My six days in Prague come to an end. It’s a very beautiful city, if you’ve never been, you should visit. I know the sign on this shot looks wonky: it’s funny how the camera can distort perspective quite easily sometimes.
Dina is from Greece but works in Scotland. Ellie is from Iran and works in Australia (she helped look after me when I went to Brisbane back in 2013). Both are here presenting in the Czech Republic at the same conference session as me (from the UK) and other delegates from Croatia and Belgium, helping, in our small ways, to advance knowledge worldwide.
This is why Brexit and the isolationist, racist mentality it provokes is so utterly stupid. I don’t just mean that as a random insult. I mean vicious, ridiculous stupidity of the most damaging kind.
The conference here in Prague has been in full swing since Sunday lunchtime, but we were given this afternoon off, so I went to Prague castle, reputed to be the world’s largest castle (though it seems to me that the Kremlin in Moscow would give it a run for its money). It remains the home of the Czech president as well as being a huge tourist attraction, and judging by the pomp and circumstance in evidence today, he was in residence. It’s a good way of getting people employed, by the looks of things.
“U malého glena” apparently means “the little glen” and is the name of this bar in Prague. Well, this is one of the world’s great beer-drinking countries, so I was inevitably going to end up in a bar or two while here…
Quick walking tour of Prague this morning although as you can see it was a rather gloomy day. This picture is taken from around the Charles Bridge, a lovely piece of medieval engineering art, and these days heaving with people, possibly the selfie centre of Europe. I pointed my camera at the river instead. The Vltava has its source at the southern edge of the Czech Republic and runs north into the Elbe, and eventually the North Sea.
So here we are in this blog’s 26th featured country, the Czech Republic, for a few days. I am here to attend the same conference that got me to Estonia last year and Croatia the year before that. There will be more interesting regions of it to depict between now and Thursday I am sure, but once I arrived at the airport this afternoon I just trundled through suburbia until I got to my hotel then went out with a couple of colleagues and had dinner; so this suburban bus stop is all you get for now. I do like the twenty-feet-high woman on the advertising mural, however. I wonder if I can get one just like her on my house.
Thanks to the very good weather over the last few weeks (though it changed today), there has been a huge crop of apples this year. Our garden tree has produced so many that for the first time ever we have a surplus. Not as much as this tree however — or rather the tree implied above the upper edge of this shot — which resides on campus, near my office, and unfortunately isn’t the agricultural territory of anyone in particular so all this windfall has gone to waste.
Off on a trip tomorrow…. a new city and new country for the blog. Come back to find out where…
Well, the weather’s still very pleasant, that is undeniable. I told my students today, most of whom are from overseas, “you do realise that it’s not always like this, don’t you?”. But these things happen, in 2013 I think I got about the best two weeks of autumn weather that New Zealand had had in recent memory. It’s hard not to just sit down and chill out in it. It won’t last…
Now there’s something you don’t see every day. Anonymous cargo planes (there were two of them), flying very low over Hebden Bridge. What with the daily lunacies pouring out of the Tory party conference at the moment, these are probably just the start of military operations against organic farmers.
11 years of using the Calderdale line, and one learns which services have CTS (Cattle Truck Status) and which are safer. I will never aim to catch the 1726 from Manchester, for example. It just ain’t worth it. The 0742 from Hebden (depicted here just about on its arrival to Manchester) is usually not so bad but today, for some reason, it suffered from a massive case of CTS.
Why monochrome again? Because it hides a multitude of white balance sins.
Being 42 