Incidents from my sleep-deprived first day

For one thing, I thought I saw a glimpse of Stonehenge through the fog as the bus was driving from London to Cambridge. I didn't get a chance to look this up so I mentioned this to somebody and I was told that couldn't be right. It did, however, look like a mini version of that (through the fog), so one question is what I saw there.

There were talks on the first day in commemoration of a well-known pattern formation person who died in March. Most of these talks included personal reminiscences and had some cool historical stuff, and the fact that some of the content was lighter helped me given my lack of sleep, long day of travel, and continued suffering from the flu. (This is a really bad combination, by the way.)

Several of the people at that (and at the rest of the conference) know me, and one or two who I only met once or twice actually remember me [beyond the looks familiar stage], which is good. We went into town for lunch before the first talk and I knew I wouldn't be late because the first speaker was among those going. There was another really big name and two other prominent researchers who are still reasonably young [maybe early-mid 40s] and me. (As usual, there's a which name doesn't belong joke in here somewhere.) We walked through St. John's college to get to St. John's Street on the other side. (Strictly speaking, non-members aren't allowed to enter through the back as we did, but it's the fastest way to get to the central part of town and all the gates are unlocked during the day.) We chose to go left (it seemed to have more restaurants) and went to the first place we found, which was a sandwich/pastry/coffee place. They have a very cool way of doing sandwiches (choose what you want on it every step of the way) and good prices. The people working at the place at that point were two girls who I think were Scandinavian of some sort based on the accents. My ordering was quite incoherent because of my state, and my brief attempt to explain what an iced capuccino was didn't work (I expected an issue here because of my experiences in Australia), so I ending up getting the hot version (though it was decent). (If I weren't so tired and didn't want to keep others waiting, I probably would have tried further.) I ended up being the brunt of good-natured ribbing by the girl helping me as a result of all this (there was a brief threat of adding tons of sugar packets to my capuccino, but I got my requested number of two---I had visions of old iced "teas" that had more half & half than tea), which was highly unexpected after she had dealt with the others pretty coldly. I think it's sometimes good to be the young person amidst all the geezers. There's some sort of relativism involved. For now, the story ends there, but I still have a couple days to go to the place again.