on friday evening and saturday afternoon, i witnessed two performances of with shakespeare in the park, namely romeo and juliet and a midsummer night’s dream. the performances took place in prince’s island park, which i already displayed twice in this blog. both plays were near to the original text, but in a modernized setting. i enjoyed both a lot!
i did not have my camera with me while watching romeo and juliet, but i had it with me for a midsummer night’s dream. here are some impressions:

last saturday, i was spending the afternoon and evening with a guy from the netherlands who is vegan. hence, for lunch and dinner, we tried to find vegetarian/vegan restaurants. he brought a list from happy cow, and for lunch we decided to go to a vietnamese place called white oak ii. it features a large variety of vegan vietnamese and chinese food, often things which originally contain meat, but where the meat is replaced. this was really amazing. the restaurant is placed in a small vietnamese mall, not obvious to find. i definitively have to go there again.
for dinner, we went to the coup, a vegetarian place at 17th avenue. this was a bit more pricy and stylish, but also very good. a place i also have to go to at least one more time. i had a vegetarian burger there, in fact the first vegetarian burger i ever had: it was really good! as was the spiced (in the sense of chili!) iced chocolate shake (hmmmm) and a cocktail called the “malibu barbie colada” which, despite its funny name, tasted fantastic. for dessert, i had a piece of organic chocolate torte, which in fact is vegan.

the last two weeks were pretty much packed with two conferences and a summer school. on august 13–14, i.e. thursday and friday, the selected areas of cryptography conference was held in calgary. then, the week after that, the ecc summer school was held from wednesday to saturday, and from sunday afternoon to wednesday the 13th workshop on elliptic curve cryptography was held. (in fact, this was the sixth ecc workshop i attended, beginning with the one 2004 in bochum. and the second ecc mentioned in this blog; apparently i was too busy to write something about the 12th one held in utrecht last year.)
in addition to these things, several more things happened, some about whom i might write a few words in some more posts.

if you’re from europe, you probably know quark. if you’re from northern america, you probably don’t, as it’s essentially impossible to buy it here. well, there are some exceptions, for example dutch/german shops which happen to be around somewhere. mixed with milk and sugar, and with other ingredients such as strawberries, it gives a nice, refreshing snack or even whole dinner. i just love it.

a few days ago my hispeed internet started to be slow. after a short time, i got the impression that the network itself was fine, but the dns lookups are slow. some minutes ago, i decided to investigate this problem a bit more in detail. indeed, host turns out to be really slow when looking up domain names, and if i enter an ip address in firefox instead of a domain name, accessing the page is really fast. searching the net for this problem, i found nothing except a list of shaw dns servers. the ones listed there for calgary differ from the ones entered in /etc/resolv.conf; more precisely, the last byte reads 143 and 145 instead of 133 and 135. to try it out, i changed the values, and voila, host ran in hispeed again. restarting firefox also allowed to access the world wide web fast, again.

well, last friday i was visiting stuttgart’s wilhelma with a friend of mine, when after some time, my camera (a nikon d40x) stopped working, only displaying “error: press shutter release button again”. after trying a lot of things and searching the web, and finally contacting the support, it looks like i have to send the camera in for repair. so right now i’ll be without a camera for some time… :-(

today, we had our conference dinner at an italian restaurant called l’espresso. the atmosphere was nice and the food was good, and after the dessert espresso, coffee or cappuccino was served. i asked for hot chocolate itself, and the waiter said he has to check whether that is ok, since they use high quality chocolate which is a bit more expensive. that already sounded good, so i told him in case of doubt i’d pay for that one myself. some minutes later, i got my chocolate (without having to pay for it), and i must say, it’s the best hot chocolate i ever had. i guess it was made in a similar manner to the one i once produced myself. if i ever come back to toronto, i have to get back to this place :)

i’m currently staying in toronto, attending a conference at the fields institute. today’s afternoon was free, so i did a trip to the toronto islands. here are some impressions from the trip:

finally, a photo of myself, taken at the beach of ward’s island.

on december 8, 2008, i did another trip which i never wrote about so far. this time, i visited switzerland’s jungfraujoch, featuring europe’s highest train station at 3.454 meters above sea level. i did that trip on a monday to avoid the hordes of tourists wich invade the jungfraujoch in particular on weekends.

eigernordwand station.

the first stop of the train inside the mountain is the eigernordwand station.

eismeer station.

the second stop of the train inside the mountain is the eismeer station, giving a wonderful view on the lower grindelwald glacier.

note that the windows were steamy, which adds a neat glow to the scenery:

the top of europe.

at the final station, jungfraujoch station, one enters a huge station. here are some views from one outside part of the station:

two panoramas; the first gives another view from the station, similar to the one above, and the second one shows in detail a metal rope which survived an ice storm:

art & ice.

inside the station, one can find several pieces of art, including an ice palace consisting completely of ice:

outside, again.

this time, on the other side of the station, where one can walk on snow:

another panoramic view:

the way back.

finally, some views from the trip back to zürich:

it appears that i forgot to document two trips i did last year, one in calgary at the end of may, and one at the beginning of december in switzerland.

the first one is a trip on may 31, 2008 to calgary’s nose hill park, a huge natural environment park depicting (if you ignore the roads and trails) the landscape which would be there if the city wouldn’t be there. enjoy some impressions. the last photo shows some rabbits in a street near to the place where i’ve been staying, which is maybe a 20 minute walk away from the park.

on saturday, i went for a small walk before going shopping, again to the confederation park in calgary. here are a few impressions.