This week, I am back in Amsterdam, attending the Amsterdam Summer Workshop. The attendance is of a very high caliber, and as for the lectures, there is one highlight chasing the next. Apart from that, it’s great to see my old colleagues again.
On Monday, my former boss Robbert Dijkgraaf, the most dynamic and surely most charming ever president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, handed the Lorentz Medal to Edward Witten. He in turn regaled the workshop participants two days later with insights about the path integral of quantum mechanics.
We’re unusually lucky with the weather these days. A Dutch newspaper already ran an article on the effects of the “tropical heat” (read temperatures above 25 degrees for several days in a row) on humans and animals earlier this week.
I use the long evenings to cycle around town (how else can you get around here than by bike), revisit the green parrots of Vondelpark (definitely not an indigenous species, but somehow they found their ecological niche there), sample the highlights of Dutch cuisine such as bitterballen, kroketten and pancakes, and envy the people who go for joyrides in the canals in their own boats.
