zweiter Samstag in Bonn

The main conference of the summer is done. This week, dozens of mathematicians from all over the world gathered to discuss their interest in flat surfaces (think of polygons from high-school geometry on steroids), foliations (think of layers piled on top of each other to fill up space in different ways), mapping classes (think of “how many different ways can I, or my kid, put clothes on, rightly or wrongly?”), expansion constants (think of how much a balloon stretches as it inflates), moduli spaces (think of how many different shapes a single kind of object—say, a rectangle or a person—can have), and many more topics. Believe it or not, these things are all related. And most of the talks were very good. It was well-paced, with only four lectures a day (I've been to some conferences with seven or eight!), and the organizers deserve a great deal of credit.

I would also count “living in Bonn” as a success so far. Let’s talk food for a moment. I’ve had my spargel (twice, once at home with lemon-butter sauce and once at a restaurant with hollandaise), and schnitzel, and pizza with schinken (ham), and currywurst, and… What’s that? You want to know what currywurst is? Well, I definitely plan to have more. It’s a bratwurst sausage served with curry powder and ketchup sauce. Also French fries (here, called “pommes”, as in “pommes frites”). And beer. Because the thing I’ve had more often than anything else, even strawberries, is beer. (I mention the strawberries because they’re my favorite fruit, they’re even more plenteous than spargel right now, and, ironically, they are called “erdbeeren” in German—“beer”, of course, being German for “berry”, since “bier” means “beer”. Now I want to see if I can find, or invent, beerbier.) My favorite beer to get here is weizen, which invariably comes in the largest (half-liter) size, and which I get to myself because Hannah doesn’t like wheat beer.

Anyway, back to the wurst. We made that lunch today after shopping at the Marktplatz, because there’s a popular currywurst stand right there. According to Wikipedia, it’s been around since the late 1940s, when ketchup and curry powder first arrived in Germany. It’s both amusing and yummy. Another import Germans seem to adore is ice cream. Soooo many gelaterias around. I’ve only indulged in that once. And the moment I really realized I was not in France (I know, you’d think the black-red-gold flags painted on everyone’s faces would give it away, wouldn’t you?) was when I tried to buy bread at 8:00 at night and all of the bakeries were closed. I guess at that time of night you should only being eating meat. Or ice cream. With beer in either case.

(Funny how being around another language will affect you. At the end of that last paragraph, I typed “schould” about three times before I got it right.)

One last food comment before moving on: we of course consumed lots of coffee during the conference. So once this morning arrived, the first thing I wanted to do was get coffee. We went to Einstein Kaffee, a coffeehouse I pass each morning on the way to the institute, which had intrigued me. Turns out to be a very American-style coffeehouse, a couple of steps up from Starbucks, not like a French café at all, with lots of seating inside and out, and hip background music. There are two Starbucks nearby, but we’ll probably go to Einstein while we’re here if we want that ambiance. In the meantime, biergartens it is!

In the middle of the week we went on a hike with several of the conference participants. One of the organizers, who has a bit of a reputation for leading people on far lengthier and more strenuous hikes than they expect, clarified that in his terminology this was just a “walk”. We covered about 10 km in all, and reached the top of Löwenburg in the Siebengebirge. This is very nearly the highest point in the area (one of the other peaks in the Siebengebirge is just a few meters higher), and the view was spectacular. Hannah spent most of the hike talking with other opera buffs, and together on top of the mountain they attempted to trace out the geography of Siegfried’s journey from Wagner’s Ring cycle among the valleys and other peaks below. They had hoped to visit the Drachenfels, where Siegfried was supposed to have slain a dragon, but since we didn't make it there they decided that the ruins of the castle we reached was the home of the dwarf Hagen. We could see the Drachenfels from our location, and there was also much discussion as to which mountaintop had held the sleeping Brünnhilde. (If you’ve heard Anna Russell’s summary of the ring cycle, you are probably fighting to withhold laughter by now. If you haven’t, you should. Or perhaps schould.) By the end of the trip, Hannah was lecturing on the sources and symbols of the Lord of the Rings, and getting quite an audience in the process. Male mathematicians, it appears, enjoy discussing culture with an intelligent, pretty woman.

A few other random things about this week… The country has had an up and a down thanks to the World Cup. On Sunday night, after their team defeated Australia 4-0, the streets were filled with cars and noise. Everyone became much more subdued yesterday when they lost to Serbia 0-1. But all of the restaurants and biergartens have several flat-screen TVs set up, and when any game is occurring, you can hear how it’s going from anywhere in town.

As we wandered around the market this morning, we were surprised by the activity in the Münsterplatz (just a couple hundred meters from the Marktplatz). Whereas last Saturday we found an artisanal fair full of sculpture and fountains, today there was Bonn’s “Energietag”, with all sorts of companies showcasing their products for conserving and preserving energy and water. There were a solar cooking demonstration, a couple of different kinds of solar panels (the first time I’d seen any up close), a system for funneling sunlight inside using something more like a periscope than a skylight, and that’s just the stuff I could figure out without reading German.

We still need to find some concerts to attend. I thought seeing a play might be another option; however, the nearby theatre is showing Der Fremde (L'Étranger) by Camus, in German, and I realized that apart from that sounding incredibly depressing, we’re not yet ready to see a play performed auf Deutsch. Going to be searching for organ and chamber recitals in the area.

So that’s a little about what’s going on here. I may post another, more mathematically focused entry for anyone interested in some of what went on in the lecture hall.

Spargel, spargel, spargel

It means “asparagus”. Bonn is in high spargel season, and it's everywhere. My strongest first impression of Bonn comes from walking through the vegetable market hearing gravelly voices calling, “Spargel, spargel, zwei kilos drei euros!” The spargel that's available, by the way, is fat white asparagus, unlike any I've seen. Hannah claims that in the US white asparagus is generally considered a luxury. All of the restaurants are serving it; some are even announcing a “Spargelfest” and have their entire placards advertising dishes based on spargel (usually with hollandaise sauce). Hannah and I have invested in our own spargel and plan to cook it tomorrow. More on that when it happens.

First things first (or second, since I seem to have allotted first place to the supreme pleasure of the word “spargel”, spoken either aloud or internally). So, first things second, and we left for Germany late Thursday afternoon. All aboard Aer Lingus, where the uniforms are the color of clover and the planes are named after Irish saints (Hannah noticed this in Dublin). It was a relatively short flight from JFK to Dublin—only about five hours of air time. Once the taxiing and waiting on the runway time was factored in, about seven hours on the plane. So there wasn't a lot of time for sleeping. I watched Shutter Island up through dinnertime. (It is a good movie, which I would recommend for anyone who likes drama with a dose of suspense and just a tinge of horror, without really being horror-genre. Also for anyone who thinks that Leo DiCaprio and Ben Kingsley sounds like a good pairing. Once again Martin Scorcese proves his love for Leo.) After that, I tried sleeping for a while but was awake again after about a half-hour. Tuned in to “Big Bang Theory” (which I only ever watch on planes, but do so whenever possible) and “Mad Men” (which I had heard many good things about, but not seen before). Enough about in-flight entertainment…

How could we tell we were in Ireland from inside the Dublin airport? All the Jameson whiskey in all of the stores. One entire hallway was covered with it, the way one might see a string of windows showcasing diamond necklaces in the chic part of the mall. Also the fact that all of the clothes in the shops were green. Bright green. The same color as Aer Lingus uniforms. And we were reminded that Ireland uses the euro instead of the pound for currency, which was fortunate since we had euros on hand. Got some proper coffee. That was the reminder that we were in Europe, and happily were going to be in Europe for some time.

It wasn't a long layover in Dublin, and we were shortly on the way to Frankfurt. A couple of days ago, when I was checking the weather for packing purposes, I learned that this region gets a lot of rainfall in the summer, so it wasn't too much of a surprise when we got on the plane that it was announced thunderstorms in Frankfurt were delaying our departure. The pilot came on several times and explained how she was arguing with the Frankfurt airport control to push up our push off time as much as possible. This was great for two reasons. One, our pilot was a woman! Neither Hannah nor I recalled that happening in some time. (Additionally, I think I heard her say the co-pilot was a “Sir”. Sometimes it seems too bad we don't have knights in the US. Or royalty, for that matter, as I read a opinion columnist recently suggesting we have a titular king and queen who could take care of the photo-ops while the president takes care of actually fixing things. But I digress…) Two, our pilot was totally taking on the entire Frankfurt air system! Well, that's what it sounded like to us, anyway. We might have been a bit punchy at that point. I spent most of the time between landing and taking off in Dublin pestering Hannah with my chipperness, and promptly slept over all of England and France (and Belgium, perhaps?).

The Frankfurt airport has a train station attached, so after some wandering about and getting (English) directions from a friendly official, we ended up at the Fernbahnhof with tickets to Bonn. The train was punctual, and once we got on, we discovered it was stuffy and un-airconditioned. This would have been much less tolerable had there not been a team of young, drunk, male athletes who sang the entire trip. The times they sang in English was to wish happy birthday (twice) to their teammate Markos, and when they broke into John Denver's “Country Roads, Take Me Home” (which was a little surreal). Most of their singing was words they made up to short tunes they knew. Most memorable was when a women's soccer team boarded the train and the guys sang “Jetzt kommen die Frauen! Oh oh-oh-oh-oh!” The two teams proceeded to have singing competitions at each other. The men's team won, I think, but they also failed to capture as much attention from the women as they would have liked.

Once we got off the train, we only took a couple of wrong turns in getting to the apartment where we're staying. Our apartment is just north of the Marktplatz, which is full of fruit and vegetable stands. There is a large pedestrian section of town with cobbled roads lined with all sorts of shops and biergartens. There will be more to tell about the town once we've seen more and gotten more familiar with it. But I just want you to know, we have great access to a lot of spargel merchants.