long weekend

After my time trial on Thursday evening, I spent Friday letting my muscles recover and trying to convince myself to finish chapter 4 of my thesis. I wanted to be done before Saturday, since I was leaving in the afternoon to go to tim_stadelmann's party in Kreuzlingen. In the end, I finished the conclusion on the train from Zürich, and dealt with the last couple of problematic sections in the wee hours of Sunday morning. In the meantime, I arrived at Tim's, got fed dinner and a nice Riesling (which no doubt helped with the later thesis editing) and got settled in.

Sunday was the party; I had a good time even though my German is still pretty terrible. I played with my shiny new camera and produced these pictures. And then I stayed up way too late, again.

I woke up this morning and had breakfast with Tim; then I caught the train back to Zürich and had lunch with a bunch of knell's co-workers. I had plenty of time to get to the airport, which was good—I had only hand luggage, and am out of tasty Swiss chocolate, and one of the things I like is kirsch-filled chocolate, and kirsch is liquid and could cause problems at airport security.

The flight into City airport was uneventful. The passport queue was irritatingly long, but the rest of the airport negotiation was blessedly short. So much so, in fact, that I got back to Oxford in time to stop by the Byzantinist's post-viva party. Even better, I had my camera with me, including the flash that helps cope with all that backlighting. I am quite pleased with a few of those portraits. At the party, I got invited to dinner by another friend, which was very handy since I had no idea if there was any food in the house.

So that was three meals in three cities with three different sets of friends, in one day. If only I could do that every week.