last week, i was in castro urdiales, a small costal town in northern spain. there, two conferences were held, namely the third workshop on mathematical cryptology and the third international conference on symbolic computation and cryptography. i attended both conferences and stayed a little longer over the weekend. after the first impressions i’ve uploaded last weekend, after arriving in castro, i gathered some more photos during this weekend. these were all taken in the city boundaries of castro urdiales, most of them close to the coast. castro is a really beautiful place, mainly crowded by spanish and french tourists and people living there (well, and conference attendants). the weather is pretty neat, especially for someone who doesn’t like heat too much as i do. also, swimming in the atlantic ocean is just great. it’s definitely a nice place to visit!

yesterday, we visited three kittens for the second time. this time, i had my camera with me. they grew older, and start to play around and to explore their surroundings. their mother was not around this time, and they were a bit sleepy, but we still had a lot of fun. kittens are so cute!

yesterday we went on an excursion. first, we visited an old ehgraben in züri niederdorf, which is a small trench between rows of houses which was used to dispose of feces during the middle ages. nowadays one can visit it and read the provided information panels. afterwards, we proceeded to the lindenhofkeller, containing celtic, roman and medieval remains.

afterwards, we continued to the sewage treatment center in werdhölzli, zürich. we had a guided tour through the process of treating waste water from the zürich region and its conversion into “clean” water. certainly very interesting! it is also interesting to see what kind of stuff the mechanic filtering finds. among toys, dentures and mobile phones one can find base stations for mobile phones, credit cards, cash, id cards, remotes, pocket calculators, etc. quite amazing.

finally, in the evening, we had a barbecue.

on saturday, we visited bern. we visited the sapperlot! exhibition on swiss dialects, walked around town, had icecream at the gelateria di berna, saw the bärengraben, walked along the aar. the weather was great, almost too hot. here are some impressions:

less clouds. less zoom. still red. still beautiful.

the following are panoramas from a thunderstorm happening almost two weeks ago. the first two panoramas were taken around three minutes apart, and the third one half an our later. the last one was taken on the late evening.