... and we're back

Sunday, August 5, 2007 at 03:36PM

I’ve been back in Melbourne for a while. The trip was very enjoyable, but I’ve returned to Melbourne with a chest bug, which has meant that I’m not quite up to full speed yet. All non-essential activities (and alas, some essential ones, I fear) are progressing much more slowly than usual.

Here are some highlights of the trip.

• Logica 2007 with so many great people, and then exploring Prague, catching up with Richard, and getting to know more Czech logicians.
• Overdosing on Medieval logic in Bonn, and especially talking over Bradwardine with Stephen Read.
• Exploring København with Christine and Zachary. It was my second visit there, and Christine’s umpteenth, so it was a lot easier to get around given than we were more familiar with the place.
• Navigating our way on the trains and buses from Århus to Legoland in Billund with Zachary, and then enjoying all there was to see and do there.
• Meeting everyone at Logic Colloquium in Wrocław – and especially thinking through – with Pavel Pudlák, Albert Visser, Alasdair Urquhart and Vedran Čačić – a counterexample to a conjecture of Grzegorczyk’s. The result of our thinking is here. Most of the thinking got done in a hike in the hills near Wrocław.
• Flying back home with Z. Normally he finds the in-flight entertainment much more attractive than mundane activities such as sleep. This can sometimes cause difficulty, especially when flying in to an airport for a quick change of planes, and we have a tired unhappy boy to navigate through the system. This time, however, he slept well on both flights (Frankfurt to Singapore and Singapore to Melbourne), and we managed to get back home with very little jetlag.

So, a good time was had by all. It’s good to be back, even if we have to struggle through a bit more of winter here. At least our AFL team is performing better than expected, so we might be able to cope with the end of the season here in football-mad Melbourne.