What I did in my holidays

I was going to finish this and add photos but that doesn't look like its going to happen. John Cohen (Winner of the B.H. Neumann prize(*) for best student talk, and him only an honours student!) has photos here. He and I didn't hang out that much but since I can't find my photos it'll have to do.

No, not a long blow-by-blow account, don't worry. But I got people to give me reccomendations of stuff and decided the least I could do is say what I enjoyed. I didn't get much time to explore since the conference was 9-6pm most days (though I did skip the odd lecture with titles like "Dirichlet-to-Neumann map, solvable model and application of them to the analytic peturbation theory on the absolutely-continuous spectrum")

So:

• Federation Square: To be honest I don't see why people go on about it. I mean its ok, and the art gallery was cool, but still. Unfortunately the Moving Image museum closed shortly after we arrived.
• Queen Victoria Market: So big! Worth going to if you want to buy interesting, reasonably priced food. Or want a really large range of cruddy knick-knacks.
• Lygon Street Carlton (Walking up from the city). More italian restaurants than the entire state of W.A. The one we went to was very nice. We tried both gelato places and they were Oh My God the best gelato ever. Especially the Dolce Vita Freddo roche stuff. Mmm. The spruikers are annoying, but mainly on the expensive side!
• Brunswick Street Fitzroy (In the middle of lots of boring stuff, luckily we caught a tram) This is a cool street. Polyester books was interesting. And I got Armageddon Blues from a little secondhand place.
• South bank and casino: Eh. The casino was classier than burswood but still rather tawdry and pokie-ridden. (No, we didn't go in to bet all our money away, just to see :)) All the fountains were off but the flame-things are cool.
• The Aquarium: What little I saw didn't seem that different from Aqua, except a bit classier- we had the dinner there, and having canapes and drinks in a big room surounded by fish was pretty cool. The dinner itself had a big reef aquarium at the back and nice view of the south bank at the front, so we could see the flamy things every hour. There was a rather tacky ride too.
• City circle tram: A free trip round the city with commentary. Cheaper than all the other trams!

(*)The photo I really wanted to put up was of the prize itself, a certificate and a piece of paper with "$400 to follow" written on it :)