- 2 days in Prague, Czech Republic
- 3 days in Paris, France
- 4 days in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Hercegovina
- 4 days in Istanbul, Turkey
- 9 days in London, England
- 73 days in Oxford, England
- 121 days in Budapest, Hungary
My collection of assorted currencies has grown significantly since a year ago, and my passport is decorated with stamps and stickers and visas and even a Hungarian residence permit. World traveler? Not exactly. But I'm definitely more of one now than I was nine months ago.
Anyway, I've been back in the States for over a month now, and I've been back at Stanford for five weeks. It's really good to be back---I had forgotten how beautiful it is here, how blue the sky is, how much I love it here. But what I also forgot was how busy Stanford life is. For some reason, there never seems to be enough time to do all the things I want to do here. It's really odd how it happens, and sometimes I think that time just passes more quickly here. For example: In Budapest, my friends and I would often cook for each other and then spend quite a while just chatting over dinner. Here, I just have enough time to duck in and out of the cafeteria for a quick meal. In Budapest, there were several weekends when I'd either do very little work or no work at all because I was traveling. Here, my weekends are frantic scramblings to get all of my work done, and I would very likely fail if I took a weekend off. In Oxford, I was quite comfortable (busy, but comfortable nevertheless) with three math classes, two math tutorials, attending the weekly representation theory seminar as well as the number theory seminar, a sociology class, and three orchestras. Here, I'm barely managing three math courses, an independent reading, an English course, violin lessons, and one orchestra. In Oxford, I felt like I had all the time in the world to just sit down and learn a lot of math. Here, I feel like I'm constantly running around and I have to squeeze in the time the learn. So question: Where does the time go???
Aside from academics, there are some odds and ends that seem to have carried over from my time abroad. I apparently picked up a slight British accent during my stay in Oxford, and for the first few weeks, my friends pointed out the change in my speech and people I met for the first time asked if I was from the UK. Also, it took me at least a couple of weeks to sort out my confusion about which way to look when crossing the street. So for a while, I would just whip my head back and forth until I was convinced that I wouldn't be greeted by a car's bumper the moment I stepped out into the street. There also seems to be some mild and almost subconscious confusion about the numbering of floors. I live on the third floor of a dorm right now, and I am almost always surprised that I only have to go up two flights of stairs to get up to my room. (In Hungary, and maybe also in Oxford, the floors are numbered as follows: ground floor, first floor, second floor, etc., so that the Hungarian first floor is the American second floor, and so forth.)
In other news, the box of books that I sent to myself from Oxford finally arrived. I shipped three; two home and one to Stanford. They looked like this when I sent them:
The box that arrive here looked like this:
That white sheet of paper is an apology from the San Francisco Bulk Mail Center. It says:
Dear Postal Customer:
We sincerely regret the damage to your mail during handling in the Postal Service.
We realize how important your mail is. You have every right to expect your mail to be delivered intact and in good condition. You can be assured that every effort is made to prevent damage. We are constantly striving to improve our processing methods to the extent that even a rare occurrence such as this one can be eliminated.
Please except our apologies for this most unfortunate incident.
Again, we regret any inconvenience caused and we look forward to providing you better service.
Plant Manager
Bulk Mail Center
For me, it didn't really matter because all I shipped were books and paper, so nothing got damaged, but imagine the damage had it been filled with something less resilient to box beatings?! In any case, I'm tremendously pleased to have this box back. It was completely filled with mathy goodness, and now that I have it back, I can look through the hard copy originals of all my notes! (I scanned them before I shipped them so I'd have them on my computer, but I'm really not a fan of reading off a screen.) So all-in-all: YAY!
I guess this was a significantly less cohesive post than I would have wanted considering that this will likely be the last thing I ever write on this blog. But so it goes. I have a regular blog that I might go back to. Here's the link if you're interested.
Well, I guess this is the end of it. 216 days of European awesomeness. It was fantastic. But it's also good to be back. Home sweet home? Yeah, I think so.
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