From Russia with love

I am back from one of my favorite countries and from what must be one of the most beautiful cities in the world. As I write about here the meeting was strange and boring in many ways and we had practically no time to spend outside the lecture hall. It was not until this morning during the one hour trip through the city centre to the airport I really got the feeling of being there again - the music, the light, the landmarks, the people, the familiarity of everything, but then I was already on my way home.

In other ways it was actually a very succesful meeting. I did meet some people who might turn out to be important connections for our future work and I did meet old friends. We did also have a very nice dinner last night with appropriate amounts of vodka and wine, caviar, meat, fish and russian salads and long speaches to the old, to the women and to friendship. I have pages of notes, business cards and adresses and I had more requests for reprints than ever before.

Tonight I am in another hotel room before the last leg of my journey tomorrow. I have been reading blogs and lots of things are happening in want to comment on. Postbloggery is writing about "How to do postdocs", Flavia over at Ferule and Fescue talks about maintaing anonymity as a pseudonymous blogger and Ianqui continued a discussion on alter ego's and blogging voice. I also have some other things on my mind I want to write about - like the academic nomadic life, my students evaluations and the upcoming finals and hopefully some more about Russia if I can get my head around to it, but it won't be today. It is in the middle of the night and I am getting up in five hours to catch another series of planes. I should go to sleep.