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Chaos in Rome and Barcelona

Posted in Barcelona, Euclid, Mental Health with tags , , , , , , on June 19, 2024 by telescoper

What I thought would be a straightforward trip back from Rome to Barcelona turned into nothing of the sort.

I arrived at Roma Termini station and got on a train for Fiumicino Airport. The train didn’t move, however, and eventually we passengers were told that we should get off and take a bus or a taxi because of “a problem on the line” which would take an indefinite time to fix.

I went to see if I could get a bus, but the queue was predictably enormous. Same story for taxis. After waiting over an hour I had all but given up hope of catching my flight when suddenly it was announced that the track problem was fixed and I got back on the train. It reached the airport in good time and I passed a very long queue of people waiting to travel in the opposite direction; trains into Roma Termini from Fiumicino had also been cancelled:

I still thought I would miss the flight, but I thought that once in the airport I could perhaps book another. Helped by the fact that I had already checked in online and only had hand luggage, however, I made it through security and to the gate just  in time to board.

So, all seemed well. I’ve travelled enough in Italy to have learnt how to cope with a fair amount of chaos.

I got back to Barcelona – which is somewhat cooler than Rome – just about on time and took the Aerobus as usual. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that today was the day that roads in the area around my flat were closed for a Formula 1 “Road Show”. The bus stopped at the edge of the sealed off area and passengers – many heavily laden with luggage – were left to make their way through the dense crowds. Whoever decided it was a good idea to block some of the busiest roads in Barcelona during the evening rush hour has a lot of questions to answer. The crush around Plaza de Catalunya was absurd and potentially dangerous, and not only for people like me who find such situations very difficult.

When I eventually got to my flat, I saw a protest against this stupid event had let to standoff in the street with some sinister-looking cops.

At home, and after a relaxing shower, I thought the day’s tribulations were over until I switched on my laptop and found it wouldn’t start:

Automatic Repair didn’t work so I logged a ticket with Maynooth IT Services. If they can’t fix it, it looks like I’ll be unable to work until I get a new machine…

…and blogging using my phone like this!

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Bloomsday Barcelona

Posted in Barcelona, LGBT, Literature with tags , , , , , , on June 16, 2024 by telescoper

So it’s June 16th which means it is Bloomsday. I looked around for ways to celebrate this day in Barcelona and found that there is a Irish bar on La Rambla called Bloomsday. When I went there, though, I was disappointed to find it not only closed, but apparently abandoned:

Barcelona gets a mention – just one – in James Joyce’s Ulysses:

Noon slumbers. Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers smeared with printer’s ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his white. About us gobblers fork spiced beans down their gullets. Un demi sétier! A jet of coffee steam from the burnished caldron. She serves me at his beck. Il est irlandais. Hollandais? Non fromage. Deux irlandais, nous, Irlande, vous savez ah, oui! She thought you wanted a cheese hollandais. Your postprandial, do you know that word? Postprandial. There was a fellow I knew once in Barcelona, queer fellow, used to call it his postprandial. Well: slainte! 

I can confirm that there is no shortage of queer fellows here, but I’ll have to have my lunch before I can have a postprandial but slainte! to you too.

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Back to Barcelona Again

Posted in Barcelona, Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , , , on June 12, 2024 by telescoper

Last night I arrived back in a very rainy Barcelona. Although I got a bit damp on the way back to my flat from the bus stop, the journey was otherwise uneventful. The one thing worthy of note is that although the approach to Barcelona Airport was a little bumpy owing to bad weather, the pilot managed to perform one of the softest of soft landings I’ve ever experienced. It was so well done that there was a spontaneous round of applause from the passengers. Clapping when the plane lands used to be fairly common, but nowadays is a rarity reserved for occasions such as this.

The end of my stint in Barcelona is now in sight so I plan to see the sights I haven’t yet seen, or at least as many of them as I can manage. Next week I have to travel to Rome for the 2024 Euclid Consortium Meeting, at which I’m doing a plenary talk on the first morning. The week after that I have to travel to Valencia to give a seminar, so it will be a busy second half of the month.

Talking of the Euclid Consortium, my term as Chair of the Euclid Consortium Diversity Committee (ECDC) closes at the end of June 2024, at which point I will also be leaving the Committee after 4 years on it. Hopefully I will find a bit more time to do research in the last two months of my sabbatical; I’ve spent about 50% of it so far on ECDC matters, and progress on writing papers has consequently been slower than I’d have liked. I hadn’t anticipated such a big increase in papers submitted to the Open Journal of Astrophysics, either but fortunately I’ve managed to get the most time-consuming aspects of that automated and since that it hasn’t taken up that much of my time.

As it happens, yesterday was the day of the Departmental Examination Board for the Department of Theoretical Physics at Maynooth. I haven’t been teaching this year, so wasn’t involved. I do know quite a few students who will be graduating this summer, though, and am a little sad I won’t be around to congratulate them. I might see some of them at their conferring ceremonies in September though.

And then there’s next academic year to look forward to. What will I be teaching, I wonder? I’m not going to think about that until I have to…

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Something in the Air..

Posted in Barcelona, Biographical with tags , , , on May 26, 2024 by telescoper

It’s been a warm and rather humid weekend in Barcelona. Yesterday was particularly stifling, with the heat and lack of breeze making things rather uncomfortable. The Air Quality indicator  reached “Poor” largely due to high levels of NO2, no doubt from vehicle exhaust fumes. It surprises me that so many people sit out at the pavement tables outside  restaurants having meals when it’s hot and the air is thick with nasty stuff. Al Fresco is supposed to mean “in the fresh air”! I much prefer to dine indoors, unless it’s very late at night.

Today was a little better except that there was resurfacing work going on  outside my flat on RambladeCatalunya. I knew it was coming, as they’ve been doing other nearby roads over the past few weekends. It was a little noisy, even on the 6th floor, but that didn’t bother me as much as the tar fumes!

Anyway, all this has made me decide not to attempt to extend my stay here beyond my current lease, which expires at the end of June. I’ll take the last two months of my sabbatical somewhere a bit cooler!

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Back to Barcelona

Posted in Barcelona, Biographical with tags , on May 3, 2024 by telescoper

So, after a brief sojourn in not-Barcelona, I am back in  Barcelona for what is not a Bank Holiday weekend. Wednesday 1st May was celebrated here with a public holiday as International Workers Day but, in the UK and Ireland, the May Day holiday is on Monday 6th (and in any case is not so much a workers’ holiday but a spring festival of much older origin.

Right now, just after 7.30pm, it is a pleasant 19°C here, a bit warmer than in Ireland. It seems, however, that there was torrential rain for much of the day on Monday. It rained so much in fact that there is even talk of the current drought restrictions being eased. Yesterday, my flight here was delayed by a mysterious weather event that temporarily closed the airport, although what had happened was never fully explained.

From now on, temperatures are forecast to rise steadily until the real heat of the summer arrives. I have this apartment until the end of June and, at some point soon, I have to decide how much longer to stay in Barcelona. My sabbatical lasts until the end of August, but the University is closed for that month, and I would probably find the heat intolerable then anyway. The question is whether to stay for July…

This month will be very busy, with some important results from Euclid coming out on 23rd May and a number of things related to that. Before all that, though, I’m going to have a drink or two on the terrace. There may not be a Bank Holiday coming, so it’s not a Long Weekend but it’s still a weekend!

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Diada de Sant Jordi

Posted in Barcelona, History with tags , , , , , , on April 23, 2024 by telescoper

Today, 23rd April, is Diada de Sant Jordi (Saint George’s Day) which, though not a public holiday, is a very special occasion in Barcelona. Saint George is of course familiar to me as the Patron Saint of England, and of quite a few other places, but wasn’t aware until a few weeks ago that he is also the Patron Saint of Catalonia.

Not much is known about Saint George, but it is believed that he was born in Cappadocia (modern-day Turkey, then part of the Roman Empire) to parents of Greek origin, and that he fought in the Roman army and died in 303 AD in Syria Palaestina (also part of the Roman Empire). There is no evidence that he ever visited England or Catalonia for that matter. It seems that he began to be venerated around about the time of the First Crusade, which happened over seven hundred years after his death.

Anyway, the Festa de Sant Jordi is celebrated in a very civilized and charming way in Barcelona. Traditionally the celebration involved giving gifts of flowers (especially roses) to women and gifts of books to men. That is obviously a bit sexist so nowadays you can give flowers and books to whomever you wish. In order to facilitate this, quite a large area of the Eixample district around my apartment is largely closed off to traffic today, refuse collections have been paused, and there are stalls selling books or flowers filling up the pavements. It was especially busy this morning on Passeig de Gràcia, where the combination of queues at the bookstalls and queues for the Casa Batlló generated a big crowd, but the atmosphere was very friendly and nice (apart from a few car drivers upset at the road closures).

Here are a couple of video clips which will hopefully give you an idea of what it was like:

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Diada de Sant Jordi

And here are some random pics

I wish I could visit the celebrations again, but this afternoon I have to take the train to Madrid for a conference.

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Problematic Pollen

Posted in Barcelona, Biographical with tags , , , , on April 22, 2024 by telescoper

Four years ago, in the early months of the pandemic, back in April 2020 I wrote a post that mentioned an allergy I thought was due to tree pollen which I had noticed taking walks for exercise around the deserted Maynooth University campus. I hadn’t experienced such a thing before but didn’t know whether I had developed it in later life or whether I’d just never previously been exposed to the source. I did subsequently discover, by experimentation, that the culprit was oak pollen.

Well, for the last couple of weeks I have been suffering from a similar, but rather more severe, form of allergic reaction which I assumed was caused by tree pollen. This one doesn’t just provoke sneezing but also makes my eyes go red and watery. There are many trees of different types in the streets of Barcelona. For example, the road on which I live, Rambla de Catalunya, is lined with Lime trees (Linden); these don’t cause a reaction. Another common species is the Plane (Sycamore) and that’s OK for me too.

To identify the culprit I did some experiments similar to what I did four years ago. This wasn’t too difficult because particular streets seem to have been planted with particular trees. And so it came to pass that I soon identified the culprit, Quercus Ilex, of which there are few in places near me, including Passeig de Gràcia and Plaça de Catalunya, as seen here:

Quercus Ilex

Quercus Ilex is the botanical name for the Holm Oak (or Holly Oak), an evergreen member of Oak family in contrast to the English Oak (Quercus Robur) which is deciduous. So it seems that pollen of the genus Quercus produces a quirk of my immune system…

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The Inaugural Euclid Spain Meeting

Posted in Barcelona, Euclid, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on April 18, 2024 by telescoper

So here I am at the Institut de Ciencies de L’Espai (ICE-CSIC) which is on the campus of the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB) for the first ever Euclid Spain Meeting. This involved a 40-minute trip on the S2 train from Plaça de Catalunya, which is a short walk from my apartment, then a short walk from the railway station at UAB through the campus to the Institute.

I was able to speak at this meeting because I happen to be in Barcelona right now. I mean that I was able to attend because I was in Barcelona anyway, not that the meeting was held because I am in Barcelona!

Anyway, I gave my talk early on this morning, so have been able to enjoy the rest of the day having got that out of the way. There are about 50 people here. It’s great to see the sizable Euclid community in Spain getting together and sharing their work.

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The Inaugural Euclid Spain Meeting

P.S. My surname always causes some amusement in Spain, as “Coles” means “Cabbages” in Spanish…

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In Praise of the Public Thesis Defence

Posted in Barcelona, Education, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on April 12, 2024 by telescoper

The ICCUB is quite large, which means that there are quite a few talks to go to, including seminars and colloquia but also thesis defences, such as one I attended this morning. The format for these events is a talk by the candidate in the presence of a panel of experts, who ask questions at the end, but the whole thing is open to the general public. After the panel questions there is an opportunity for questions from the audience, but only from those who have a doctorate. I was tempted, but didn’t put my hand up.

Anyway, this morning’s talk was well attended and of very high quality and, as usual, the whole event lasted getting on for two hours. It’s a very different experience from the form of viva voce examinations used for PhDs in the UK and Ireland.

I like to attend these public thesis defences because they’re a very good way of finding out about the research going on in areas away from my own specialism. In physics the people who are really working at the coal face are the PhD students so one often learns more about the details from such talks than from colloquia from senior folk, which are usually cover a wider area but at a more superficial level.

Another nice thing is that there is a little gathering afterwards (on the right) with a selection of food and drink available to celebrate the candidate’s success. In fact it was a double celebration as the candidate was offered a postdoctoral research position just two days ago. I abstained from the champagne as alcohol at lunchtime usually sends me to sleep in the afternoon, and I have a lot to do in the rest of today.

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Presentation of the BAO DESI results at ICCUB Uni Barcelona – by Licia Verde & Héctor Gil Marin

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on April 8, 2024 by telescoper

Last week, when I wrote about the new results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) I mentioned that there would be a seminar here at ICCUB about that very topic. Well, the seminar, by Licia Verde & Héctor Gil Marin, was recorded and here it is:

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