Posted by Martin Orr on
Saturday, 09 August 2008 at 10:09
Sorry for the recent loss of service on this blog, because Rails on the server was upgraded. I'll try and catch up on posts from my holiday over the next few days.
I spent two days in Lyon, which had more worth seeing than I expected. The old town is on a steep hill, and the youth hostel was half way up the hill, so there was a lot of climbing. The town is at the confluence of the rivers Rhône and Sâone so you can't go far without crossing a bridge.
My favourite bit was the nineteenth century Basilique Notre-Dame de Fourvière, on the top of the hill. The outside is overly fancy, but the inside is right up my street - classical basilica plan, decorated with large mosaics showing scenes from church history connected with the Virgin. I also visited the Musée des Beaux-Arts, with lots of fine paintings, and the textile museum - important because Lyon was a centre of silk-weaving, but not very exciting.
Tags
france, holiday
Posted by Martin Orr on
Thursday, 17 July 2008 at 14:30
I have spent two nights in Amiens, a city in northern France. Its cathedral is striking mostly for its size, the biggest Gothic building in France. It has a pair of oddly asymmetrical towers on the front. At night, the normally white front of the cathedral is illuminated to show the colours the statues would originally have been painted. It makes it look magically alive, and must be quite a feat of projection to illuminate all the little bits of statues in different colours.
On my way from Amiens to Lyon, I passed through Paris, walking from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon. I don't want to stay any longer in Paris, partly because I don't feel like anywhere so big and busy just now and partly because I already saw quite a bit there a few years ago.
Tags
france, holiday
Posted by Martin Orr on
Sunday, 13 July 2008 at 21:12
I have just spent a week at the National Mathematics Summer School in Birmingham. Forty-two fourth/fifth form students are invited, the idea being to expose them to a broader range of mathematics than they get in school. Six sixth-formers are also invited; as well as being given some maths of their own, they are expected to look after a group of the younger children. I was at the summer school myself in 2001, and as a senior in 2002, but haven't been since.
This week had a strong geometrical flavour - four of the seniors' five sessions had a geometrical or topological theme, and there was much building of models of solids, either from plastic kits or origami. I gave the seniors a talk on hyperbolic geometry - a change from the Euclidean geometry I usually do at olympiad training camps. I think it went pretty well, and managed not to be too hard for them. I felt like I had not much to do overall at the camp, despite there being surprisingly few permanent staff. Still I enjoyed it, and it reaches a lot more children than the formal Olympiad training scheme.
Since the summer school finished on Friday, I have been staying with my aunt in Hove. I visited the magnificent Brighton Pavilion, the hilly town of Lewes and Seaford, on the sea. Tomorrow I am going on to France.
Tags
holiday, imo, nmss, teaching, travel
Posted by Martin Orr on
Monday, 14 August 2006 at 11:58
Rome is huge - everything always takes longer to walk than you expect. There are so many things to see that even without that there would have been lots I wanted to see but didn't have time to. Fortunately I did have three full days which was probably the minimum time worth anything. The things to see are also very varied, with lots of ancient ruins as well as many more recent things (indeed most Roman churches seem to be a couple of hundred years newer than those in the north of Italy).
The queue for the Vatican Museums two or three times longer than the one in Florence but it moved much faster and only took 45 minutes. These museums are huge and have lots worth seeing (the most famous being the Sistine Chapel, but I preferred the Raphael Rooms) but they close early on Saturdays and I only got 2.5 hours inside - I could have spent much longer.
Centuries of Christians have quite a lot to answer for in their treatment of their Roman ruins - many have been turned into churches or had statues stuck on top of them. I suppose this does at least preserve the buildings; many other ancient buildings had their stones removed to build things like St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican.
Now in: Belfast
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Martin
Tags
art, holiday, italy
Posted by Martin Orr on
Thursday, 10 August 2006 at 16:42
One thing that struck me about Florence was how old the city centre is - all the modern shops are in good, solid stone buildings from the 15th century. It is claimed that the Renaissance began with the competition the city held in 1401 to select the artist to decorate the doors of the Baptistry; today you can't see the doors very closely due to the number of other tourists in front.
The Uffizi, the main art gallery, is also packed with tourists; I queued for two hours to get in. On the other hand the Bargello, the sculpture museum, had no queue at all and some equally interesting works of art, including two of the entries for the baptistry doors competition (for which you had to submit a bronze panel showing Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac).
Now in: Rome
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Martin
Tags
art, holiday, italy