My Birthday

Is my birthday soon? Why is it that during the time of my birthday I had no idea what I wanted.. oh no, I had everything I wanted. And when my mum and my husband asked me about what i wanted i couldn't say what. But now.. alas, I have something i want. So can my birthday be next week? :-)Check out this beautiful female binary watch .. which is ultra cool. or is that ultra geeky? I don't know and I don;t care. This is one watch that I want! :-)
The only thing is that I saw this watch on the wrist of thi guy at the conference last week.. and it is pretty big watch. It kind of engulfed his hand. So I just have to make sure it doesn't swallow me up... but to be swallowed up by a binary... may be that won't be so bad! :-P

My photo

It is so funny how people keep telling me to change my pic!! I thought it was funny but others think i look mentally challenged! :-P
Ok next project change photo! What do you think of my new photo? I personally miss the cross eyed, crazy look of before.

Day 4

This was the day of my talk - the night before it, although I had gotten home late about 11pm, I managed to go over my slides before making myself go to sleep at 1am and then i kept waking up in the middle of hte night, because i was so worried i was going to oversleep. My talk was straight after lunch so lets just say i didn't eat much lunch either. It went ok, not the greatest but ok. People asked lots of questions and I think did ok answering them. But I wasn't expecting much anyway. The worst part was when in the middle of the whole thing i forgot the word 'space' so after I said 'key' I paused and my mind was frantically trying to think of the word 'space' but I couldn't remember it and everyone was just looking at me and omg, probably thinking what an idiot!! I could see at least one person smiling at me, probably thinking poor girl!!
Afterwards I was so relieved my mind was numb. It is funny how I never realize how nervous i am until afterwards when the pressure is off. We had the conference dinner that night and then I went out with a bunch of people from ETH and another German named Leif and a Polish studying in the Netherlands named... damn!! I knew I was going to forget at least one name. That is why I am making myself write them down. In case I forget.
And I ended up talking to him a lot of the night as well. He was an interesting guy with lots of interesting commentary about Poland. Here are some of the funny things I learnt from him:
- The president and the prime minister of Poland are twins. Really?!! and they are ultra-conservative.
- They were trying to make Jesus Christ the king of Poland. It didn't work out though. I think what with him missing from the coronation and all...
Really are these things true? can somone check for me??!!!

- omg he asked me what the top two largest countries in Europe were and I said Ukraine and he said that was the second and France was the first. HUH!! According to the following Ukraine is bigger than France!!

Day 3

I left London for Cambridge. I got here (Cambridge) after a lot of hassle - I was worried about my adapter problems and so once i got to king's cross i decided to try to buy another adapter before i get to cambridge because who know how many shops are open in a small town - seriously i was walking around kings cross with all my baggage and then i found out the train to Cambridge didn't leave from there on sundays and i had to go to another station and..
anyway I finally caught the train which takes about 50 minutes to get to Cambridge - once i got there i caught a bus to the city center and walked to the place i was staying at - it was one of the colleges called the Sidney Sussex. I dropped all my baggage in my room, exhaled a sigh of relief because i actually had gotten there! Then the next worry was what time the conference people were meeting to go punting. I wanted to meet some of the people since i didn't know anyone and I also wanted to try punting actually :-) and I thought afterwards I will walk around the city of Cambridge. Oh my how glorious Cambridge is. I will get to it, but I loved it so much. It is wonderful and beautiful and ....
anyway so I went to the office to see if the conference had left any info about the punting at the Cannes river. I got to the office and I saw a bunch of people standing in front of the office - I thought can it be? can i be that much on time? Most of the people were Europeans who did not look that geeky so I wasn't sure if i was in the correct place - but then i saw one or two geeky looking people and they were mostly men so I thought can it be? so I made myself go and introduce myself. Now that was kind of scary!!
anyway so it was them and i joined them and we left for the punting expedition. I ended up getting into a punt, punted by Stajano himself! :-P on my boat there was an Austrian Rene, a German Christoph and a Japanese of the unknown name who worked under Prof. Imai. Our group was a lot of fun - and we all took turns at the punting. It is actually pretty hard trying to maneuver the thing, make it go in a straight line while you still have some speed. After the punting, we all went to dinner and some drinks. I met another German guy Ulrich with his Brazilian girlfriend Luciana who was studying in Germany. She was in EE and the paper being presented was a joint paper. ooh how romantic!! :-) It reminds me of my two lovely papers with dazbend!! seriously how geeky do i have to be to find this SO romantic!
Actually getting into this topic, dazbend and I had two papers together the year we got married. We made sure we were joined for prosperity!!!

Day 2

I went for a walking tour of london - unfortunately it was raining or drizzling the whole day so I walked around with an umbrella in my hand the whole time and my pant legs were wet! Lets see..
I got off the underground at St James Park and walked to Buckingham Palace, went back thru the park to West Minister Abbey and Big Ben - the parliament is really very pretty and all the buildings.. then across the bridge and I once again passed this statue of the two women riding a chariot - i forget who they are but i do remember that last time i was there i was very impressed then as well. There is so much passion involved in the faces - i will definitely upload the pic when I get a chance. I walked past the Dali museum - the statues were still there and i still loved them. The museum housed Dali statues and picasso watercolors - i was really tempted to go thru it but i thought that i didn't have enough time to spend inside a gallery. Anyway i crossed over the river again on the Jubilee bridge - sat at a cafe and ordered myself a pot of tea - the bloody thing had 4 cups of tea!!! i kept drinking and it wouldn't finish!! Afterwards i was walking up to Picadilly Square where I saw this huge crowd - music and all these gay men.. actually i started seeing a couple of flaming gays whilst drinking tea - and i was wondering what was going on!!
so it seems that London Pride was going on. that is, the gay and lesbian pride festival. There was lots of alcohol and some gay behavior and i am not talking about the happy kind :-P of course it was nothing compared with the Sydney Mardigras. There the gays really show they are gay!! T&A galore!
I listened to some good music whilst walking around and had a really nice free ice cream. I then walked around some more and finally decided to visit Harrods which is supposed to be this fantastic shop which is worth seeing. Ok let me just say looking around a store which sells Armani and Gucci and other brands that i have no idea about and can in no way afford. Harrods is this huge shop where you can get lost going from floor to floor and room to room. Anyway i wasn't too big a fan.
I had dinner with friends here and i met Yasaman who is the niece of one of my 'aunt's Manzar. She is a nice girl :-)

Day 1

When i got there, Rouhi was out but she had left instructions with some cleaners. I had a little nap and since R was coming back about 6-7pm, i wanted to go out for a bit - unfortunately based on advice of R , i went to Richmond which is really nothing but some shops - there is a nice view but that was not even that nice. So I ended up walking a fair bit and got home about 7pm.
I had a nice dinner and chat with R before going to sleep.

Day 0

Normally there is no reason to write about day 0 - that is the day you get on the airplane and leave for the bigger and better things. Alas in my case i need to. United messed me up so bad that i am planning on writing a complaint letter to united upon my return. Seriously these people are defective. Although I was in the check-in line within the required time - that is at least 2 hours before my flight. However due to staff shortages, the line was huge and by the time i got t the front of the time, it was 40 minutes to my flight and they said the flight was closed. Meanwhile they had been letting people from other flights in front and several people from my flight got totally screwed. This very unfriendly woman told me too bad and told me to go and stand in another line. So i went to the other line with several other very pissed off people - My comrade in arms were two american guys - one (Tom) was studying his masters in Oxford on middle eastern studies and actually he was very interesting. More later. The other guy (chris) was a younger undergrad who was going to Oxford as well for a summer of studies and i guess traveling. Can you believe he was also going for studies in middle east? these guys were totally unrelated. they were both on my flight. Also in the line was a girl from Puerto Rico I think her name was Lucy - she was going to Zurich with her husband who was Indian - you don't see that very often right?
anyway after 2 hours in line, not knowing what was going to happen we were sent to the gate for standby. I was lucky number 13. So it seems when you go on standby it is not a first come first serve basis - people with more mileage point than you as well as people who have paid more money for their ticket end up getting priority. Like crazy we all went to the gate and waited, pretty certain 13 people were not going to miss their flight. Anyway suffice it to say we didn't know until the very end of the boarding time and then I was lucky number 13 - some people in the wait list were not there and so i ended up being the final person they ticketed, Lucky me.
The rest fo the flight was pretty normal - i got the middle seat, with two big guys on one side and two other big guys on the other. Fortunately big here didn't mean fat. but they were all really big.
and i watched The Life of Others, the German movie which got the oscar for foreign movie - and although itwas good i kept falling sleep - lets just say the subtitles were not easy to read.
so that was it. I got to London on friday morning and by the time i got to rouhi's house it was 1pm or so.