“Mum, when you’re the queen, are you able to get broke?”
“Asymptotically, the lost landscape doesn’t look glassy at all.”
(upon checking for accuracy – of speech, not physics – it was actually the LOSS landscape)
I wish I could say I overheard these in the same place, but they were collected from different countries and demographics, i.e. England vs. France and small child vs. physicist.
I’m at this physics conference next to a Corsican beach and while all of the physicists and dual-specialty professors are inside hearing a lecture, I’m sitting under a massive tree outside, looking at the ocean while doing a Duolingo lesson that’s teaching me to say things like “What is the weight of the particle?” in Russian.
(In a separate lesson, it also gave me the practice sentence of “The monitor is very dirty” which is just as accurate as one of its other offerings, “An atom of oxygen is sixteen times heavier than an atom of hydrogen.”)
When I’m not eavesdropping and mining high-level theoretical physics for metaphor, I’m mostly thinking about Ferrante, even though I’m not in Naples and technically this is France, not Italy.
Tomorrow I hope to overhear something else worthy of inclusion while in Amsterdam or Iceland, because I have two layovers – Schiphol for 7.5 hours, KEF for just over an hour – and certainly plan to leave my suitcase at the airport in Amsterdam while I go have a walk along a canal. Not that I had the option of a direct flight back to NYC from Corsica, but I did choose the longer available layover to sit between my Corsica – Amsterdam flight and Amsterdam – Reykjavik. If I have greater time than necessary to walk to a new gate without fear of missing my next flight, I would much rather have even more time so I can leave the airport and explore.
I don’t know what percent of people would count my approx. five full hours in Amsterdam as “having been to the Netherlands,” but it will fit my personal requirements of 1) leaving the airport (OBVIOUSLY – I’ve been in Schiphol before but an airport isn’t a country) and 2) having enough time to see/buy something. I’ve only done this a couple times (at least with countries I otherwise haven’t been to – my shortest “leave the airport and run around” layover was about 4 hours in Beijing (IN WINTER, on my way home from Thailand, aka sans jacket and feeling in my fingers and toes), but I’d already been to China and Beijing years before). The others were…Portugal, but that was 22 hours and I spent the night in a hotel, so I don’t think anyone would question that; Budapest, where I had a 9-hour layover (if you want to be technical, I was only in Pest); Bangladesh, where I didn’t get to see much in the 12 or so hours but did make it to a grocery store (favorite item: Lays potato chips in “American – SALT” flavor) and nearly to a hospital (probably, someone (not me) should have had stitches, but sometimes you slap a bandaid on and hope for the best); and Fiji, where I think I spent about 8 hours on a lawn chair next to a hotel pool. That’s the weakest one, certainly. Oh – and Canada, for about 20 hours, but I guess I didn’t technically leave the airport at all and anyway I’ve been to Canada a few times before (…intentionally).
