Opening Ceremony
Tuesday 15th
The first day of the conference (after arrival) consisted of the Opening Ceremony and Invited Lecture (The Mysterious Neutrino by Professor P. Depommier) in the morning, and a City Tour in the afternoon.
| The Opening Ceremony was held at 10:00am immediately after breakfast, and was our first occasion to visit the building that was to be the venue for all of our lectures and other formal gatherings from now on. |
| At 10:33am Liviu Bilteanu is welcoming the participants at the opening ceremony before handing over to some of the speech makers on his left.. |
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City Tour
The City Tour started at 15:00 with a short walk South along Shoseaua Kiseleff to the Village Museum, which my guide book lists as one of Bucharest's best sights, and is apparently one of Europe's oldest and largest outdoor museums. It was certainly a pleasant, shady oasis in the heatwave conditions that we were experiencing.
| The museum apparently has around 300 churches, wooden houses, windmills, roadside crosses and farm buildings. This was one of the more impressive churches. |
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At 16:08 I was exploring the village museum with the Norwegian delegation,
Sergio, Gjert and Asle.
Sergio is apparently actually Portuguese but rather impressively was able to converse with Gjert and Asle in Norwegion. |
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| The church from another angle. |
| The inside of the Church was rather dimly lit, but a flash would have destroyed the atmosphere.. |
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| After the visit to the Village Museum, the city tour continued South along Shoseaua Kiseleff (red line) to Piatsa Victoriei opposite the government building (which I think we were supposed to see, but were too late). At this point it was decided that it was time to turn back so that we could return to the university in time for dinner at 19:00. |
| However my map showed that we had not even entered the area marked as Central Bucharest yet, so Laura, Angeliki, Tuba, Mustafa Gulnur and I decided to break with the group and continue until we had actually seen the city (following the blue line). |
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| At 19:26, Laura, Angeliki, Tuba, Mustafa and Gulnur on the streets of Bucharest. We had made it to the South West part of Central Bucharest, called the Historic Old Quarter according to my map. |
| I'm not sure what was supposed to be so historic about this part of the city, as it seemed to be a rather uninteresting business district. So we stopped for a picture in front of the National Bank of Romania and headed back for the more interesting North of the city. |
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| At 19:48 we were making our way back through the North Western part of Central Bucharest and paused at Piatsa Revolutsiei near the Royal Palace and the old Central Committee of the Communist Partybuilding from which Ceauchescu made his fateful speech in 1989, and where the shell of a bullet-riddled building (background) is preserved in honour of those that died in the subsequent revolution. |
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The journey back didn't go quite as planned, as our experiment with
trying to take a local bus back took us down the wrong side of the
park. However we found a path through the park, which was quite
pleasant, and arrived back at the University at 21:00, which was
not quite in time to make dinner.
This is one of asle's pictures, which I think shows the meal that we missed.. |
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| But we were in time for the usual after dinner party.. |
| these were also Asle's pictures, so I was able to appear in them.. |
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