So I’m back home and back online, after two full-on weeks in Dublin. There’s not much to show for it really, but below the fold you’ll find a few photos and reflections. The short version: ESSLLI was fantastic fun but not very relevant for my PhD, Dublin is a great but very expensive city, and I’m neither a photographer nor a snappy-tourist.

For those who don’t know, ESSLLI is the European Summer School for Logic, Language and Information. It’s two weeks of intensive coursework (if you take a full program you can do four sessions a day, making eight week-long courses, plus the daily student sessions and four evening lectures spread over the fortnight) with around 300 attendees, mainly MSc students and PhD candidates, in this case smack in the middle of Dublin.

Needless to say I didn’t work as hard as all that.

I did attend courses (and presented a paper at the workshop on Language, Games and Evolution) but I took some time off for browsing bookstores and music shops, juggling, and just wandering the city.

Although I had my camera with me, there are cursed few photos that (a) were of something interesting, and (b) worked. So I’m going to point at the ESSLLI2007 tag on Flickr, where those more talented and more assiduous than I have posted a bunch (at last count, 365 shots!). Conveniently enough, I stayed at the same hostel as ‘merpeltje’ and we hung out a lot, so she managed to document a whole lot of stuff I missed.

Like the day trip to Glendalough, when Wouter shouted me out of the shower because we had 15 minutes to make the bus instead of the hour and a half I thought we were sitting on, and in the rush I forgot my camera. It’s a lovely piece of Ireland, even if designed for massive tourist throughput. The mist came down, it rained (flickr), there were mountain goats and heather (flickr), there were ruins and tombstones (flickr) and after four years of Amsterdam being up in the hills again made me awfully homesick… From the bus on the way I caught a glimpse of two deer drinking on a little promontory, silhouetted against the reflection of the sky in the water… it looks awfully naff in a painting, but in real life it made me leap out of my seat and shout. (Admittedly a moment of stillness would have suited the mood better, but you always think of these things too late.) Believe it or not, on the return trip there was another deer in exactly the same spot.1

That wasn’t the only beastie sighting of the trip. The first day we rocked up to Trinity College (where the courses were held) there was a fox calmly surveying the tourists and waiting for the lady feeding the cats to move on so he could muscle in on the scraps… This photo clearly shows my mad skillz with a camera, and less clearly shows the fox. I reckon he’s weighing up the chance his SUV gets towed while he’s tucking into a quick dinner.

Fox

Which leads me, by a clever segue, in two directions at once. First there’s the fact that some nasty little insects decided to snack on me, leaving my legs most unsightly:

Bug breakfast

More cheerily and less hairily, there’s the very merry culinary story of the Isaacs Hostel Gelegenheidsband and Citchen Krew, comprising myself (bottlewasher and Defender of the Saucepan), Wouter of the Main Course, and Crumbles Marieke. I happened upon the other two after they’d already figured out the Isaacs kitchen system:2 roughly eighty backpackers wanting to cook their meals, and seven and a half saucepans to go around the five working hotplates. We developed a nuanced technique (chiefly involving bribery, flattery, occasional threats, and brute stick-to-it patience) for collecting the necessary implements, and turned out multi-course culinary extravaganzas on almost every night.3 I’m not exaggerating, we’re documented: here’s Wouter making coq au vin, the entree and dessert of our final banquet (the burned-looking thing is my Rhubarb Cream Flan, and not as blackened as it looks; the shamrock adorns the Custard That Didn’t Burn). They made (and I ate…) scones. Even the shopping was a barrel of (admittedly peurile) laughs.

There’s even a YouTube moment: killing time in the kitchen I started juggling, with Wouter doing his best to send a ball or two into the coq au vin.

That wasn’t the only juggling we did either — the other two were keen enough to buy balls, and I had one fantastic session with a Dublin native who taught me club-stealing (much harder than with balls) and a wicked two-person three-club pattern where you’re constantly changing places and swapping clubs. If anyone in A’dam wants to try it out give me a shout — if you own clubs so much the better, since I don’t, but it should be adaptable for balls as well.

It wasn’t all fun and games though. A summerschool is, after all, a serious business.

Men at work

And we took it seriously.

I’ll admit that I spent a disproportionate amount of time in the Celtic Note cd store. I came away with some good trad stuff (thanks to Carl Vogel we managed to catch a session (flickr) as well), and the following photo, confirming that I was really in Ireland:

The Chieftains rule supreme

While I didn’t spend as much time in bookshops as I might have liked to, it was quite long enough for both my wallet and my baggage allowance… Here’s a couple of the more ideosyncratic shelving strategies on display:

If you mostly want Shakespeare...

… and for all those discount philosophers out there:

Discount philosophy

I made it in to see the Book of Kells, which was stunning (see some blurry photos of my reproduction here). Unfortunately it costs eight euros to visit, so I didn’t get to follow my plan of going every day to see a new page… and in fact I ran out of time for a return trip. The one page I saw, though, was fantastic — the detail is so much more visible ‘in the flesh’4 than in a glossy photograph. I stayed about an hour, and would have happily done it again on a new page.

Besides the shopping and touristing, we spent a lot of time just walking around. Dublin has nice parks, a good feel on the streets (at least in the daytime — I took a wrong turning one evening and got my first ever sighting of someone in the act of shooting up…), and clear infrastructural support for the confused tourist:

Look left!

The locals seem pretty happy to be there too.

Manhole cover

And for those who made it through that epic post, a wee prize: the only photograph I took in the whole bleeding two weeks that I’m really pleased with. It’s a view of the Liffey, looking west in the evening. Surprisingly difficult to leave.

View of the Liffey

Notes:

  1. A nasty thought just came to me: probably there’s a tourist trap somewhere close by, and a fence just out of sight around the headland, keeping the probability of a photogenic composition nice and high… [↪]
  2. In fact to be honest I only directly contributed to about three meals… Didn’t seem to slow the others down though. [↪]
  3. We’ll pass over the Dropping of the Pizza and The Custard That Burned, especially since in each case we had enough other courses to serve as successful fallbacks. [↪]
  4. Literally, in this case. [↪]