evening's entertainment was a powerpoint presentation by a professor that pushed the "look at all these awesome toys and awesome projects and awesome people at CMU" angle (jedi knight and Matrix imagery, "you define the future"-style flattery, robots and Disney).

The next day was lots of talking: official information about the program, area introductions, and then meetings with professors. The theory introduction focused on this Aladdin center they have here and applications of theory that result in pretty videos that can be shown in presentations. A grad student later told me that this spin often gives prospective students the impression that there's not much pure mathy theory going on here, but after actually meeting with the professors it became pretty clear that first, you can do pretty much whatever you want, and second, there's lots of pure theory being done. I could be happy here research-wise.

In the evening there was a gigantic party at the Blum's house. Beautiful house. Hired waitresses and catered food. Steven Rudich gave a magic show.

The next day was, erm, student panel and a housing and city tour. Honestly, I was impressed. So CMU's second big recruiting theme (after the "we do a lot of cool stuff one") is "we treat you like a human being". Of course every school will say that, and the students will all tell you how happy they are at a recruiting weekend (or maybe not, I heard a story about the student tour guide at another school telling the prospectives he was leaving because his advisor had just been denied tenure), but the students here actually seemed happy with both their treatment by the department and the quality of life as a grad student here.

They had us all tour a stunning grad student apartment occupying a whole floor of a house in Squirrel Hill. The jaws of every Californian in the room dropped when they told us the rent, something like $700 or $800 a month for the whole thing, multiple bedrooms, short commute to campus, proximity to trendy student areas and all. You can have your own multliple-bedroom apartment for what a room in a crappy apartment in Berkeley costs. You can *buy a house* and your mortgage payments will be about the cost of sharing a Berkeley apartment.

As for the city itself, I was also impressed. The two student areas they pointed out to us, Shadyside and Squirrel Hill, both had a perfectly fine selection of streets lined with cute little shops and cute little restaurants. (The official city tour guide they hired to comment on things during the bus tour amused us all and the grad students by telling us that these were really upscale expensive parts of town. Our guide pointed out every ethnic group that had ever lived in any area, and talked about "orientals". Ok. Old vs. new Pittsburgh.) The downtown areas they took us through had enough bars, clubs, and funky discount shops to keep anyone happy. I was amused by the Church Brewery, a, well, brewery and bar in a converted Catholic church, and The Sanctuary, a night club also housed in an old church. Shrinking population and decline of religion, I guess.

This all actually starts to give me the sneaking suspicion that, er, California might be over-rated. Not weather-wise, nor food-wise. But the equivalent cute areas and cute shops and cute restaurants in the bay area are generally found in isolated areas that you probably have to drive to, and they're probably overpriced. I don't know if I'd want to be 35 with kids in Pittsburgh, but it doesn't seem to be a bad place to be 25, and if nothing else there are 200 other CS nerds in your same position.

We had all been rather concerned by the repeated message from everyone that "Pittsburgh isn't that bad", as if they were all seriously trying to over-compensate, but most of us were sold by the tour.

Randomly, I noticed that among the grad students there were first, a lot of Americans, and second, a lot of girls. I don't know if CMU makes a conscious effort in their admissions along these lines, or if there are cultural things influencing who goes where, but it's interesting.

I think that's all.

It's back to Princeton for me for tomorrow and Tuesday, then to Toronto for the rest of the week.

Posted by nadia at 03:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, I failed at salsa dancing tonight, or rather, salsa dancing failed to exist when I went, so I'll write.

Yesterday was Hungary's national holiday, which celebrates (I believe) a failed revolution in 1848. Pesti Est (an event calendar magazine thingy) had ads saying something about tram 2 and szabadsag something-or-other, which turned out to be a "walk of freedom" along the riverfront with, uh, gigantic rotating cylinders with pictures of people's heads on them and recordings of speeches and/or discussion of freedom and who knows what else in Hungarian. There was a bewildering barcode/modern art theme. Everyone was wearing these little round ribbon pins with the color of the Hungarian flag.

And that was about all I saw of the national holiday thing. I expect many, many people got trashed, because that's the most patriotic way to celebrate your country.

It was a fabulous, sunny day. Spring really has appeared quite suddenly and unexpectedly. And it's as if a huge veil has fallen off of me, and suddenly I'm seeing a whole new city I'd never had the stamina to explore before.

Today was my bureaucratic maze. I showed up at the American embassy at 9, as instructed. American embassies seem to have this thing about fencing off and policing the street in front of their door. I guess it makes sense if you're afraid of car bombs, but it completely removes any possibility of doing that whole racing-into-the-embassy thing they do in movies. Pity.

I convinced the guards outside that my not having a passport less than 24 hours before a flight to the US was an emergency, and they let me inside the gate so I could wait in a second line to be let in the door.

Then the steps went as follows:

1. Be let in the door by nice Hungarian security guy.

2. Empty bag of electronic objects, get x-rayed, metal-detected.

3. Go through second door.

4. Walk through sea of Hungarians applying for American visas to windows 8 and 9 in an empty room in back for Americans who lost their passport.

5. Fill out one (1) passport application form, one (1) declaration about losing/getting stolen one's passport, and receive one (1) map to nearest passport photo place, and one (1) instructions for reporting a lost/stolen passport to the Hungarians, a requirement for leaving the country. American forms now have this long declaration about the time it takes to fill out the form, which often seems to take more time to read than the form itself takes to fill out. Give up ID card.

6. Pay $97 at window 7, except that card doesn't work so I'm instructed to go find an ATM.

7. Leave embassy, follow map to passport photo place, get passport photos. 800 ft. Get cash at ATM.

8. Return to embassy, repeat steps 1-4. Meet a pair of guys from Kentucky there to replace a passport stolen out of a car, chat. Give up photos.

9. Wait for the consul to appear to take my oath that I haven't lied about anything. She's young, makes a comment about me being from Los Altos, and I find out she graduated from Berkeley in 2003.

10. Realize that the backside of the fourth form from step 5 above contains a requirement about two more photos of a different size, so return to passport photo place and buy two more photos. 550 ft

11. Return to metro stop, fail to find Moricz Zsigmond korter on the metro map. Note that districts are not labeled on the metro map. Blue metro to red metro to home to get city map. Note fashionable pre-teen on metro with army-colored shoulder bag that she's written all over in classic disgruntled teen style. It says "Rockerek!" with round exclamation point.

12. Red metro to tram 47 to Moricz Zsigmond, note that I probably could have taken tram 4/6. Bus 3 to some weird stop. Realize I have forgotten paper with address at home. Try official-looking building across from bus stop. Sign says it's closed on Wednesdays. Guys are waiting outside. The man inside doesn't speak English. The guys in line translate for me. He asks if I'm a student and tells me to go down the street. I am skeptical, but do.

13. Down the street office of immigration and such-and-such has two rooms. One has a door with a window that is shut and covered in signs saying "don't knock" in English and Hungarian, some signs in Hungarian, and a sign in five languages about reporting lost travel documents. But the door is shut. It opens periodically and someone's name is called to pick up a small gray folder with pictures in it. I'm guessing some sort of visa. Then it slams shut again. People also walk up to the window to deliver these small gray documents. I attempt many times to get the attention of someone behind the window and fail. The room across the hall is also full of miserable-looking people, but also contains flyers about refugee services, so I determine that it's probably not where I belong. A counter labeled Informacio is closed.

14. I settle down to wait.

15. I finally shove my way to the front of the window when it opens and attract the attention of the woman currently there. She tells me I have to have pictures. I show them to her. She tells me I need to fill something out. I say ok. The window slams shut again.

16. I wait some more.

17. At some point many, many names are called and the room's occupants all get their documents and leave. The window slams shut.

18. I doze off in the sun.

19. Hordes of border guards walk through on their lunch break.

20. They walk out.

21. I realize that an hour and a half has passed since I arrived. I was somehow under the impression that the people in the room had noticed me, but I think not.

22. I bang on the door. It opens. I tell the guy who opens it that I've been waiting for an hour and a half and that I just need to report my passport is gone. He asks me where I'm from, and when I say America, he gives me one form to fill out. It asks for my "family name", "surname", "mother's name" (but not father's), and many other pieces of information that I can't remember, such as my address in Budapest. I am amused that an official government document has mistranslated the name words, note that "family name" is csaladi neve in Hungarian, and decide that that one is correct.

23. My official document is a printed sheet of paper with my name, birthdate, a title in Hugarian, and my picture glued to the front. It arrives in 15 minutes. By this time it's already 2 pm.

34. Bus 3 to tram 47 to blue metro to the American embassy.

35. It's now open hours for American citizens, and a huge line is out front. Cute guard recognizes me in line, motions me to the front of the line, has me open all the pockets of my backpack, then lets me in.

36. Repeat steps 1-3.

37. Walk through small sea of Americans.

38. Lady behind the counter recognizes me, gives me my temporary passport and a sheet explaining procedures to get a real one.

39. Blue metro to red metro to school. It is 3:30 when I arrive. I was supposed to take a midterm at 2.

40. Midterm. The sun sets pinkly outside.

I missed all of my classes, was late to my early midterm, and what do I have to show for it? A weird-looking passport and a document I could have made with MS word. Phew.

Posted by nadia at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

They gave me a new passport. It's valid for a year. It cost a lot. It's not as nice as my other passport. I also got a sheet of paper with my picture pasted on it that says stuff in Hungarian about me being able to leave the country. I spent at least 6 hours navigating this bureaucratic maze. Now I just hope it all works.

And with that, I'm leaving. My patched-together itinerary goes: Budapest -> Brussels -> Newark -> Pittsburgh (CMU) -> Newark (Princeton) -> Toronto -> Newark -> Geneva -> Budapest.

Posted by nadia at 06:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night I took tram 24 from Blaha Lujza to the Torekves Muvelodesi Kozpont for ballroom dancing. On the way, the street was lined with warehouses with big signs in Chinese and Vietnamese. The tram filled with asian people. I figured Diane would be pleased.

So today after an expedition to the Vista Cafe and Restaurant for breakfast (rather disappointing), around Vorosmarty ter, and then to the Mammut mall, we hopped on the 24 tram on a whim and set off to explore this mini China-town.

To situate yourself, you are on Kobanyai heading East, towards Konyves Kalman. On the right are rows and rows of warehouses with signs in Chinese, and openings between the warehouses labeled with enticing signs such as "Euro Square". On the left is a long solid metal fence with a few openings that people are coming and going through.

We hopped off the tram and headed through an opening in the fence. A big sign at the entrance had an X through a dog, a gun, a video camera, and a camera. There was a big guard man in black. Inside the fence was a vast land of dilapidated metal shacks stacked with piles of junk for sale, clearly straight out of the cargo crate. We saw more underwear than I've ever seen in my life. Stacks of bright orange dolphin thongs. Socks. Fake Puma shoes. Belts. Tools. Plastic-wrapped shirts with Engrish on them. The ground was covered in plastic wrap, crushed boxes, old plastic soup bowls. We crossed the streets and toured through the warehouses. Everywhere the scene was the same. The stores/metal cargo tins were closing up for the night. People gathered around boxes and tables to play some card game that involved violently throwing down your cards. I bought a pair of stripey toe socks.

People didn't speak English, but they did speak Hungarian, Mandarin, and Vietnamese.

Down an alley/street between warehouses a man had a truck piled with crates of chickens and pigeons, and we watched the negotiation between the man and a couple who felt and then bought two chickens, holding them by their wings as they squawked in protest and then were shoved in a cardboard box.

A woman sold bags of fried tofu, noodles, ginger, and root vegetables on the sidewalk in front of a mostly closed warehouse.

We walked through more official-looking stores selling piles and piles of this junk, toys with Engrish names ("Interesting wind surf!"), low quality knives, everything individually wrapped in plastic.

At the far end of the open cargo crate area appeared to be stands selling food. It must have been authentic, because the sanitation was certainly questionable: piles of chicken parts left to rot and so on.

We have to come back when it's open for real.

The whole experience left me with quite a few questions, though. Why is this here? Who buys all this junk? Where does it all come from? Is it going somewhere? Why... Hungary?

Posted by nadia at 06:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Spring has finally arrived! It was a beautiful day today, sunny and a balmy 8 C (45 F). There was something about the fact that it was above zero that put an extra spring in my step and a sparkle on the entire day. The breeze was soft and comforting.

I decided that as long as I'm stuck in Budapest, I might as well enjoy myself. So I did. I spent a solid afternoon at the baths, taking in the outside pools, the sauna and the cold plunge, and a small tour of the indoor green pools. I talked to a bunch of French civil engineering students who were here for a week-long exchange to study Budapest's bridges. For once it was warm enough that the 38 C pool felt uncomfortably hot.

And at night, I decided to go out, and discovered Budapest's ballroom dancing scene. Score. Tonight was Szombat esti láz, Saturday night fever. The music was a divided rotation of your usual 10 international competition dances with paso doble removed and salsa instead. The first hour was standard (waltz, foxtrot, quickstep, viennese, tango, waltz, foxtrot, quickstep, viennese...), and the next several were a much more popular and crowded mix of 90% latin, 5% standard, and 5% things they don't play in the ballroom scene I'm used to (bachata, something that's not a night club two-step that's danced to your usual sappy night club two-step music). They apparently don't believe in hustle, polka, argentine tango, or any non-jive swing here (though people doing "boogie woogie" which appeared to be west coast, maybe, were segregated in a different room). The samba people were doing is not at all the samba that I learned at Berkeley. This samba was mostly a fixed dance with a set of complex in-place latin moves that rarely travels.

Within two dances I was co-opted by a really good dancer for the entire rest of the evening. Who spoke fluent English. Everyone that I have asked to dance speaks fluent English. Any professional person below a certain age seems to speak fluent English.

Certain music choices were hilarious. One song was Jail House Rock, but in Hungarian. I laughed. My partner informed me that this was a famous Hungarian singer. I asked him, "You know who Elvis is, right?" There was also a Hungarian version of a song from the French Romeo et Juliette musical. I don't even know why I know the song.

Anyways, I think I have finally discovered how to meet random Hungarian people and emerge from this silly American BSM bubble. I am pleased. Tomorrow is Öt órai tea (5 o'clock tea), same crew and same scene as today. Yay.

Posted by nadia at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My passport is gone.

Gone.

It was on my desk on Sunday, because I looked through it to write the last entry.

I haven't used or moved it since then. But it is no longer in my desk, in my backpack, in any of my clothes, in any of my books or papers, under the desk, under the bed, squished in a chair cushion, under my mattress, hidden in my laundry, or any other of a number of ridiculous places.

I was all set to go to Prague for the long weekend, but now I can't.

Now, what's worse than this?

Monday and Tuesday are national Hungarian holidays, so everything is closed, including the American embassy. The embassy web page says that it takes five business days to process a passport application. They will issue a provisional passport for return to the US, but I wasn't even planning to be in the US for five business days, and I will in any case be three time zones away from all my documents.

My flight to the US to visit grad schools leaves on Thursday morning. The tickets, are, of course, economy, and so non-refundable in every sort of way.

The only real photo identification I have here is an expired California state ID.

Does anybody know what I can do?

UPDATE: I called the embassy and spoke to a very nice man who told me that he didn't know the exact procedure, but that I can come in at 9 am on Wednesday morning and they'd "fix me right up". I think this means I get some sort of paperwork to re-enter the US and they'll be able to mail me a passport while I'm there.

My passport has 4 days to re-appear before it gets declared gone forever.

Interestingly, it feels like my accent is a temporary passport, particularly on the phone, to get me transferred to someone who can tell me what's going on. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy about being an American.

Posted by nadia at 07:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We took an early-morning train to Bratislava, Slovakia. I had no idea it was so close. We left at 6:20 am and got there before 9. There were six of us in total, but we split up in the morning because Diane didn't bring her passport and missed the train.

I found the train ride over rather charming. There was actual snow on the ground, lots of it. We watched snow-covered Hungarian towns pass by, and noted the transition to Slovakia by the appearance of ads on benches at the train stations written in a non-Hungarian vowel-lacking language with lots of interesting diacritical marks.

Bratislava itself is quite small and much cleaner than Budapest, though admittedly we pretty much stuck to the old (touristy) parts of town. I found out later that it only has about 500,000 inhabitants. There was actually a lot of snow on the ground, white snow in huge piles, which I found rather charming. In the morning, there were legions of men in orange vests shoveling the snow into piles in the squares, more men shoveling the snow in piles into wheelbarrows which they wheeled to other piles, and even more men shoveling the piles of snow into a truck.

They also painted their nice buildings in odd colors. There were almost no cars in the touristy bits.

There were amusing sculptures in the street.

McDonalds has a different menu than in Hungary, and is advertising a series of something-something amerikou something sendvic called "McTexas", "McNew York", "McLouisiana", and "McMontana".

In the morning, everything was dead. Cafes wouldn't open until 2 pm. We walked to several museums only to discover that many of them didn't open until 11.

We were intending for it to be a weekend trip, but we quickly realized that in Jonah-style tourism there wasn't much to last more than a day. We walked through the Primate's Palace, which has, um, a mirrored room, some English tapestries of unknown provenance, and a sizable collection of vaguely disturbing paintings of no apparent technical interest.

We walked through the national art gallery, which Jonah's guidebook called "ho-hum" and discovered that the most amusing parts were actually the slightly off-grammatical thick art-critique prose descriptions in English of the paintings we were looking at. As in Hungary, many of the major artists studied elsewhere and only came back home to find subjects to paint. There were galleries of portraits of unknown rich Slovakians through the centuries, which we used to illustrate a discussion of women's fashion from the Renaissance through the Victorian era. These were interspersed with illustrations of rather unappetizing vegetables. There was almost a whole floor of wooden statues and painted panels used in churches. Many of the wooden statues (almost exclusively along the themes of Mary and baby Jesus and Jesus nailed to a cross, with only a few varied saints to spice things up) had lost their hands or feet, and one particularly sad incarnation could only really be described as "Mary with chunk of baby".

One particular Slovakian sculptor from the late 1700s apparently made 69 character study sculptures of male heads expressing various emotions, which were rather striking for their modernity.

We were the only visitors there besides one man who was copying one of the paintings, so we were followed around constantly by the small army of women in charge of standing in museums. The lady at the coat check made a big show of checking our ticket against the number on our coats, despite the fact that there was one other coat on the wall.

We went to the museum of viniculture and viticulture, where I realized that I have no idea what the difference between viniculture and viticulture is. Apparently Slovakians are proud of their wine. We were, again, the only visitors in the whole place, and this time when we'd made it through the first floor the woman managing the place locked the front door and unlocked the basement to herd us through the exhibits there. They had a collection of iron doors with grape decorations from houses that have since been destroyed, a huge old press, and walls and walls of wine bottles.

We ran into the other half of our group entirely by chance outside of the city museum. It had rooms full of random artifacts from Slovakia starting from the stone age and leading up through the beginning of the 20th century. I got the impression that nobody bothered to write in Slovakian until quite recently, though the exhibit that I think illustrated this was only written in Slovakian. Interestingly, things from the era of the Austro-Hungarian empire were both in German and in Hungarian, but never in Slovakian. It hadn't occurred to me that people even bothered to use Hungarian outside of modern Hungary. In the basement there was an exhibit on torture, labeled the "Museum of Feudal Justice", which contained many scary metal implements for many scary purposes ("Instrument for the crushing of bones") and had blown-up woodcut illustrations of people doing horrible things to other people in great detail.

And that was that. We walked up to the castle on the hill, but it had just closed. The view from the castle over the Danube was really rather depressing, an illustration of Communism at its worst. The other side of the river was filled with identical boxy concrete high-rises, and we had a wonderful view of the UFO-bridge, for which they apparently destroyed the entire old Jewish district. This wouldn't have been such a big deal at the time, though, because the Jews had already all been killed in the Holocaust.

For dinner, we met a friend of Tobin's who is actually a minor celebrity in Slovakia, a radio dj and the host of a behind-the-scenes show on the Slovakian version of American Idol. He told us that he now gets 12-year-olds following him around for his autograph. At the dinner table, he laid out two cell phones, which rang constantly, and a pack of cigarettes, of which he smoked three. The English menu at the restaurant had some amusing translations of dishes, such as "chicken bag", which apparently meant "stuffed chicken".

Bush just came through Bratislava last week on his European tour, which I was almost entirely oblivious to thanks to the lack of news here. Apparently the entire city was full of policemen and emptied of everyone else, the Bush people reserved an entire hospital just in case, and CNN had a big map of Europe highlighting all the countries that Bush visited... with the Slovakia arrow pointing to Slovenia.

Half of us took the 9:20 train home, which got in before midnight. This was perhaps a waste, because a cafe or a night club would probably be the most interesting part of the trip, but tiredness and Diane's intense hatred (or despise) for me exiged the early exit.

I have a new goal: fill up my passport. A few more trips outside Schengen countries should do the trick. I got four stamps yesterday: one each for entering and departing Hungary and Slovakia. As of now, I have two full-page visas, one full-page carte de sejour, and stamps from: 1 Canada, 1 US, 1 England, 4 France (2 Roissy-CDG, 2 Nice-Cote d'Azur), 2 Italy, 2 Slovakia, and *6* Hungary (4 Ferihegy-3 and 2 Budapest).

Posted by nadia at 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

AT&T flew me to New Jersey to interview for their grad school fellowship program.

On that note, I've noticed that the one comment everyone makes when I mention how much I've been flying is "Racking up the frequent flyer miles, eh?" It's probably only the sort of thing I find irritating when I'm jet-lagged.

Kevin left early Tuesday morning. He was either sick or jet-lagged for the entire visit, so I spent all my time caring for him. And I came down with the cold the day of my flight.

I left Thursday morning and arrived in Newark Thursday evening, just in time for a lovely snow storm. The limo (actually a luxury taxi) was almost half an hour late from the storm traffic. The driver was hilarious, driving like a maniac in the snow, swearing at the other drivers, and at one point he even drove over the snow-covered curb dividing the express portion of the highway from the exit portion to get past some drivers who were going too slow for his taste. Fortunately we actually made it to the hotel. And man, what a hotel. My room had a full kitchen. The bed was wider than my bed here is long. I took a bath.

The next morning, I woke up at 4, then 7:30. At 8:30, the fellowship's academic advisor called me for a phone interview. At 9, I was driven to the AT&T research buildings to begin the real interviews. Everything was covered in fresh snow. The AT&T buildings seem to be in the midst of a semi-abandoned corporate park, the victims of market changes and downsizing and companies building buildings they don't actually use. There's a statue of Shannon in the balcony, and pictures of various other research giants other places in the building maze. I had no idea where I was the entire time I was inside. It was nice, though. The cafeteria has wide windows looking out onto a peaceful snow field, and at lunch we watched deer with big white tails bound back and forth.

The interviews themselves were quite fun, actually, a series of 45-minute sessions where the people "interviewing" me actually spent most of their time telling me about their big projects and then asked me for questions about the program. I 1. learned about effectively sampling IP routing data, 2. got grad school advice and criticized the W3C, 3. got my first dose of approximating the TSP, 4. discussed compounding engagement cheesecakes, 5. learned about optimizing compression algorithms for phone call data, 6. learned that math is a really, really small world, that the chromatic number of a distance-one graph over R^2 is (less than or equal to) 7, and saw how to look backwards at the prize-collecting Steiner tree problem to approximate it, 7. learned about computing exact values for large problems of the TSP and saw more Rubik's cube variants than I've ever seen in my life, and 8. got another dose of TSP and had an unexpected meeting scheduled for the next day with a Princeton professor.

But really, the most awesome interview was with Neil Sloane. When I walked into the office, he pointed to a bookshelf a few feet wide and told me "Those are my books." as in, the ones he wrote or co-authored. I told him I was a fan of the OEIS, and began to describe how I used it to solve Kevin's Christmas present puzzle. I got as far as describing a design of paper folded at right angles before he said "Oh! The dragon curve." So then he told me he spends most of his time updating the database by hand, and showed me some of the most recent update suggestions in his email. Then he showed me a series of problems inspired by silly integer sequences, investigating an operation invented by Knuth involving writing a number as a sum of terms of the Fibonacci sequence, and looking for primes and squares in "degenerate math", where addition is max and multiplication is min and you carry out multi-digit multiplications the way you learn to in third grade. Then he went on to a problem of cutting up a polygon into pieces that fit into a square and its equivalent in three dimensions (which I mentioned reminded me of the Erik Demaine video of cutting and folding the surface of the cube), and had just started talking about error-correcting codes over algebraic rings when we ran out of time. This was all presented at light speed, in the nicest most soft-spoken friendly manner possible, and I was struggling to keep up the whole time. Fabulous.

I also had an hour-long interview "tea" with the members of the fellowship committee from other (non-math) areas of AT&T. It was tele-conferenced with another building somewhere else in New Jersey, so not only was it an eight-on-one interview with jet-lagged me near the end of the day, but I was also on camera. By the end when they asked me if I had any questions for the committee, I'd managed to exhaust all my questions on earlier interviews, so I asked the representative from natural language processing what AT&T's interest with natural language was. The answer was "We're a communications company, of course we're interested in natural language!" But then it devolved into a rather amusing discussion of the AI phone service being put into place for customer service, and of the records of people who call it who either don't realize they're talking to a machine or who immediately realize they're talking to a machine and are incredibly unhappy about it.

I also heard quite a lot about budget problems, disappearing funding for summer interns, the shrinking of the fellowship program, journal subscriptions that were first made electronic and then canceled, the unionization away of secretaries, and some amount of trepidation for the upcoming purchase by SBC and the future of research in the company. I was surprised to learn that there were actually only around 40 applicants for the program, of which 12 were interviewed for 5 slots. I don't think that's private information.

The official day ended when dinner ended at 8. After 12 hours j'etais crevee.

And so I spent the rest of the weekend with Christophe.

That isn't technically true.

Saturday afternoon, I got a personal tour of the Princeton campus, the IAS buildings, and the CS department from Moses Charikar, the poor CS professor roped into showing me around by his friend who interviewed me the day before. The Princeton campus really does look like a gothic church. I'm not sure how I feel about the possibility of living in a building that should be on Mont Saint Michel. I was once again shocked to discover that my application had been read in detail by an actual human who paid attention to what I wrote, recognized me as an individual, and who appears to believe I am interesting in some way. Later I talked to a graduate student who told me she was pleased to see that there would possibly be another girl joining the theory group. I think I'm beginning to be sold on it all. Small program. Tranquil atmosphere. Young theory professors working in young, sexy areas. Emphasis on close interaction with faculty. Possibility of getting an advisor from anywhere I want, including IAS or math.

Christophe took me rock climbing, where I took the belay class and was having fun until I strained my forearms on a tricky climb. We went out for sushi, where he was able to show off his new ability to eat with chopsticks. My French is *awful*. The next day, we drove to New York to see the last day of the exposition of The Gates in Central Park. Two hours there, two hours back, and a parking ticket because we didn't have enough quarters to fill the meter entirely. It was bitterly cold. The crowds were pretty impressive, and nice people with tennis balls on sticks drove around in golf carts and passed out small orange patches of fabric. The orange color was nice against the snow. I thought it looked like ski slalom poles, a view independently shared by quite a lot of viewers despite the fact that slalom poles don't have curtains on them.

I left late on Sunday evening. The weather was clear, and the takeoff gave me spectacular views of Manhattan. I even had a free seat next to me, so I slept fitfully curled up in a fetal position between the armrests. If there's one saving grace to such a short trip, it's that the whole time my body had no idea what time it was, so going east wasn't much of a change.

Posted by nadia at 01:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)